Once your email hits a subscriber’s inbox, you have to let your content do all the talking. If you’ve done your job, that should be a cinch, right? Think again.

HTML clipping

Email clients such as Google’s Gmail have started clipping HTML emails larger than 102 KB. Instead of seeing the entire text of your email, your email will be cut off past the 102 KB mark. Instead of the rest of your text, subscribers will see an alert that the message was clipped and have the option, in the form of a hyperlink, to view the rest of the email.

Email on mobile

Mobile clients take it one step further. On Gmail mobile viewed from a browser, the only indication that a message has been clipped is an ellipsis, with no call to action to read further.

Clipping not only makes your messages shorter – often in random places such as after one image in a series or at the end of a sentence in a paragraph – it can impact the effect of your targeting efforts. Imagine the lost opportunities if your subscribers don’t see relevant products or personalized content based on their demographics and other data you have for them.

The consequences could be disastrous, as returning customers who receive personalized emails spend 100% more time on the sender’s website and seven times more than first-time clients.

Keep in mind that while targeting is critical, clipping can also damage your email reputation. If subscribers cannot see the entire email, including the unsubscribe button, the chances increase of your email being reported as spam, which can impact your deliverability.

Keep your emails lean and trim

Remember, it isn’t images loaded from an external source but the HTML itself that is clipped, so clean up your HTML. Remove all comments from the code, as well as tabs and double spaces. This takes up precious space that you no longer have to play with. If you aren’t too comfortable with HTML, or don’t have time to fiddle with the code by hand, you can use a tool like HTML Compressor to help you out. It’s a huge time saver and may catch some things you don’t.

And if your emails have to be bigger than 102 KB, make sure you put a big old link to the rest of your content in the body of your email so it can’t be missed and your aren’t missing the target…

This article has been published with permission from its original source.