We recently held an AWeber customer workshop in Orlando, Florida. While we were there, one of the most frequently asked questions we received wasn’t about deliverability or what to write in your emails or the most popular integrations.
Nope. It had to do with emojis. Or, more specifically, “How do you add an emoji to an email subject line?”
Luckily, we had an easy answer: There’s a super quick keyboard shortcut that allows you to add your favorite teeny-tiny hearts 💚, smiley faces 😆, and clapping hands 👏🏽 to your subject lines (or even inside your email copy). Follow the steps below to try it on your Mac or PC.
How to add emojis to an email subject line on a Mac
Keyboard shortcut: CTRL + CMD + Space
- Step 1: Open your email draft inside your AWeber account.
- Step 2: Place your cursor where you’d like the emoji to appear in your subject line.
- Step 3: Hit the three buttons of the keyboard shortcut (Control + Command + Space bar) down at once. An emoji window will pop up.
- Step 4: Click on an emoji to insert it into your subject line.
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How to add emojis to an email subject line on a PC
*Keyboard shortcut: Win + . or Win + ;
- Step 1: Open your email draft inside your AWeber account.
- Step 2: Place your cursor where you’d like the emoji to appear in your subject line.
- Step 3: Hit the two buttons of the keyboard shortcut (Windows key + . (period) or Windows key + ; (semicolon)) down at once. An emoji window will pop up.
- Step 4: Click on an emoji to insert it into your subject line.
*This shortcut is available on Windows 10. (Window 10’s touch keyboard also has a built-in emoji keyboard. Just hit the smiley face to the left of the space bar to activate it.)
Pro tips for using the emoji keyboard
- The emojis you’ve used most recently will be stored at the top of the window.
- Scroll through the emoji categories along the bottom of the window. (Categories: smileys and people, animals and nature, food and drink, activity, travel and places, objects, symbols, flags, and symbols.)
- Use the magnifying glass to easily search for emojis instead of scrolling through them all.
- In Windows, you can change the skin tone in the upper righthand corner in the “people” emoji category. It looks like a square patch.
- On a Mac, you can change the skin tone in the “people” emoji category by clicking on an emoji. A small bar will appear with multiple options.
- Enter as many emojis as you’d like into your subject line. Once you are done, you can close the pop up window by hitting the Esc key, or pressing the “X” at the top left corner on a Mac and the “X” at the top right corner on a PC.
Should you use emojis in your email subject lines?
We wanted to find out. That’s why we recently analyzed 1,000 emails from 100 of today’s top marketers. The result: 6.9% of subject lines included emojis.
While that’s a small percentage, using emojis could increase your open rates, according to Mark Asquith, marketing expert and founder of Rebel Base Media. (Asquith was also one of the 100 top marketers whose emails we included in our research.)
“A well-placed smiley, timer, or contextual emoji used alongside a well-thought-out subject line will really make your message stand out within someone’s already very busy inbox,” said Asquith, who frequently uses emojis in his own subject lines.
When it comes to your own subject lines, our advice is to test, test, test.
Set up an A/B test of two emails — one that uses an emoji in the subject line, and one that doesn’t — and see which version your subscribers prefers. This can help you optimize your open rates in the future.
Related: Why You Need to Split Test Your Emails
AWeber lets you A/B test more than just subject lines, too. Our testing tools allows you to test almost everything, like send times, copy, templates, buttons, images, and more! Try a free 30-day trial of AWeber and you can start split testing today!