How much do brands use emojis in subject lines?

You see them everywhere these days. Sometimes, it even feels like too much. So, I wanted to investigate how often brands use emojis in subject lines.

Should you be using emojis in your subject lines? How much do your competitors use them? What’s the industry standard?

How often are emojis used in subject lines? I dug into the 300+ emails database, and here’s what I found:

13.2% of the subject lines included emojis.

That number feels low, doesn’t it? I thought it would be higher. Way higher.

Here’s how emoji usage breaks down across industries:

• Ecommerce: 18.6%

• Media: 16.7%

• Digital Products: 11.5%

• Apps: 11.1%

• SaaS: 8.7%

• Coaching: 5.6%

E-commerce brands top the list (understandable given their focus on high-volume B2C communications), while SaaS and Coaching are far more reserved, potentially opting for more formal, straightforward subject lines.

Campaign emails & newsletters are very different from automated sequences.

In my experience, emojis tend to appear much more frequently in campaign emails and newsletters, a format that allows for plenty of room for experimentation and A/B testing.

However, it's understandable that less playfulness is seen in revenue-driving sequences that run on autopilot, such as welcome flows or cart abandonment sequences.

If you want to implement emojis, you need to add them to the full sequence so they make sense throughout. Because they change the tone and style completely, it is harder to make these changes.

Curious—how about you? Do you use emojis in your subject lines, and if so, how have they performed?

Cheers,

David from Send Good Emails