Today I learned something new from a bunch of TGE nerds (former EveryAction coworkers of mine who gave me advice on a puzzling client question)
I had a client who switched in February 2026 from the traditional email editor in Targeted Email to Drag & Drop. Their 2x a month newsletter design and content length didn’t change but was rebuilt in the Drag & Drop editor instead. Their click rate stayed the same, but their open rate fell by 75%! Or so it seemed.
What actually happened was that the same newsletter design, when transferred into Drag & Drop editor, had a ton of HTML added by the Drag & Drop editor and that made the email file size exceed the 102kb gmail threshhold… causing Gmail to truncate their email and put a “view entire message” link.
And guess where the open pixel lives? at the very bottom of the code so the gmail clipping meant the pixel doesn’t load! So unless someone clicks through the email (and gets an inferred open captured) or clicks the “view entire message” link to load all the code including the hidden open pixel at the end, the opens aren’t being captured. Sure enough for the post-drag&drop newsletters, when I looked at email performance reporting and grouped by email domain, the click and open rates for gmail in February were almost the same; in January, gmail had an open rate about 10x greater than the click rate.
And of course gmail truncating your email has other challenges like hiding your required unsubscribe link, and just generally messing up your email layout.
What is the solution: I’m advising them to use less rows in the layout, testing the final file size, sending test messages to gmail to see if it clips or not. Hopefully this will address these issues for this client but mostly sharing this because it was not something I could have diagnosed on my own and if any other client is experiencing very low open rates, this might be the culprit!