Are you sending marketing emails and your emails are clipped? There are two big problems with that: small and big. The small one: your tracking analytics are off. And second one, it’s a huge one: you are breaking the law.
In the past years, I received more and more emails in my inbox where at the bottom of the email it says email is clipped. So I decided to record this video to show you how to avoid it and stay compliant with the law.
But before we start, I want to explain you and tell you a little bit more about those two big problems.
Your analytics is off
So the first problem is your analytics is off. Why? Because all email marketing service providers put their tracking code pixel at the bottom of the email. So under unsubscribe, under managed preference under your address, typically they put at the bottom. So when email is clipped, open rate, clipped rate, conversions and all other data is not populated to your email marketing software.
So if your emails, you send email let’s say to 10,000 subscribers and your open rate is zero or close to zero. It’s not because nobody opened. There might be a lot of people who open it, but emails were clipped. That’s why data was not populated back to your email marketing service provider.
Your emails are not compliant with Can-Spam Act
And the second problem, which a huge one your emails are not compliant with Can-Spam Act. To be compliant with Can-Spam Act you have to include unsubscribe at the bottom of your email as well as your physical address.
And majority of clipped emails are clipped right above unsubscribe or and or your physical address. So one email’s clipped, in most cases you are not compliant with that law and some of your email subscribers might complain and you might get into trouble.
So how can you fix it?
So first I will start from easy solution. So first you can place the tracking code, not in the footer but in the header of your email. It will solve that tracking issue, and the analytic issue but it will not solve that law compliance issue. But anyway, I’ll show you right now on my computer how you can do it. I will show you in Klaviyo, an email marketing service provider we use but this option might be available in the email marketing service provider you use. So let’s go to my computer.
So here I’m in my Klaviyo tesk account. So I click on the Account. I click Settings and click on Email settings. And we are looking for Email tracker position. So I click Place the email tracking pixel in the top of the email content. Okay, so it’s saved.
So the first issue is solved, however it will not fix the other issue unless you will put your unsubscribe manage or manage preference and the physical address at the top of the email, which will not make any sense. So this easy fix will not do the job.
So there’s harder way to do it but I highly recommend for you to do the hard way because this is the right way to do it. So let’s start. There’s three things we should know about.
Your email should be less than a 102 kilobytes
So the first one, your email should be less than a 102 kilobytes. All parts of your email consists of HTML code and HTML code has a weight and each character counts. And there should be less than 102 kilobytes.
How you can check how big is your emails? You can just send a text to yourself to your inbox and check how heavy it is. Let me show you how you can do it. So let’s go to my email and look for some marketing email. I received few emails this morning . Next, let’s do this one. So here’s the email. It’s not clipped, which is good. How heavy it is? You click here and you do download message and downloads. So now I want to go to my folder. Look for downloads. And I see that email is 36 kilobytes.
Let’s see other emails which are clipped. And how heavy they are. Okay, so I found this email. And this is the simple email but I believe it’s code heavy. And as you can see, it says clipped email. So this is the problem. So let’s see how heavy it is. Download message. And let’s go back to this. And as you can see, it’s 126 kilobytes.
So the rule number one you need to make your emails light. By the way images don’t count because images are hosted in the cloud and images are equal to few kilobytes. So it does not… Let’s say if your image is heavy does not mean email will be heavy because images are hosted somewhere in the cloud. Image will not affect the size of the email but quantity of an image will do.
Do not copy and paste texts
Point number two and it’s in addition to the first one. Do not copy and paste texts. So if, for example, if you’re a copywriter or somebody else write the copy in the document or a document or Google document, do not just copy and paste in the email because it will move over the formatting from the text document. That hide that formatting. And it will add extra codes to your HTML and it will cause a problem.
So I’ll show you right now in Klaviyo how to check it and how to fix it. So I’m in my Klaviyo and I click on let’s say Campaigns and let’s try something. Okay, so this was an email clone. Then do that. Clone. Then we do Content. And let’s do Added content.
Correct. Okay, so we have it here. So typically how people do and where it’s the majority of this issue is is just copying and pasting. So, and let’s say I want to copy this. So I copy this and I want to add it here. So the problem with this, it will bring extra format. As you can see it formatted in like weird way. And if we go to click source here, as you can see there’s like a lot of weird copy.
So, what is the right way to do it? First you can piece into note that or something to strip off the formatting, or then other solution, what we typically do internally. We insert the blog and instead of pasting it to here, here we just do go to source. We go to Source. We click out of here and then we do the Formatting.
We adjust formatting. And as you can see this code versus this one. This one is extremely heavy. This is extremely light and you will need to find the middle ground to make your email much, much, much lighter.
So do not copy and paste text from any document. Make sure you strip out all formatting, so that it’s not formatted. And in the email editor, you can add formatting.
Keep essential links only in your email
And the third thing is to keep essential links only in your email unless you need to include as well as essential blocks in the email. In some tools like cloud your email marketing software there’s tools. Blogs like product blog. Same thing in, I believe in MailChimp they have also recommended product blogs.
Those blogs are adding a lot of extra code. If you need to add them, have them, but make sure the rest of the email is light. As well as do not add those website look like those menu like which looks like on your website the menu. Email is not website. You should not mimic your website. It should be much simpler. And there should be one call to action versus multiple calls to action in your menu.
I hope it helps. I hope you will not send any marketing emails anymore which are clipped.
