How to add Glyphs to Email subject lines

Email marketers constantly strive to find new ways to get their emails noticed, opened and clicked by end users. With more and more businesses embracing email channel to communicate with customers, it becomes even more important for marketers to innovate and try new things. One of these new techniques, you might have noticed, is to use glyphs or symbols in email subject lines. Marketers do this to try and stand out in the crowded inbox and earn an email open.

But this brings up the obvious the next question for many people – How do you add Glyphs in an email subject line? NOTE: This is simply one way, others may be available within your specific email solutions.

To ensure that you use a widely supported Glyph (like ♥, ✈,❸,❷,❶) in a subject line use a utf-8 encoded character in your messages Subject. When creating an email newsletter, you would need to replace each Glyph with appropriate utf-8 encoding.

Examples:

You can generate different Glyphs by changing the code in red.
Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat#Unicode_Dingbats and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols to find out more symbols that you may use with proper utf-8 encoding.

Visit http://www.percederberg.net/tools/text_converter.html or http://emailstuff.org/glyph/ to find out corresponding utf-8 codes for various Glyphs.

Special considerations when using Glyphs

It is to be noted, not all mail servers, webmail providers and mobile devices support use of Glyphs (encoded using utf-8); so these are to be used with caution. Testing should be done to check rendering across variety of email clients and mobile devices. Also, be sure to measure effect of using these symbols on email metrics.

For example: Outlook 2003, Lotus and some Blackberry devices offer very limited support to Glyphs. Some of these devices might just render a “?” or shaded square instead of the intended Glyph. Rendering may also be different on varying email / mobile clients. For example, a black heart in Gmail UI may render as a red heart on iOS devices.