It is quite difficult to imagine modern communication without emojis. Today, you can find them everywhere – in social networks, messengers, websites and even in regular e-mails. And if VKontakte or Telegram emojis have been popular since their release, they began to actively appear in newsletters not so long ago.

There are several reasons for this, and one of the most obvious is communication, which most often takes place in a business format. That is why the selection and addition of emotions should be treated carefully, otherwise the effectiveness of the entire email campaign may deteriorate.

How to choose the right emoji and not harm the mailing list – we tell in this article.

What are emojis and why are they needed?

When the user opens his mail, he sees a lot of messages from different organizations, where all the letters merge into a single entity. If there are emojis in one of the topics, it immediately attracts attention.

To understand, look at the picture below:

What did you pay attention to first? Most likely, to a message with an emoji. In this case, they distinguish letters from the whole mass, but at the same time do not make them “strange”. On the contrary, I want to read them.

And here are a few more theses, why you should use emojis in your newsletters:

• Saving. The email subject in mobile versions is usually limited to 26 characters. If you add an emoji, you can replace the word and reduce the length of the line.
• emotions As strange as it may sound, emojis evoke emotions. With their help, for example, you can create a sense of urgency.

You can use emojis not only in the subject, but also in the sender’s name, preheader and the letter itself. We’ll talk about how to work with this a little later, but for now let’s look at some examples where special characters are used.

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Who uses emojis

Using emojis is a big step, especially for large organizations. Today we can meet them in various fields – it is finance, medicine, and even jurisprudence. Such companies take emojis seriously, because if you overdo it or present them in the wrong way, you can scare away subscribers.

This is how, for example, PrivatBank carefully selects emojis. It uses a minimal set that allows you to reinforce the theme:

Most online stores do not present their mailings without emojis at all. They use them to attract the attention of subscribers. For example, Electronoff inserts up to 3 different emotions:

And even the government knows about emojis. US President Barack Obama himself used emoticons when drawing up a report addressing young people.

And here are a few more examples from popular companies:

As you can see, emojis have become popular and many companies are following this trend. How to create such a newsletter and not lose customers at the same time – we will consider examples below.

Tips for using emojis

Follow the guidelines below to make your emoji mailings effective.

Tip 1: Focus on what is important

Emojis help draw attention to an offer or a specific piece of text. For this, for example, you can use a red exclamation mark, which signals something important.

Tip 2: Use appropriate emojis

If you attach a random set of emojis to the letter, it will not work, on the contrary, it may repel the subscriber. You should choose such special characters that are suitable for your audience and related to the text.

Tip 3: Use emojis as list markers

As we said above, special characters in mailings can be not only in the subject, but also in the letter itself. This method is perfect for those who do not have a full-fledged mailing design. Emojis in this case will be a good visual solution.
For example, take a look at this newsletter:

It uses solid text, but thanks to the emoji, it doesn’t look so awkward.

Tip 4: Don’t overdo it

Sometimes there are such mailings where 3-5 or even more emojis are used in the subject of the letter. We do not recommend being a fan of such a rule, as it can only confuse the user. Try to stick to minimalism, based on the examples of popular email campaigns that we talked about earlier.

In addition, mail clients themselves may perceive it as spam. Take a look at the image below – it’s a simple spam that probably won’t be liked by users.

Tip 5: Analyze mailings

In this case, we are talking about testing an email campaign with and without emojis. It often happens that the audience does not perceive emojis well, even if they were well chosen. A/B testing will help you with this, the essence of which consists in two identical mailings, where one uses emojis and the other does not. So you will see in which case the main indicators work better: openness, clickability, conversion rate and others.

Tip 6: Check that the display is correct

Modern mail clients exclude the occurrence of errors when working with emojis. However, your clients may be using outdated services like Outlook 2003. They usually don’t accept only a few emojis – if you have them in your list, it’s better to abandon them or replace them with others.

How do you know emojis aren’t working? A simple test: send a newsletter to all mail clients and see how they react to it.

Also, check special characters on different devices, for example, the same emoji may look different on iOS and Android.

Tip 7: Emoji as a font replacement

Another way of using emoji, which is not suitable for everyone, allows you to completely replace the usual font of the topic or text fragment. To understand what we are talking about, look at an example:

In this case, the name of the topic is related to technology, so it looks organic. Otherwise, it is better to avoid such experiments, but everything is in your hands.

Services for generating emojis

In conclusion, I would like to tell you about two cool services that will help fill your email with various special characters.

Unicode-table

Unicode-table is a pleasant design service with many different emojis, which are divided into categories. Each icon has a detailed description, including Unicode, HTML code, and more.

official page: Unicode-table.

Tim Whitlock

Another service, albeit with a primitive design and complicated navigation, but has all the emojis you can find. All icons are divided into 6 different categories, and to the right of each is written a name – you can easily find an emoji by searching the site.

official page: Tim Whitlock.

Conclusion

Using emojis in newsletters is an effective way to attract subscribers and increase conversions. The main rule is to use them with caution. Try not to overdo it with icons, and choose them based on your target audience and content as a whole.