Why is Gmail clipping my email?
How can I reduce the file size of my email?
You may have noticed that in Gmail, some of your messages are clipped at the bottom, like this:
Gmail does this to any email over 102kb in total size. So that includes the html, subject lines, tracking and images.
One of the main challenges with this is that, not only are your recipients not seeing the rest of the email you wanted them to see, but very often the unsubscribe link will be in the footer so people may not be able to easily opt out. You’ll therefore be at a much greater risk of people marking you as spam, and damaging your deliverability.
Another issue caused here is that Gmail is also clipping out the tracking that determines whether an email has been opened or not, so you won’t accurately know how many people are opening your emails.
To check how large your email is, the simplest thing to do is to send yourself a campaign and download it. In Gmail, this is done by selecting the options dropdown in an open email and selecting download. If you use a different email client, you will still have the option to download the email, but the instructions may differ slightly.
Then, in windows, right click on the downloaded file, go to the properties tab, and you’ll be able to see the total size of the delivered email, including all the html, subject lines, tracking and images.
If this is happening, there are two ways you can solve the problem:
Reduce the length of your email: Any emails long enough to be clipped by Gmail are probably not being read thoroughly by recipients anyway, so try and reduce the amount of content. If you absolutely must include everything, it’s better to split the campaign out over two sends, which should help your overall engagement as well.
Check your image dimensions and quality: The most common email width is 600px. If you are viewing the email on a mobile, the maximum width they would display would be 600px and on a mobile it will be even less (somewhere around 375px depending on the device). If your images are wider than that, the extra resolution not be visible, but it’ll be making the email larger in size nonetheless. By reducing the dimensions or quality of overly large images, you will really help reduce your email’s overall weight while sacrificing little to none of the quality. If you don’t have your own image editing software, there are a bunch of free online tools which can be used to reduce dimensions or quality of an image.