Braze tracking links in email are massive!

Question

Hi. Brand new Braze user and experiencing problems with email size. Our previous provider emails are about 60-70kb in size but when we send emails via Braze they come in at 180kb and result in gmail clipping. AI analysis of the Braze code suggests that the link wrapping that Braze does (for tracking purposes) is much, much bigger / longer than the original code:

* Original URL: Might be 30–50 characters.
* 
Wrapped URL: These can exceed 800–1,000 characters each because they contain encrypted data to identify the specific user, campaign, and link clicked.

This is blowing out our email size. Any suggestions on how to trim the wrapping? Thanks!

jimboktTWS · Answer

Thanks for the responses. Our emails are typically 60-80kb in size and the Braze sends are coming in at 170kb. We're generating html in dreamweaver but also tested the drag and drop functionality which had the same outcome.

We'll review links / email size and hopefully result in a bigger send size. Thanks again!

TedScott · Answer

Where are you generating your HTML?  How many long are your emails / how many pages?

jerome_ahkan · Answer

Hey @jimboktTWS, from my understanding, you can’t trim the link wrapping in Braze—it’s required for tracking campaign, user, and click attribution, so modifying it would likely break reporting.

What you can do is reduce the overall email size to avoid clipping. A few things that we've seen help us with sizing constraints are:

* reducing the number of links in emails

* combining CTAs and making sure our primary CTA is above the fold

* avoid repeatedly using the same link within the email

We also found minifying the HTML made a noticeable difference. That was particularly helpful for Content Cards using custom HTML, where we needed to stay under the 2KB limit. Hope this helps!