Adding Emojis into your email campaigns can be a great way to make them stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes. And evidence backs this up: research by ReturnPath showed that by adding an emoji to the subject line, open rates went up while complaints went down.

SmartrMail also fully supports adding Emojis in your emails, including in the subject line. 

Inserting emojis into your subject line is as easy as coping and pasting them across from a service such as Get Emoji.

If you’re interested in trying this out in your next email campaign, then here’s some things you may want to keep in mind:

Emojis look slightly different across different platforms. For example, this is how the common smiling emoji will appear on various platforms:

Apple:

Google:

Microsoft:

Samsung: 

This means that if you send the smiling emoji, it will appear as Apple’s design when viewed on Apple devices, Samsung’s design if being viewed on a Samsung Phone, and so on. The only complication is that when viewing an email on an email client such as Gmail on an iPhone, the Emojis within the email may render with Google’s design, not Apple’s. 

Unfortunately there’s no way to force a particular emoji design to appear for all your subscribers. The good news is that the designs will usually be very similar and if you want to ensure you're sending the right sentiment to all your subscribers, you can use Emojipedia which lists design variations for all Emojis. 

Thankfully now the vast majority of email clients render Emojis both subjects lines and the emails themselves. 

The only exceptions to this is Outlook 2003 which does not support Emojis. Instead they will appear as rectangular boxes or as glyphs such as in the image below:

Additionally, computers running Windows 7 (and earlier versions) will not be able to display Emojis as the operating system itself does not support Emojis. This is regardless of what email client is being used. 

In Gmail, emojis may also look different between the inbox view and within the email itself. This is because Gmail will sometimes use two different styles to render emojis: one for the inbox view and another for the email itself. 

While there are some differences in design across various platforms, and some older platforms cannot render Emojis at all, the majority of your subscribers will be able to view Emojis. As long as you keep these factors in mind, adding the right emoji to your next email campaign has the ability to make it stand out from the crowd in your subscribers' inboxes.