• by Jess Nelson , October 4, 2016

Less than a quarter of email offers marked in the subject line are interesting enough to be opened, according to an email study released Monday by Adobe. 

A survey of over 1,000 U.S. respondents revealed that only 19% of work emails are interesting, while only 23% of personal email offers are interesting enough to be opened.

Could emojis present an opportunity for marketers to capture reader’s attention? 

Bridgette Darling, product marketing at Adobe Campaign, says that emojis are appropriate in email as long as they are not aggressive or passive-aggressive.

“It’s a way to show intent,” she says. “You don’t have to go into any more detail than you have to, but your intention still gets across.”

The most commonly used emoji in work emails is the thumbs-up image, according to Adobe, followed by an assortment of smiley faces. The thumbs-up image is also the second-most popular emoji in personal emails, although a heart is much more common in personal emails than work communication.

It may only be appropriate to send emojis to peers in the workplace, however, as opinions on the appropriateness of emojis in email differ by position.

Less than one quarter of respondents think it is appropriate to send an email with an emoji to a senior executive, with more than half of respondents saying it is very inappropriate. On the other hand, more than half of respondents stated that it could be appropriate to send an emoji to a peer given the right circumstances.

Emojis may not yet have infiltrated the workplace entirely, but they have been shown to increase email engagement when included in the subject line of email marketing campaigns.

Emails that include emojis have significantly higher open rates than those without them, according to a recent study by GoDaddy. A sample of more than 1.3 billion emails from 2015 and 2016 showed that emojis increase open rates by at least 20% when contained in an email subject line.

Emojis also increase click-through rates by at least 50% when compared to emails without an emojis in their subject line. 

Email marketers should be aware that emojis don’t always render properly on every email client, such as Outlook, so email testing is an essential component of any campaign containing emojis.