?You identified your most engaged customer segment and you’re determined to make a great email, packed with great content and value.

?You choose some beautiful pictures to go with the long copy and add some links to your social media pages, as well as even maybe a link to the review page, FAQ and About us page. You have also linked every single picture that you carefully placed in your template and why not, also added some extra linked text within the copy as there’s no such thing as too many places to click.
?You re-check everything and now your email is complete. You gaze at it for a few seconds like an artist contemplating his fully-fledged piece of work in all of its glory.

And you send it.

[A few moments later…]

⚡️Disaster strikes! Open rates are weirdly low and revenue seems off. Or even worse, open rates and click rates are particularly high but no revenue at all or very little relative to other analytics. It seems like your email sailed into the Bermuda Triangle… what happened?

If you really did send to a good segment and the email was truly well built then it is highly probable that Gmail is clipping your email. (See image 1)

‘The Gmail curse’ Image 1 :

(Btw, If you have no idea if your segment or email were good and you feel that you’re throwing darts in the dark, you might want to consider hitting us up – we do this for a livin’ ?)

This is a problem that should be addressed ASAP. So let’s dive straight in:

?Why does it happen?
Your email size is too big, can be in all aspects: images too heavy, HTML text code to heavy, template too long, too many links, too many blocks especially if they’re different for mobile/desktop etc.

Gmail will start clipping if your email is greater than 102KB in size, but we have seen emails lower than this also clip.
It can also happen if you sent consecutive emails with the same subject line.

?‍♂️Why is this a problem?

When you send an email the code used to track the emails analytics get attached to the email. If Gmail clips it, it messes up the code and your analytics get screwed. The data you receive for that email becomes inaccurate and most likely useless as you don’t know what really happened in that campaign – it could have been abducted by aliens for all you know.

?Okay now I understand, please tell me how to fix this!

1️⃣Compress all images, try to keep them below 100Kbs, compress them multiple times if necessary. Here is a cool free tool for that: https://tinypng.com/

2️⃣Paste all text without formatting first. This is usually done by CTRL + Shift + V

3️⃣Keep only essential links, leave only those related to that email be it a link to a blog or the products. Remove link bar and social media links if the problem persists.

4️⃣Keep a 60:40 text to image ratio, fewer images are always better for deliverability and will reduce the size of your email. Also if your template is particularly long vertically, try to cut it down as much as possible.

5️⃣Try to keep email templates simple and effective, avoid clutter and unnecessary blocks. Remove split mobile or desktop exclusive blocks as these are occupying more space.

This can be a big headache if you didn’t know what is going on. We encourage to check all emails you send as you receive them.

Fortunately, now that you read this, you know what to do if you see one of your beloved emails being mercilessly sliced in half.

Sócrates Lozano, Hustler Marketing