We're sending out transactional e-mails. Order confirmations, delivery notifications, the boring stuff. And while these are supposed to be complaint-proof, we were still getting complaints regularly, and our AWS Historical Complaing Rate was climbing up.
When it started approaching the warning levels, we sat down to think it all through and realised that it may be the emojis. Back in the early days, when we were young and fun, we put emojis in the subject lines. Nothing crazy, just a single green checkmark "✅". When we implemented a feature that warns customers about an error in their order, we started also using a single "☝️". That's it.
So we decided to test it and made a few changes in late November last year.
- Removed the finger emoji, but kept the checkmark. (Mostly because I like it and I like the feeling of those early days.)
- Kept the subject line to one sentence.
- Moved the checkmark emoji towards the end of that sentence.
- Made sure we always terminate the subject line with the store name.
Here are the results.
(The sharp increase in September has to do with order volume.)
Since late November we haven't received a single complaint, and our historical complaint rate has been steadily going down. (But once again, our e-mails are strictly transactional.) Looking back, it makes sense, because the emojis-first approach may make emails appear spammy at first sight.
While I realise I don't provide much data or research here, I'm putting this out because it's a real experience. And when I was reading up on this topic myself, I haven't found much of real life experience. It was mostly generic SEO-optimised posts. For further reading, here's what I found at the time: