Wondering what’s up with those weird stats showing subscribers clicking on your email links but never opening the email in the first place? If you have a lot of subscribers with gmail.com email addresses, you may have noticed this at some point.
How is that even possible?
Good ol’ Gmail may be clipping your emails. ✂️
Why does Gmail clip emails?
Gmail automatically clips emails that are larger than 102kb. Your subscribers will see a ‘View entire message’ link where the clipping occurs. And they need to click this message to see the full content of the email.
Unfortunately, clipping happens in any email marketing platform if you have a lot of content with styles applied. While it’s something that’s out of our control, we’ve got plenty of tips to help you keep it from happening, so keep reading!
Note: Clipping will "clip" your reported open rates by 50% or more, because even if a subscriber opens the email, Gmail will not count it as opened unless they click the 'View entire message' link.
Learn more about email open rates and click rates here.
How do I know whether my email gets clipped?
The surest way to find out if your email gets clipped is simple: Test it!
Step 1. Click the paper plane icon in the top-left corner of the email builder.
Step 2. Add a Subject line and a Gmail address that you have access to under Recipients.
Step 3. Send the test email and check it out in your Gmail.
If your email got clipped, don't despair. Let's look at some tips that can help you next time.
How to avoid clipping in Gmail?
By optimizing your emails to not get clipped, your email stats will be more accurate and your subscribers will see your entire message without having to click on anything extra to reveal it.
Here’s how to avoid email clipping in Gmail:
Break it up: If you cover a lot of different topics in your email, try breaking it up into several smaller emails. Dedicate one email to one or two topics max.
Add teaser text: Instead of adding all of your content straight into your email, you can add teaser text (these are shorter blurbs) and links to your website or blog, where your subscribers can read the full content. This is smart, too, because it gets traffic to your site, which is great for SEO, and gets your subscribers to explore more of your website, including your shop, special offers and services.
Write in Flodesk: Try writing your email content directly in Flodesk instead of copy-pasting it from other apps. Word processing programs and note-taking apps often apply underlying styles to your text that may get copied over to your email increasing its final size. If you apply a lot of styles (bold, underline, italics) or use several different fonts or text font colors, these all add up in the final HTML size of the email.
What about images?
Should I avoid using images in my emails?
The funny thing about clipping is that it has nothing to do with image size. The images are all hosted on Flodesk, so when Gmail displays your images, it calls them from our server. As long as you’re using a healthy ratio of images and text in your emails (learn more about text-to-image ratio here), you should be fine.
Summary
If your email is bigger than 102kb, Gmail will clip your message. This isn't something that Flodesk can control, but it is something you can avoid by following a couple of tips.
Before scheduling your next email campaign, send a test message to a gmail.com address to test if clipping happens.
Reduce your email's HTML size to avoid clipping by breaking up your emails into multiple sends; pointing subscribers to read full content hosted on your blog/website (instead of including it all in your email); and writing your content directly in Flodesk.
By ensuring your emails don’t get clipped, your email stats will be more accurate and your subscribers will see your entire message without having to click on anything extra to reveal it.