Newsletter Glue: New Email-Optimized Columns Block & Email Size Checker

For their WordPress newsletter plugin, the Newsletter Glue team just added a shiny new columns block to their collection of custom email-optimized Gutenberg blocks. They also released an email size checker for Gmail and newsletter templates.

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New Columns Block

You might wonder what’s so exciting about that, since Gutenberg already has a column block. So why not just use this one? Well, if you’ve ever tried to create a 20:80 layout with the core columns block and seen how it looks in email, you know why!

Newsletter Glue were unable to convert the web HTML to email HTML for the core columns block. It worked relatively well for 50:50 layouts, but as soon as you tried to create a 20:80 or even a 33:33:33 layout, everything broke down very quickly.

With the new columns block, you’re clearly more flexible when creating 2- and 3-column email layouts. To find it, type /ng or /column and search for NG: Columns.

For starters, they focused on optimizing the column layouts so they don’t break in emails. The plan is to add more features in the future!

In other news, you can now edit the Read more text in the post embed block.

Email Size Checker

Newsletter Glue also introduced an email size checker that allows you to preview your emails and check if they will get clipped in Gmail.

Gmail truncates emails that are around 102kb in length. This means that all content exceeding this size will be cut off and your subscribers will only see the following text notification: [Message clipped] View entire message. This means that your subscribers will not see the footer including the unsubscribe link, CTAs, and any of your important content. Also, email open rate tracking pixels may not fire.

Before you send your newsletter, you should check the size of the emails in the preview of your browser and then make adjustments if necessary.