The size of the email is something rarely thought about before sending the communication, but it can drastically change the reported performance of your campaign. For example, large emails can take longer to deliver, trigger spam filters, be rejected by the recipient's email server and be difficult to read and navigate, especially on mobile devices.
Futhermore, some inboxes, like GMail, truncate or cut off the content of an email that exceeds a certain size limit. When an email is clipped, only the first part of the message is displayed, and the rest is replaced with a message that says "Message clipped" followed by a link to view the full version. When this occurs, the script used by Dialog Insight to record email opens can be cut from the content and result in seemingly very low open rates.
Gmail Email Clipping
If your email is being clipped by Gmail, it means that the size of your email message exceeds the maximum size limit allowed by Gmail, which is currently 102 KB. The volume of the message is proportional to the number of characters, each character is approximately 1-2 bytes. When an email exceeds this size limit, Gmail will automatically clip the message and display the "Message clipped" message, along with a link to view the full message.
To avoid having your emails clipped, it's important to keep your email messages concise and to the point, avoid using large images or attachments, and consider using plain text instead of HTML formatting when possible. By optimizing the size of your emails, you can ensure that your messages are delivered in full and are more likely to be read and acted upon by the recipient.
Best Practices
Here are some tips to help optimize email size:
General Practices
- Reduce image size: Large images can significantly increase the size of an email. Compressing or resizing images before adding them to an email can help reduce the overall size of the email. For more info, consult this article.
- Avoid using attachments: Attachments can quickly increase the size of an email. Instead of attaching files, try uploading them to a cloud storage service and including a link to the file in the email.
- Minimize formatting: Formatting such as bold or italicized text, font size and color can add to the size of an email. Keeping formatting to a minimum can help reduce the overall size of an email.
- Use plain text: Plain text emails are smaller in size compared to HTML emails, which can include images, formatting, and other elements. If possible, consider sending plain text emails.
- Remove unnecessary content: Before sending an email, review it and remove any unnecessary content, including duplicate information or large blocks of text that aren't relevant to the message.
Dialog Insight Practices
- Use as few structure blocks as possible
- Use the bottom margins of elements instead of using dividers
- Convert grouped content areas into simple text blocks (Grouped zones generate a lot of extra HTML)
- Merge several elements into one (Example: a title + text block + button, remake them into 1 single text block)
- Avoid hidden mobile-only content
- Avoid alternative mobile images and dark mode
- Convert text content into an image
For any further help on optimizing your emails, contact us to find out about our services.