Alyssa Dulin

Nov 29th

Deliverability Dispatch #002

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A weekly newsletter to help you reach your audience.

BF/CM Recap

I hope everyone who celebrated had a wonderful Thanksgiving! As I mentioned last week, I spent a lot of the holiday keeping an eye on our email sending at ConvertKit. Here's how it ended up going:

We sent 114 million messages on Black Friday and 123 million messages on Cyber Monday with a 99.8% delivery rate both days. The 0.2% of bounced emails those days are from typical bounce reasons like invalid addresses, typos, full mailboxes, etc.

Do emojis cause messages to land in the spam folder?

Insider Tip:

Adding an emoji in your sender name could cause bounces

A colleague in the email industry recently noticed that a sender with high reputation sent a message with the checkmark emoji in the from name, and Gmail rejected the messages completely (bounced). When the sender removed the emoji, messages were delivered successfully.

Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Do They Affect Open Rates?

The short answer: it depends.

This article dives into how emojis in the subject line impact open rates, click through rates, unsubscribe rates, and complaint rates. Some highlights:

Subject lines without an emoji had the higher open rate at 52.94% to 47.06%
Emails with emojis in the subject line showed more abuse complaints with 7 out of 10 campaigns having more abuse reports than non-emojis

Read More

Litmus: Using Emojis in Subject Lines to Stand Out in the Inbox

Be sure to be mindful of your audience, use emojis with purpose, and remember that if emojis didn’t work this time, they might have the desired results in your next campaign.

Read More

Econsultancy: Here’s what we learned about emojis by looking at >1.5m subject lines.

Econsultancy found that emojis can make good subject lines better, but make bad subject lines worse.

See the data

FulcrumTech: Do Symbols in Subject Lines Boost Email Response Rates?

"In a study conducted by Experian, 56% of the brands they tested experienced a higher unique open rate when using symbols in subject lines. For example, the most popular symbol — the black heart — resulted in an open-rate lift of 2.2%, while the black sun with rays increased open rates by 14.9%, and an umbrella produced a 50% lift."

Keep reading FulcrumTech's article to learn 5 tips for using emojis in the subject line.

5 tips for using emojis

In conclusion: Testing matters

All of the studies and articles above highlight the importance of running tests to determine what your audience likes and dislikes. Some audiences may respond really well to emojis while others might have a negative sentiment. Emojis can also provide a nice boost for an already-great subject line, but tacking an emoji onto a not-so-great subject line can make engagement even worse.

My recommendation: focus first on writing engaging, relevant subject lines. Then, run some A/B tests to learn how your audience reacts to emojis in the subject line and use your findings to inform whether emojis are a good fit for your subject lines or not.

Emojis alone likely won't cause your messages to go to the spam folder. However, if your audience doesn't respond well to emojis in the subject line and you start receiving more spam complaints, you could start to see more spam filtering. This is why testing is so important!

As always, feel free to reply to this message with any deliverability questions you have! I'm happy to help.

Alyssa Dulin

Head of Email Deliverability at ConvertKit

Deliverability Dispatch by Alyssa Dulin

Do emojis cause spam filtering?

Alyssa Dulin

Deliverability Dispatch #002

↓

BF/CM Recap

Do emojis cause messages to land in the spam folder?

Insider Tip:

Adding an emoji in your sender name could cause bounces

Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Do They Affect Open Rates?

Litmus: Using Emojis in Subject Lines to Stand Out in the Inbox

Econsultancy: Here’s what we learned about emojis by looking at >1.5m subject lines.

FulcrumTech: Do Symbols in Subject Lines Boost Email Response Rates?

In conclusion: Testing matters

Alyssa Dulin

Want to make sure your emails are staying out of the spam folder? Deliverability Dispatch is a weekly newsletter that helps you reach the inbox of your subscribers.