Emoji. In 21st century you encounter emojis everywhere and on a regular basis - whether it’s in social networks, or in a regular SMS, or in one of the popular messaging mobile apps such as Viber or What’s App, we all are completely absorbed with emojis.
But are these just colorful symbols or the new way of communication?
Recent research shows that emojis are used not only by teenagers - in fact, 92% of people use emoji and more than 30% use emojis several times a day, according to a report published by the Emogi Research Team. Not in text messages only, they are literally everywhere today - as decoration in high fashion collections, in movies, emails, social media.
Since emojis became an integral part of our lives, many marketing companies were eager to explore how the use of emojis in marketing communications can help user engagement.
Leanplum analyzed over 2.6 billion push notifications that contained emojis to learn more how it helps engagement. Every aspect was taken into attention - open rates, conversions and retention. The findings were very interesting.
Why Do We Like Emojis?
When communicate face-to-face with someone it’s easy to express your emotions, when it comes to Internet life it’s not that easy.
According to scientists, when we see emoji in a message, our brains lights up the same way as if we see someone’s face. The brain recognizes non-verbal information and processes it as emotions.
Naturally, more people will want to click on a push notification that contains emotions that they like.
Every year hundreds of new emojis are added, so the marketers can easily enrich their language, and it becomes easier to find right emojis that relates to you, or even look like you or your friend.
It’s hard to resist that within the last couple of years emojis use increased dramatically across all communication channels.
Social Media
Emojis are used every second on Twitter and Instagram. Last year Facebook introduced emoji reactions, which became popular immediately, so now people can express their thoughts and feelings about anything simply choosing the respective icon:
The numbers below prove how important emojis are to your social media outreach.
- On Twitter, using emojis results in 25.4% more engagement.
- On Facebook, using emojis results in 57% more likes, 33% more comments, and 33% more shares.
- On Instagram, nearly 50% of all comments and captions contain emojis.
If you don’t take emojis seriously yet, it’s time to take a chance and start talking to your consumers the language they all understand - emoji.
Marketing Emails
Do emojis help to increase email open rate? The answer is positive, as 56% of brands saw an increase in open rates when the email subject line contained emojis. Not only that, but they also noticed much higher clickthrough rate, which means that such emails were more engaging for the consumers.
No doubts, that emojis can be of a great help for marketers here, as over 60% people say that they decide whether to open an email or not based on the email subject line.
Check out the list of popular emoji email subject lines to get inspired.
Push Notifications in Mobile Apps
Leanplum analyzed the usage of emoji in push notifications from year to year, and found that there was 163% growth in 2016 compared to 2015. The trend continues to grow.
The other important finding was that the open rate of push notifications that contained emoji saw significant increase of 85% compared to the ones with no emoji used. For mobile apps this is a game-changer - the opportunity to attract more new users or wake those who have not been active for a while. In addition to that, it was found that push notifications that contain emoji can help increase day 2 retention by 28%.
Not bad, right?
Emojis on video
Aside from using emojis with push notifications, using emojis on video is a great method to trigger a response to an action, or event, which in turn could lead to viral content and furthermore, increased engagement.
As video content marketing is gaining traction rapidly, spending the time to create video content will increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
According to Statista, a whopping 3.1bn videos are viewed each year, 74.6bn is spent on video ads, and 16.4bn is spent on video influencer marketing
With the statistics in mind, and the usage of emojis on video, coupled with customer retention strategies, conversion may increase up to 35% (according to g2.com).
Advertising
If you Google something like “best emoji ads” you will find over 111 million results there as a proof of the fact, that emojis have been widely used in advertising.
Brands use the most out of it, making creative ads around their products and services, communicating their message in the universal emoji language that everybody understands.
Start your emoji story now and see how it helps to boost your users engagement!
