Toning up your emails with Emoticons

We all know the major email components include tone, word choice, organization and pacing. Tone is communicated in many ways on email and it all started about 25 years ago with emoticons.   A recent New York Times article titled (-: Just Between You and Me;-) highlights how they have moved into the business world. An interesting statistic is over half of people using emoticons are over 30 years old. 

So how many of you are using emoticons in your sales messaging? The article indicated emoticons are used when closing a sale.  Tone is risky on email because it can be easily misunderstood and emoticons run that risk. Although this article introduces some fun new icons such as *\0/* (cheerleader) and //0-0\\ (John Lennon) and B-)(cool), I suggest you play it safe and be deliciate if you use any of these with prospects:

happy

sad

wink

grin

:-/ confused

:-0 surprise