Should You Add Emoji to Your Email Subject Lines? We share our results…

Emoji are everywhere these days. Text messages, blog posts, Facebook posts, Slack, Teams, Skype, and let’s not forget the critically acclaimed masterpiece that was The Emoji Movie.

People seem to love using emoji!

But should you use them in your email subject lines?

Do emoji help or hinder your email marketing campaigns?

It seems not everyone can agree...

In today’s mythbusting blog post, you’re about to find out the truth – do emoji have any positive impact on your email marketing? – or are they just a big shiny distraction from what you should be focusing on?

Let’s do some science!

Should You Add Emoji to Your Email Subject Lines?

That’s the big question we’re going to help answer today!

Over the past 5 months, we’ve split-tested 37 emails by creating 2 identical variations of each, and sending them to a random 50% of our email list.

Well, almost identical...

• 50% of people received an email with a normal subject line
• 50% of people received the same subject line, but with an emoji

Just like this...

Everything else about the emails was identical in every way... the content, the links, the randomness of the chosen groups.

Our aim is to share with you our discoveries about whether adding an emoji to your email subject line has any positive or negative effect on:

1. Email open rates
2. The click-through rate of links within your emails
3. How many people unsubscribe

If you’re short on time or patience, you can click here to jump right to the results. Be sure to scroll back and read the whole article later, as it’s packed with valuable insights focused on how to use (and not use!) emoji.

First things first, you’ll learn...

How to Add Emoji to Your Email Subject Lines

Adding emojis to your emails is easy for both PC and Mac users.

Go ahead... try it now!

Before We Get to the Data and Results, Here’s What You Need to Know...

Only compare each email against itself

The 37 emails that make up this experiment were all sent with different content and goals, and at different times of the day, week and year.

For example, you’ll see some tutorial emails sent to a segment of our subscribers who specifically opted-in to receive them. These emails typically see 33%+ open rates, compared to 15% for our general list. Likewise, new feature announcements typically see higher open rates than our general ‘T.H.Ri.V.E. on Friday’ weekly email newsletters.

In other words, try not to compare the performance of individual emails against each other.

The real value of this experiment comes from comparing the performance of each non-emoji subject line against its emoji subject line alter-ego.

Oooh, that’s like, so random!

The other important thing to remember when viewing the test results is that there’s always randomness in individual comparisons.

Randomness is a super important factor in any A/B test, and it misleads people into thinking they see patterns in the random static of chance.

Think of it this way...

If you flip a coin 100 times, you’ll probably expect to see close to 50 heads and 50 tails. After all, there’s a 50% chance you’ll get either result every time you flip the coin.

In reality, however, you’ll see a wide array of results each time you do the same experiment...

Given that heads seems to come up more often in the above example, it’s tempting to think that the coin was weighted, or that the coin was always flipped with some kind of special technique.

But since each flip is entirely independent (just like the performance of our emails in this experiment), what you’re actually seeing is that super sneaky randomness factor making you think there’s something real causing the pattern.

But if you continue to flip your coin a few hundred times more, you’ll start to see the true pattern emerge as the average result gets closer to 50-50.

There’s plenty of advice on our blog if you want to learn more about what really affects A/B tests, but for now just remember that the results of the individual emails don’t matter as much as the big picture trends.

How Are Emoji Displayed in Different Email Clients?

At the time of this post, there are currently 3,633 usable emoji and each one looks different, depending on your email app, browser, application, or operating system.

In other words, even though we chose a particular emoji in our email marketing service, we know that everyone will see their own variation depending on how they receive our emails.

Let’s take the cake emoji as an example...

For most emoji, this isn’t a problem – all the emoji above look like delicious cakes – but sometimes it can cause confusion when the emoji is lost in translation.

For example, when you think you’re sending an 'astonished' face, but subscribers using Mozilla see a dead Teletubby...

All this to say, don’t be surprised if your emoji subject lines look different from how you intended them to look for your subscribers.

What Metrics are We Measuring?

Open Rate

Open rates vary dramatically based on:

• Your industry and topic
• How new your subscribers are
• How relevant and interesting your subscribers find your subject line
• The time of day, week and year you send your email
• What your subscribers are doing when they receive your email

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

In theory, CTR should NOT be affected by email subject lines or emoji you choose.

We’ve included it in this experiment to provide a fuller picture, and to demonstrate how randomness affects all A/B tests, which can mislead you into arriving at false conclusions.

Unsubscribe Rate

Some unsubscribes are normal – desirable even! – as subscribers decide they no longer want to receive your emails. This prevents you from marketing to people who will never engage with your message.

Most email marketing services also charge higher prices for larger numbers of subscribers, so encouraging legitimate unsubscribes can help to reduce ongoing costs.

However, a very high unsubscribe rate is a problem, as it can reduce the deliverability of your future emails, getting you into trouble with your email marketing service.

For today’s experiment, we also looked to see if either the emoji or non-emoji subject lines caused a measurably higher unsubscribe rate, perhaps implying that readers find it cheap and tacky.

Spam score

Many professional email marketing services offer a subject line spam score of some kind.

This score uses a complex algorithm to predict whether a particular subject line will get caught in your subscribers’ spam filter.

All of the emails in this experiment passed ActiveCampaign’s spam score with flying colors – with and without the emoji.

Evaluating which subject line performed better

To understand which subject line performed better – with or without emoji – we compared their open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate using 2 different metrics:

1. Percentage point difference
2. Percentage difference

We use both these metrics together, as they can show patterns and trends more easily than just scanning the rates themselves. Of course you’re free to compare the actual numbers yourself if you want, it’s just helpful to see the difference in a single number.

Bear with us, we’re not going into any crazy algebra here. This is about as technical as we get...

1. Percentage point difference

This tells us the difference between two percentages. For example...

The percentage point difference between these email open rates is +0.5

2. Percentage difference

This shows how much larger or smaller the difference is as a percentage. For example...

The percentage difference between these email open rates is +50%

The Emoji Experiment Results!

Open Rate

The percentage of people who open the email.

• Column 1 shows the email subject line, so you can see the emoji we used.
• Column 2 shows the open rate of the subject line without an emoji.
• Column 3 shows the open rate using the exact same subject line, but with the emoji.
• Columns 4 and 5 show the open rate difference between the two versions, using percentage point difference and percentage difference as described above.

Below are 5 emails, but you can click the toggle underneath to see all 37 if you're curious.

Unsubscribe Rate

The percentage of people who unsubscribed from the email list.

The Bottom Line

That’s a lot of data!

Remember how we said the most useful insights would come from the comparisons taken as an overall average?

Let’s look at how those engagement metrics stack up against all 37 emails in the test...

So What’s the Big Takeaway? Do Emoji Matter in Email Subject Lines?

The results of this long experiment seem to suggest that including emoji in your email subject lines has no meaningful impact on the effectiveness of your email marketing.

In other words: We did this, so you don’t have to!

Remember that this experiment involved only 37 emails, and maybe... just maybe... a different pattern might emerge if we continued to test hundreds or thousands more. However, within the scope of our test, we believe that adding emoji to your email subject lines make no measurable difference to open rate or unsubscribes.

So was this post a waste of your time?

Absolutely not!

If you were hoping to see a clear winner, then this post is even more important for your successful email marketing. You’ve just learned for certain what you probably already suspected: the flashy stuff might be fun, but isn’t important to your business growth.

The quality of your list, your choice of subject line, and sending relevant emails is much more important than adding emoji.

So What DOES Improve Email Engagement?

...and how can you improve open rates and reduce unsubscribes?

Here’s what makes a real difference to your email engagement...

1 - Craft compelling subject lines

Which email are you more likely to open?

• Tuesday Newsletter #113
• #facebookdown – total panic or business as usual?

If you’re not putting time into crafting an interesting subject line, you’re throwing away so many potential readers who will never even discover the message, offer, or links inside your emails.

Emoji are one way of making a subject line stand out, but they’re becoming so common in our inboxes, that they can’t magically make an uninteresting subject line interesting.

Check out this post for more help on writing great email subject lines.

2 - Send relevant emails

When your subscribers first joined your email list, they made a deal with you... they would give you permission to appear in their inbox, provided you send them relevant content.

Even if you don’t think you made this deal, you did.

The moment you start to send emails that are no longer relevant, you can expect to see lower open rates and high unsubscribe rates.

For example, if your audience signed up to hear about gardening, they probably won’t respond positively to receiving emails about Italian cooking... unless you can guide their expectations over time and help them see the connection (home-grown herbs, tomatoes, and building an outdoor pizza oven!)

3 - Send super relevant emails

Sure, general topical relevance is important, but the secret to AMAZING subscriber engagement is sending the right email, to the right subscribers, at the right time.

To do this, you need to embrace the power of tagging and list segmentation!

Let’s use our gardening example... Not everyone who has a garden has fruit trees.

Those who don’t are unlikely to be interested in emails about fruit tree pruning and pest control. It doesn’t matter how appealing you make the subject line or how many tree emoji you include .

But those who do have fruit trees will be super excited to open, read and click on your emails.

It makes sense to only send these emails to subscribers with the ‘fruit tree’ tag in your email marketing service. That way, you’re keeping your open rates high and your unsubscribe rates low.

Your email marketing service will be able to set tags based on which specific links are clicked inside your emails, but Thrive Suite contains many more ways to tag your subscribers:

• Thrive Leads - Add tags based on the opt-in form
• Thrive Quiz Builder - Add tags based on visitors’ quiz results
• Thrive Architect - Add tags using the Lead Generation element
• Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme Builder - Add tags using the Contact Form element
• Thrive Automator - Add tags based on customer or member interactions with your site

4 - Offer consistent value and build trust

We all know what it’s like to receive email after email from a brand who only ever asks something of you without offering any real value. And that’s a surefire way to tank your open rates and rocket your unsubscribes.

If you consistently provide great value to your subscribers in each email, they are much more likely to look forward to the next one.

And the next one.

And the next.

Of course, they’re also much more likely to open and read your emails, as well as trust any links when it’s time to share an offer or blog post.

Ready to Take YOUR Email Marketing to the Next Level?

We hope you've found this experiment valuable, and that you're inspired to improve your own email marketing to keep your audience engaged with your brand.

Thrive Leads is an incredibly powerful tool to help you build your mailing list faster, and ensure your subscribers are automatically tagged in your email marketing service so you can send the right emails to the right people.

Check out this video to learn more!