[Message clipped] View entire message

Ever had this happen to you? In gmail, this happens all the time. I’ve seen hotmail/outlook, however, let the same email through without issues. In either case, if you are the one getting an email and the following message appears — not much you can do (aside from opening the full message in new window).

message-clipped

But, if you are the one sending this email to your customers — listen up. Firstly, you shouldn’t be sending your customers emails, looking like this and I will explain why. It looks unprofessional, yes. You lose some of the content, that’s also obvious. You annoy anyone who already doesn’t like you even more, since the ‘unsubscribe’ button is no longer there. But that’s not all. Because the footer of the email is cut off, so is the code that comes with it that tells your beloved Mailchimp (or whatever you use) who opened the email and when. And not everyone clicks on “View entire message”. People are lazy, remember? And they also don’t care about you.

Now, how to not let this happen? Cut down your email content. And not just decrease your image size, that won’t do much, as images are just links (as in code). So what you need to lose is some extra code. That means any type-styling that you might have brought across when copying/pasting text. Or, you just have too much crap on that email of yours. Summarise and more importantly — send yourself a test message before sending it to the world and make sure everything is running smoothly.

 

Personalised emails

My first thought when I get a personalised marketing email from someone is “Who the fuck are you?”. Those aren’t emails that quite obviously come from a company and they just have my name in their database. These are from companies, which are sent from an individual working at that company (marketing guy, random artist, etc), but I have never actually met or even heard of that person. They usually start of with something like “Hi Alex, I’ve had such a busy…”.

Getting too personal by email with people you don’t actually know isn’t a good thing. It’s nice to get an email that’s personalised, but don’t make it too obvious, people aren’t stupid.

On another note, Google Hangout emoticons (previously known as Gmail Chat) have put on some weight. I call them “obese smilies”. Just look at these little blobs. Where are all those diet nuts looking, kids will be using this and also get fat. Start an anti-fat-emoticons campaign, quick!

obese google emoticons