Marketing
Are You Using Emojis and Emoticons In Marketing?
Marketing challenges all of us, even the most proficient at it, so any tip on how to do it better is worth receiving. You can never know too much about how to attract the attention of your target audience. For many businesses, their products or services are unexciting, so it takes something special to make them stand out especially on social media.
We know you’re already up to speed with the need to provide unique, relevant content, and now our tips on how to use emojis and emoticons in your marketing to improve engagement and conversion will bring your marketing to life.
This blog post will let you know where we believe you can use emojis in business marketing and still keep your professional reputation. Let’s start with understanding emojis and emoticons and how they work.
Emojis and Emoticons Explained
Wikipedia does a good job defining words we can all understand. Emojis are pictures or images and they predate emoticons. Initially, they were known as a pictograph. However, they became popular on Japanese mobile phones, and now they are universally known as emojis, a word derived from e + moji.
Emoticons came on the scene later, and it’s the use of punctuation on your standard keyboard. Arranged in different ways to represent facial expressions. Now when you choose text-based punction, e.g. “:” and “)” together, you get a smiley face as in 🙂 and so on. Wikipedia has a list of the most popular emoticons in text format for you to use in your marketing and there is no cost to use them.
How Do Emojis Work
In marketing, our campaigns must tap into the emotions to grab attention and get a reaction. Seeing a happy or sad face tells the reader the emotions of the writer and how you too may feel when reading the content.
It’s 101 marketing and sales to create content copy that appeals to the part of our brain, i.e. the limbic system responsible for reacting to stimulus. The reaction is done without first processing it, so using these small pictures of facial expressions helps achieve higher open rates and conversions in email marketing. On social media, you’re more likely to share or ‘like’ a post that has an emoji.
Where To Use Emojis In Marketing
In the subject lines of emails, the emoji has come a long way. Social Media Today presents an infographic from Campaign Monitor on how relevant and effective emojis are in subject lines to entice the recipient to open and read the email message.
Can you believe using a smiley face in an email’s subject line increases the unique open rate by over 50%? And with so many special events that need marketing, using the ‘heart’ for Valentines Day or a Christmas Tree at Christmas time is unlikely to go out of favour.
Social Media
The prolific use of emoticons and emojis on all social media platforms is a trend here to stay. Females use them more than males, e.g. 57% of emoji users on Twitter are women. Younger people are more likely to use them in their postings, too, with 86% of Twitter users 24 or younger.
SMS Messaging
We’re all doing it; now, mobile phone software provides hundreds of emoticons. Using a string of small images may replace using text altogether. It’s easier to click on an image of a dog than to find the letters and spell out ‘dog’.
Summary
There are opportunities to turn prosaic copy into something more interesting with an emoji or two. Even if your business is used to the more traditional use of images, give emojis a go and measure their performance. A higher open rate, click rate and sharing are what all marketers want, and that usually requires a new approach even if it appears unnatural if it works, that’s all that counts.
