What Happens When Emojis Are Included in Email Subject Lines?
Like most things, a compelling, open-worthy email all starts with the first thing a reader sees—the subject line.
Crafting an intentional, captivating subject line can be the small but impactful difference between a skyrocketing open rate for your email campaigns and the duds you don’t want to talk about.
In other words, your subject line determines several things—whether the email will be opened, seen, and clicked through. Obviously, you want all of these things to happen.
Creating engaging subject lines continues to be an invigorating challenge, and it’s something that we’re proud to continuously evolve. Because, as you know, target markets change and evolve consistently. At Wellness Pro Media Solutions, we’re committed to consistently optimizing our strategies.
We’ve all seen the subject lines coming through from big brands that include a smiley face or a holiday-themed emoji. But do they really work, and further, could they work within the wellness professional industry? We wanted to find out.
Recently, we tested a method for drawing attention and captivating readers, by including emojis in the most crucial part of an email—the subject line.
Want to know how it worked out? Read on to learn more about this experiment, the results, and how you might be able to improve your email stats by implementing similar strategies.
The Emoji Email Subject Test: What Happened?
Recently, we brainstormed a test where we’d include emojis in one of the most important sections of any email, the subject line. The overall idea with tests like these is to see how these changes will impact open rates—negatively or positively—so we can gauge what works, what doesn’t, and what speaks to a certain audience best.
We came up with a way to test including emojis in an email subject line for a few reasons.
- In our digital world, emojis are everywhere—they’ve become a big part of our communication strategies in our day-to-day digital communications
- About 85% of users are using their smartphones to check and manage their emails—and emojis certainly communicate in this type of digital setting
- This strategy was different, fun, and hopefully eye-catching—it was likely to make the emails stand out and increase the probability of a customer noticing the email
- The emojis add a flair of mystique, which should become a motivating factor to get a reader to open the email
Ultimately, we ran an AB split test to experiment with our theory. One audience received an email with emojis in the subject line. Another audience received the same email without emojis in the subject line.
We ran this test on two unique brands with two unique cosmetology and beauty industry-specific audiences—Elite Beauty Society and Beauty Insurance Plus.
For EBS, we opted to include a sparkle emoji at the beginning and end of the subject line:
What Every Beauty Pro Needs✨
While our other email subject was exactly the same (sans emojis):
What Every Beauty Pro Needs
In this case, the subject lines without the emoji had a higher open rate. In fact, it nearly doubled in comparison to the subject line with emojis.
Subject Line with Emoji: 7.83%
Subject Line without Emoji: 16.65%
Those results display a substantial difference. But what happened with the Beauty Insurance Plus experiment? On the other side of our test, we again examined two subject lines.
One with a starstruck emoji at the end of one of the subject lines:
Take Your Career To The Top 🤩
While our other email subject was exactly the same (sans emojis):
Take Your Career To The Top
Same as before, the subject line without the emoji won. But it wasn’t a dramatic difference like the result we gleaned in the Elite Beauty Society experiment. Instead, the difference was a marginal .09 percent.
Subject Line with Emoji: 7.67%
Subject Line without Emoji: 16.65%
What the Results Tell Us
Through this method of experimentation, we learned that our subscribers for both brands were less likely to open an email with an emoji directly in the subject line. In fact, we can say with a 95% level of confidence that using an emoji (most at the beginning of an email subject line, according to our test) could dramatically reduce your open rate by 68%—and that’s pretty dramatic. Our advice on your email subject line? If you’re planning to use an emoji, it would be most beneficial to place it at the end of the subject line—or, simply choose to opt-out of emojis entirely. Below is a little extra data to backup that claim.- Emojis Ending Subject Lines: In tests with the emoji at the end of the subject line, there was a statistically significant result with no emoji performing 14% better than with an emoji at the start of a subject line. We can be 95% confident that no emoji will perform better than an emoji at the end of a subject line. We are 90% confident using no emoji at the start of a subject line will produce a 14% increase in open rates when compared to using an emoji at the end of a subject line.
- Emojis Starting Subject Lines: In tests with the emoji at the beginning of the subject line, there was a statistically significant result with no emoji performing 16.85% better than with an emoji at the start of a subject line. We can be 90% confident that no emoji will perform better than an emoji at the start of a subject line. We are 90% confident using no emoji at the start of a subject line will produce a 16.85% increase in open rates when compared to using an emoji at the beginning of a subject line.
- Emojis Starting & Ending Subject Lines: In tests with the emoji on both sides of the subject line, there was a statistically significant result with no emoji performing 112.57% better than with an emoji at the start and end of a subject line. We can be 90% confident that no emoji will perform better than using an emoji on both sides of the subject line. We are 90% confident using no emoji in a subject line will produce 112% more opens than using an emoji on both sides of the subject line.
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