How to Slice an Email Image for Klaviyo

Slicing is not a design skill. It is damage control. You have one tall picture of an email and Klaviyo wants modules it can link, alt-text, and reorder. Every cut is a decision about where a section ends.

What you are actually making

Horizontal bands (sometimes with a vertical split inside a row). Each band becomes an image block. That is the whole mechanic. You are not rebuilding HTML; you are portioning a bitmap so production can finish in the ESP.

Where the line should go

Put cuts in empty space: the gap under a hero, between product rows, above a legal footer. If the line would run through a letterform, a face, or a price tag, move it. “Close enough” shows up as a white hairline or a clipped serif in the inbox preview, and then someone redoes the whole export.

Isolate CTA bars when you can. One slice, one URL is easier to QA than a slice that is half lifestyle photo and half button.

Columns only when two tiles need different destinations. Vertical cuts on a single full-width story are busywork.

The footer problem

Image footers go stale the first time legal changes an address. If the design includes a footer, exclude it from the grid and rebuild it as text or universal content in Klaviyo. Autosliced has an explicit footer exclusion for that reason: not because footers are rare, because they rot.

AI auto-slice is a first draft

Auto-slice is good at finding big section breaks on clean layouts. It is mediocre when type sits on photography, when cards share a continuous background, or when a designer used one long gradient. The failure mode is not “no cuts”; it is confident wrong cuts.

Treat the suggestion like a junior teammate: accept the ones that land in gaps, undo the ones that bisect a headline, add a line the model missed between two product rows. The cost of a bad cut is one undo. The cost of shipping it is a client email.

A sane pass in Autosliced

1. Drop the 2× export.
2. Run Auto-slice.
3. Walk top to bottom once. Fix only the wrong lines.
4. Exclude footer if it should not be an image forever.
5. Alt text + links, compress, publish.

Do not optimize for “fewest slices.” Optimize for “every link target is its own block and nothing important is bisected.” For a normal promo that is often somewhere in the 6–20 range. A 40-slice email is usually anxiety, not precision.

Quick QA before publish

• No cut through type or faces
• Each CTA / product tile has the right URL
• Content slices have real alt text
• Decorative dividers are marked decorative if your tool allows it
• Total image weight is not a brick (compression)

FAQ

Should I pre-slice with Figma frames?

You can, but most automatic tools want one tall image. Export once, slice where you publish. Maintaining two slice systems (Figma and the tool) is how things drift.

Why not just one image?

No modular links, no partial republish, worse accessibility, harder A/B on a single band. Slice campaigns. Save the single-image trick for one-off experiments you will not maintain.