Why are there duplicate blocks in my emails in Gmail and Outlook?

  • 11 May 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 405 views

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Hello All!

I’ve run into a few issues in the last few weeks within our campaign and flows that has left my myself and colleague scratching our heads.

 

For the last year that we’ve been with Klaviyo, I have designed every email with two different versions; a desktop view and a mobile view. Trying to optimize our design for our subscribers any way that they view our content. Seems like this is an industry standard. And it’s worked out great, except recently.

 

The issue is that sometimes test emails and campaigns that myself, members of our team, and our subscribers have received from our company display with duplicate blocks. This was first experienced internally, within the small email provider we use amongst our company. It isn’t the most complex system so it seemed to be more on the provider end rather than Klaviyo. As I’ve created emails, I’ve seen this issue occur on the two biggest providers, Gmail and Outlook. It doesn’t matter if these are test or live emails. All the content from both desktop and mobile views are visible within the email body.

 

I’m not sure why this is suddenly happening and if others have experienced the same issue. I understand why this may be happening; The email contains code that is for both desktop and mobile, but we had never had this issue with the old Klaviyo email template editor. Our running flows were designed with the old template editor and we have not noticed any issues with them. Since March, I have been using the new template editors for our campaigns and hadn’t run into any issues until two weeks ago. When my colleague reached out to Klaviyo support, they weren’t very helpful and blamed the duplicate blocks on “Gmail sender’s settings - so Klaviyo cannot control this.”

 

 


1 reply

Userlevel 7
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Hi @flannelizetheworld

 

Welcome to the Community! Happy to have you, I’d be more than happy to share some insight into why this might be happening.

 

Definitely agree that mobilizing your emails to be viewed well on mobile is indeed industry standard. However, if you’re not aware, there is an option in in your Template under Styles > Mobile section of your Template that says ‘Enable Optimizations’, essentially this feature automatically optimizing your email for mobile viewing instead of manually creating a mobile-only view of your campaign. 

 

Essentially, these display issues could be happening for various reasons. One of the issues could be the inbox providers you and your colleagues are using to view the email. For instance, Klaviyo Header/Link Bar blocks actually have 2 logos in the HTML, one for Desktop and one for Mobile. Some Outlook versions will ignore the styling to only show 1 of these logos and load both. Unfortunately, this is an industry-wide problem with Outlook. We have more extensive information on this in our Help Center Documentation. Additionally, if you’re viewing the email in your Gmail inbox via the Chrome or Safari browser rather than the dedicated Gmail app, this could also be contributing to the issue as Gmail Mobile Browser version does not render media queries. Media Queries are a form of CSS (a styling code language) that is responsible for how elements render on mobile sizes. 

 

To attempt to minimize the possibility of duplication by using an image block with a links only header block on top of or next to it, both hyperlinked. This header block would only need to be created once, and then can be saved. Once the new header block is saved, it can be dragged/dropped into any template and replace the old header. Finally, I would advise against forwarding your emails as this will cause display issues in your emails as mentioned in this similar thread. 

 

I can see from your colleague’s previous support inquiry that you have used our suggestion to use a hyperlinked header block image and it was helpful. I would also suggest ensuring your images are turned on in Gmail so it does not ask you if you’d like to ‘display images’ at the top of your message.

 

Finally, I’d suggest investigating tools like Litmus or Email on Acid to test your messages on various devices. Additionally, Litmus wrote an insightful article to further explain Rendering Differences in Microsoft Outlook Clients. There are other users who had a similar issue that I’d advise looking into as well to gain more insight into this!

 

Thanks for participating in the Community!

-Taylor 

 

 

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