What is email clipping?
Email clipping is where an email client do not show the full email.
Gmail is known for hiding the content of a large email behind a ‘View entire message’ link (see below example) this is known as clipping. Email that have a message larger than 102KB are clipped by this client.
An email message includes content such as text, URLS, tracking codes of links and HMTL, among other features. In essence it is the underlying code that your email is made up of. The size of the message is determined by the total byte size of the characters included (each character is approximately 1 to 2 bytes).
Not only is the message clipped by this email client, but so is the tracking code that monitors the email’s open rate.
This, therefore, makes it important to ensure that your email messages are smaller than 102KB, so that all of the content is shown within the email body and the open rates can be tracked with ease.
Reasons that email clipping may occur:
You have too much content
Having too much content is one of the simplest reasons your emails might be clipping, the solution to this is to edit your content or cut out any unnecessary information. Ensure you save or duplicate all of your content before making any changes, this way, if for some reason it gets lost or deleted, you have a backup that you can edit.
If you are finding it difficult to remove or edit your content, try to include CTAs such as ‘Read More’, whilst this is still encouraging your audience to click to read your campaign content, at least it will take them to your site, and will ensure that your emails can be tracked.
It’s important to note that the email message is not affected by the size of an image, as it is based on the email’s code and the number of bytes that contains, however the associated code that comes with an image can affect the message size. Meaning that if you were to remove any imagery from an email campaign, it could reduce the size of the email message.
Once you’ve made your changes, test your email with an email testing tool (we use Litmus) to see whether you have lowered the size of the email message.
You’ve copied and pasted your content
Copying and pasting content from a website, for example your blog posts, or a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word can sometimes cause your emails to be clipped. This is because there is potential that the copied content includes hidden formatting code, that adds to the overall size of the email message. To avoid this, when you copy and paste content into you emails use either the ‘Paste as plain-text’ or ‘Paste from Rich-Text Editor’ functions.
You’ve sent multiple test emails with the same subject line
Testing emails with the same subject line can cause issues with Gmail. This is because Gmail tends to combine emails into on single email in your inbox, if they have the same subject line, causing the email message to become too large. This should not cause any issues when it’s sent out to your subscribers, however your email will appear clipped if you continuously test the same subject line. When testing you should either delete previous test emails with the same subject line or change the subject line every time you test the same email.