Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Deliverability and Rendering
An emoji subject line can lift opens or land you in spam. Here is what to test across clients before you ship one. Putting an emoji in an email subject line is a small decision with outsized consequences. The emoji can lift open rates, get your email filtered as spam, or render as a broken box depending on the recipient's client. I have run enough email campaigns to know that the subject line emoji is a gamble, and the odds depend on details most senders never check. Here is what I check before I add one. I learned this the expensive way. A marketing campaign I managed used a rocket emoji in the subject line. Open rates on Apple Mail were fine. Open rates on Outlook were near zero, because Outlook was rendering the emoji as a broken box, and recipients were deleting the emails unread. We lost a segment of our audience for an entire campaign because of one emoji. Rendering Across Email Clients Email clients are a fragmented rendering environment. Apple Mail, Gmail web, Gmail mobile, Outlook, Yahoo, and ProtonMail all render emojis differently, and some render them not at all. Outlook on Windows historically used Word's rendering engine, which had limited emoji support and could show a plain box where an emoji should be. Gmail strips some characters in subject lines. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.