Trim the fat: tips for sending lighter emails

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French writer, poet, journalist, and aviator)

Most email advice focuses on what to put in your emails.

Today, let’s talk about what to take out.

The average marketing email is often over 100KB. Add a hero image, a few product shots, embedded fonts and tracking pixels, and it’s easy to hit 500KB. Send that to 10,000 subscribers and you’ve just moved 5GB of data through the internet — for a single campaign.

That has multiple costs:

• Deliverability cost. Gmail clips anything over 102KB, cutting your footer, your unsubscribe link, and sometimes your main CTA. Heavy emails also load slowly on mobile — and slow-loading emails get deleted faster.
• Attention cost. An inbox is a fragile place. The reader who waits three seconds for your header image to load is the reader who closes the email before reading it.
• Energy cost. As we often, say — email isn’t free. Every byte × every recipient = real energy, real emissions. Trimming 200KB off a campaign to 50,000 subscribers saves 10GB of transfer. With millions of campaigns sent every day, it adds up.

The good news is that the fix for all three is the same.

Five things you can do this week

1. Audit your last send

Take a look at your last email and check the file size. Anything over 100KB is worth a second look. You can paste in the HTML to our CSS Inliner to see its file size.

2. Compress your images

Most images in emails are uploaded at 2–3× the resolution they actually need to display at. Ensure they’re the right size, and then run them through an optimiser like Squoosh, TinyPNG, or ImageOptim (if you’re on a Mac) before uploading. You’ll often drop 70% of the file size with no visible difference.

3. Question every image

Does that hero banner earn its place, or is it decoration? Some of the best indie operators and brands are dropping them altogether.

4. Drop embedded fonts

They bloat the email and fall back to system fonts on many clients anyway. Use a system font stack.

5. Try a plain-text send

Just one. A quick update, a Friday note, a personal question to your list. You’ll might be surprised how well it performs. Plain text feels personal, stands a higher chance of landing in the primary tab, and gets read.

A small challenge

Send one email next week without a header image. See what happens to your open, click, and reply rates. We’ve been doing this more at EcoSend — we’ve seen more clicks, more replies, and no one has complained that they’re missing an image!

Lighter emails aren’t worse emails. They’re often better — for your reader, your deliverability, and everything downstream.

Heck, they’re often faster to create too…

P.S. The last three weeks — accessibility, CTAs, and now email weight — all point to the same thing: you will make an impact by respecting your reader’s time and attention. That’s the whole job, and it’s what we’re obsessed about with EcoSend.