Length of email

[AllisonHeaphy1]

Hello, 

Can anyone please tell me the limitations that Marketo has for a length of email without going to a separate landing page? 

Thanks! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

This kind of feels like the wrong question, i.e. an XY Problem.

The size of a single email, in bytes, that can be sent by Marketo is hardly the most important question when it comes to email size.

More important questions are “Will my Marketo Email Editor be usable?” and “Will I hopelessly bog down local and remote server resources?” and “Will my recipients’ email clients be usable?”

What is the size of email you’re expecting to generate, say to the nearest 100 kilobytes?

[Dave_Roberts · Accepted solution]

I've seen some pretty long emails put together in Marketo, I don't think there's a reasonable limit on how much you can stuff into an email based on "how much Marketo allows".  As Sanford mentioned, and depending upon how your template is built, there might be some slowing down in the editor as you add more and more modules/content to an email. Beyond this however, there's a more precise limit that some inboxes enforce before they clip an email -- likely in an effort to avoid exactly this type of thing (emails that are forever long). 

Here's an article with some more info on where Gmail clips an email in the inbox:
https://help.drip.com/hc/en-us/articles/4424710412941-Avoid-Email-Clipping-In-Gmail#:~:text=Gmail%20....

Gmail has a size limit of 102KB for each email message. Once that limit is reached, the remaining content is clipped and becomes hidden behind a link to view the entire message.

Every element making up the email, from the HTML to the written text and images, has an impact on file size. Each letter or character you type takes up approximately 1-2 bytes. This starts to add up quickly with longer email messages. 

From what I've seen, this is a reasonable threshold for the size of what you'd expect an email to be -- something that people are going to spend the time reading. If you're running into issues with thinking about the total length/size of an email I'd recommend you find a way to break it down if possible if the intent is to get a human reader to commit to your message. 

If you've got a ton of content to feature, it might be more savvy to set that up on a landing page (which can handle much more content and has much more flexibility in terms of presentation) rather than chunk it all into an email. For something like a longer newsletter-style email, you might think about trying to segment your audience by interest and send them a shorter email with content that's curated to their interest and then provide options to click-thru to an LP with more detailed info.

[SanfordWhiteman]

n.b. helpful as it is overall, this quote on the Drip page is kind of absurd:

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Each letter or character you type takes up approximately 1-2 bytes

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There’s no need for approximation, since the number of (UTF-8) bytes necessary to represent a given character is predictable + inflexible.

If it’s in Basic Latin/ASCII, 1 byte. Latin-1 Extended characters through N'Ko (inclusive), 2 bytes. If you write in CJK languages, assume glyphs are going to take 3 bytes, never 1 or 2. Some rarer cases take 4 bytes but it’s unlikely you’d be writing an entire email in such languages.

But again, all totally predictable. A message written in US English is going to take 1 byte per character (since even a few 7-byte compound emojis sprinkled in won’t make a difference).

[Grace_Brebner3]

@SanfordWhiteman is (as per usual) right, but to add beyond his very correct points on the impacts of "big" emails... the specific scenario you're talking about (being sent to "a different page") is not a Marketo issue, but a client issue. Most commonly seen on gmail, and it is (again, per Sandy's comment) not a length issue but a size issue - gmail will cut off an email if it is more than 102kb.

Worth noting this is about the volume of code in your email - the file size of any images has no bearing on this.

Generally most will say that if your emails are going over that mark, they are too long you should be looking to shorten them - and perhaps to review your HTML to ensure it's not bogged down with extraneous lines of code (which can happen easily if you're not careful). But, again to Sandy's point, it's not just best practice because you'll likely get better engagement, but also because it'll probably result in a better experience within Marketo too.

Hope that helps 🙂