Should you use emojis in email subject lines?

What about special characters, all caps?

Oh, those darling emojis: red heart, face with tears of joy, naughty eggplant. Surely they have a use in subject lines for marketing emails.

Indeed, they do, say the conservative folks at the Nielsen Norman Group.

They say emojis in subject lines can:

• Draw attention to your message in a crowded inbox
• Help communicate the topic of your email
• Add emotion and context to a message
• Even replace words — a heart for love,for instance — if used carefully

But beware. Emojis:

• Can be hard to distinguish on a desktop — let alone smartphone — screen
• May not be correctly displayed across all email clients, browsers and devices
• Might confuse people unless you choose only very familiar emojis
• Might be seen as mass mail and “marketese”

Still, used carefully — and with the blessings of the NNG researchers — why not give them a go? At least A/B test emojis and find out whether they work for you.

ALL CAPS: Use it? Or lose it?

WE THOUGHT IT WAS YELLING, BUT … capitalized subject lines get opened significantly more often than upper and lower case, according to a study by MailChimp.

A couple of caveats:

• Personalizing? Avoid all caps for names. Recipients are especially sensitive to seeing their name in all-caps in a subject line, especially when the rest of the subject line is in sentence case or title case, according to the Nielsen Norman Group. Instead, capitalize the first letter of the recipient’s name only.
• Don’t be afraid to use questions in your subject lines. But skip exclamation points.
• Be careful. MailChimp is an outlier with this advice. Proceed with caution. A/B test.

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Sources: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

“Subject Line Data: Choose Your Words Wisely,” Mailchimp, Nov. 13, 2013