Gmail Truncation

Huge emails = a big no no.

Did you know Gmail will actually cut short an email that exceeds 102kb in size? This is called Gmail Truncation.

They do this to prevent large, slow-loading emails from impacting your inbox performance and user experience.

This means the reader will have to click ‘View entire message’ in order to view the entirety of the content, that you worked so hard to create.

Luckily for you, CM Email Marketing lets you see your campaign size before you launch, so you can ascertain whether you need to reduce the size before you press launch.

So, what causes a large email I hear you ask? A number of factors can increase the weight of a campaign, including:

Length of your email – try to keep your emails short, concise and to the point. You want to keep the main information at the top of the campaign (we call it ‘above the fold’) so it displays in the preview window. If you need to host read more content, then you could use our hosted pages for continued online reading.
Too many images – this can not only increase the size of the campaign, but also affect loading times too. Click here to see what type of images work best in email.
Animated GIFs – Following on from images, GIFs can significantly increase the size of your campaign too, so be conscious when designing your content on what’s important to you and what you want to include. If you want a large GIF image, maybe look to reduce the text content.
Custom fonts – both our Drag & Drop and Hybrid Editors have email safe fonts ready to use. But if you wish to pull in custom fonts, this can increase the size of your campaign. On mobile, whilst the fonts are loading the text in your email will not render, leading to a less-than-ideal user experience.
CODE. CODE. CODE – your coding style will also have an impact on your campaign size. Try to keep your code as simple and as clean as possible and avoid excessive use of media queries.
Editors – Some editors add their own (often unnecessary) code to emails which can contribute to the email size. Campaignmaster’s Drag & Drop editor uses as clean as possible code, so not to increase campaign size. Our hybrid editor gives you full access to the HTML code and we don’t add any unnecessary, additional coding.

What are the risks of sending large emails?

Deliverability being the biggest, you risk your email not being delivered to your intended recipients. This could be because the large file size can seem suspicious to email filters. This can then have an ongoing effect on your deliverability.
Bigger the email = longer the processing time. So, if you’re sending out time sensitive emails, be sure to keep your emails as small as possible to avoid processing delays due to large email sizes.
- A humble brag from us, but we can deliver emails to 60,000 recipients in less than 30 minutes 😊
Emails going into spam – especially in Gmail if your campaign is cut off and the unsubscribe link in the footer is not picked up.
Limited display on devices.
If your email is truncated by the likes of Gmail, then your recipients might not see the full email and therefore you’ll miss out on those all-important conversion clicks!
Inaccurate campaign results.

If you can’t reduce the campaign size, (as we appreciate it’s not always easy to do), make sure to include your best practice View Online link, at the top of your campaign, so your readers can enjoy your content in its entirety, even if the rest of the email has been cut off in Gmail.

Our recommendation for a good campaign size is 80kb or under – and our clients have the benefit of seeing this on their launch confirmation page: