Email Marketing & Automation

Does an Emoji in Your Subject Line Impact Email Open Rates? ?

We’ve shared some details in the past on how some marketers are incorporating emojis into their marketing communications. In celebration of World Emoji Day – yes… there’s such a thing – Mailjet performed some testing using emojis in email subject lines to see how different emojis might impact the email open rate. Guess what? It worked!

Methodology: Mailjet offers an experimentation feature known as a/x testing. A/X testing removes the guesswork of what works best by allowing you to test (up to 10) variations of the same email, compile the performance of each version, and then sends the winning version to the remainder of your list. This provides email senders with the best possible chance to maximize your email campaign’s performance.

The findings of Mailjet’s testing are published in this infographic, Emoji Subject Line Test, which provides evidence that emoticons in subject lines can absolutely impact open rates. Not only that, the infographic provides evidence that different cultures are more accepting of the emojis! The United Kingdom, United States, France, Spain, and Germany were tested.

How Do You Insert an Emoji into a Subject Line?

If you’re an emoji user (or abuser), you’re probably used to hitting the emoticon menu on your mobile keyboard. but that doesn’t actually exist on a desktop so how do you do it? The easiest way I’ve found is to navigate over to Get Emoji where you can simply copy and paste the emoji of your choice!

Are we Getting Over-Emoji’d?

One of the conclusions of the studies may be that, while emoticons impact open rates, they may be overused or subscribers may be becoming used to them. Overall open rates with emojis has dropped year over year from 31.5% to 28.1%

It’s now commonplace to use emojis in email marketing and we’ll probably see more and more of them as Google announces an all new set of icons for its latest Android operating system. However, it’s a sign to marketers that perhaps their peak has come. There is still plenty we can learn from the emoji though and this research pinpoints the importance of knowing your audience to communicate most effectively with email. Marketers need to take note of stark cultural differences when it comes to audience receptiveness, but also cross-platform compatibility. Brands will be looking for the next big thing in engagement and need to be aware of all the different platforms their email will be displayed on and test any tactic they plan to use against these. Josie Scotchmer, UK Marketing Manager at Mailjet

By the way, the best performer was the simple red heart emoji.❤️ The emoji was one of few to generate a positive net result across all test regions with a 6% increase in open rate.

World Emoji Day

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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