As the number of marketing emails sent rises, brand owners are increasingly looking at how to tailor and personalise their messages to encourage the recipient to open and engage with the content. One method which is gaining traction is the use of symbols in subject lines and, as Experian research shows, it is a great way to increase open rates and improve engagement – when you get it right.
But what do we mean when we say “symbols”? Well, every font set (like Arial and Calibri) is made entirely out of “symbols”. Many font sets include extra symbols beyond letters, numbers and punctuation.
These special symbols are based on the Unicode computer industry standard character set, and are different from images. This Unicode data is encoded in a number of different ways for your computer to store and understand it. When this coding fails to translate, results can appear messy, with seemingly random symbols appearing instead of the desired effect.
So how do you ensure your email subject line doesn’t read like this: “Thank God it’s Friday”? The best way to know if a symbol will render across all email clients is simple – test it.
Since email providers use different font sets and understand different encoding methods, there are millions of possible permutations of symbols that will render and not render. At the bare minimum, you should be testing your most important groups of subscribers.
So, if you know that most of your subscribers read their emails in Gmail or Hotmail, at least view tests in those places to make sure most of your subscribers won’t see the dreaded “empty rectangle” or question mark.
A heart in a subject line about a credit card balance might not make sense. The same subject line rules still apply when using symbols – the more relevant they are, the more subscribers will understand and enjoy them.
If you test using symbols in your subject lines and see great results at first that taper off, perhaps the “newness” of this tactic is waning. Try testing new symbols or testing symbols against no symbols and remember, the most important thing to your campaign is the receptiveness of your target audience.
We’re often asked if symbols affect your chance at landing in the inbox. The short answer here is no – ISPs and email clients now tend to use engagement data to determine whether a message is spam or not. So, what are you waiting for?
Helen Taylor is a data analyst at Experian Marketing Services
