Emojis are absolute fun, right? They can spruce up a serious social media post or add a tinge of color and a dash of personality to the boring emails. We started using emojis while sending or receiving text messages on our mobile phones. Now, they are everywhere.
From Email to Twitter to WhatsApp, emojis are now present in every form of digital communication. In fact, nearly 92% of all Internet users use emojis on different platforms to get their messages across easily. Over 6 billion emojis are floating around on every social media platform. No wonder it has been considered as the fastest growing language in the UK.
The best thing about emojis is that these can make a big difference in the online visibility of your brand, as well. According to a recent study by Braze, brands that use emojis in their marketing campaigns experienced a growth of over 770% every year.
In my opinion, you can set your brand apart from the rest if you use the right emojis and symbols in your marketing campaign. And it’s easier than you think. Here’s how you can use emojis and symbols to take your marketing strategy to a whole new level.
Top 4 Emoji Marketing Strategies To Boost Your Business ROI
You are probably wondering why to bother using emojis when you can simply type your message. In that case, I would like you to take a look at the following statistics related to emoji marketing.
- 50% of brands noticed a sharp increase in email opens if their subject lines consisted of emojis.
- Even Tweets included emojis saw nearly 25% more engagement.
- Facebook posts with emojis result in 33% more comments, 57% more likes, and 33% more shares.
- Push notifications also saw a 9% increase in conversion rates and an 85% increase in open rates.
Simply put, emojis convey what your words can’t. Now let’s begin with the strategies one by one.
1. Encourage communication with your prospects
Here is a small example to help you understand this point even better. Consider the following message written in two different formats.
Format 1
I will not be able to attend the meeting since the scheduled time conflicts with my staff meeting. Send me an e-mail and let me know the points that I have missed.
Format 2
I will not be able to attend the meeting since the scheduled time conflicts with my staff meeting. Send me an e-mail and let me know the points that I have missed. 
Read it carefully, and you will understand that the second message sounds less negative than the first one. Such is the power of emojis. You can always use emojis to communicate with your prospects easily.
Interesting Read: Visual marketing ideas for Instagram and Pinterest
See, here’s the thing. People do not always fall for formal conversations. You need to be a little informal to get your target audience talking, and that is when the role of emojis comes into play. Use the right emojis at the right place to draw the attention of your target audience.
You can also get ideas from the World Wide Fund for Nature, which launched an emoji marketing campaign to raise funds from all parts of the world. As per this campaign, you could use any of the 17 endangered animal emojis in their tweets. At the end of the month, WWF would send you the total number of icons used by you on Twitter.
Each icon you use is worth £0.10 voluntary donation. The announcement tweet alone received 34, 000+ tweets.
So yes, you can communicate with your target audience a lot better if you use emojis sensibly in your marketing campaigns.
If you are talking about discounts, use the dollar emoji or this one: 😵. Similarly, if you are talking about offering assignment help, use book emojis or 👩🎓 👨🎓.
2. Use emojis in push app notifications
It is no new fact that most of the media consumption takes place on mobile apps.
Thus, no matter how clichéd it sounds, you just can’t ignore mobile marketing. And speaking of mobile marketing, how can we not talk about the push notifications? Push notifications are crucial for every marketer since it offers direct interaction with the user’s home screens.
But, most of the push messages are usually ignored and sent to the spam box. But, this may not be the case if you can use relevant emojis to make your push messages hard to ignore. Use the emojis to give an emotional touch to your push messages. After all, emotions and information can influence the buying decision of consumers.
Let’s say you are a travel website. You can use these- 👛 👜 💼 🎒 or other travel destination images in the push messages. You can also use airplane emojis to announce flight deals. Thankfully, there are emojis for all sorts of businesses. So you just have to search for the right one and use it.
You can also take inspiration from Pink Nation in this case. They used the emoji of a woman fist-pumping in the air out of excitement. This was used in their push message to attract women and ask them to choose their outfit.
3. Implement emojis in Instagram posts
I don’t know if you noticed it yet, but half of Instagram’s post contains emojis. In fact, you can now order cocktails at Boxpark only by using a sequence of emojis, as shown below. How cool is that!
Emojis are a significant part of the Instagram vocabulary, and why not? They have particularly distinct meanings, like the words you may look up in the Oxford Dictionary. Use the relevant emojis in your Instagram posts as captions or comments to boost your social media marketing efforts.
Keep these tips in mind before using emojis in Instagram comments and captions:
- Understand how your target audience uses the emojis and choose the right colored versions of them. You don’t want to offend anyone, do you? You can use Hubspot’s Emoji translation guide to know the meaning of each emoji.
- According to Sue B Zimmerman, using emojis in these locations usually boosts an organization’s sales and revenue. The locations are:
- Your Bio
- Your Call to Actions
- Your Comments
- If possible, use the heart emoji as frequently as possible. After a thorough analysis of 2500 Instagram posts, it has been found that the emoji of an heart wins over all the other emojis. The heart emoji averaged 120,000 comments and likes per post. The next two emojis are sparkles and artist palette.
- Keep your target country or region in mind. Say you want to target Finland. Then the more emojis means more engagement. However, you may have to keep a tab on the usage of emojis for Tanzania since they aren’t fond of emojis.
Interesting Read: 7 Effective Tips For Advertising on Instagram Stories
You can also use the emojis in your Instagram posts to play visual brain tease with your target audience. Anthony Thompson even tripled his Instagram engagement with the help of emojis. He commented on this photograph with a Tim Tam Shooter emoji, as shown below, which led to a series of discussions on the same thread.
I would suggest you tag relevant users besides the emoji to foster quick emoji engagement. What do you say?
4. Use proper emojis in Tweets and Facebook posts
You may not know if your crush will ask you out or not, but Facebook definitely would want to know ‘How are you feeling?’ Thus, you can use the relevant emojis to let the world know what’s up with you. You can use the same emojis to attract your potential customers and boost your ROI. It is because plain texts are boring.
According to Zazzle Media, Facebook posts with emojis get a 57% higher like rate, a 33% higher share rate, and a 33% higher comment rate. Aren’t that what marketers look for? Make the most of the opportunity and use the relevant emojis on your Facebook next time you post a status.
Zappos started a heart emoji in their status updates. It attracted over 20 shares and 700 likes within 24 hours. 😁 And 😛 get the highest engagement on Facebook. So try something different other than just sharing your feelings, maybe.
As far as Twitter is concerned, emojis can work like magic on this platform. It fills the missing context of emotions and enhances Social Engagement to a great extent. I follow Larry Kim from WordPress, and his usage of emojis in tweets is incredible. When used in promotional tweets, he has noticed 3X more engagement.
Whether it is Twitter or Facebook, make sure you use the emojis carefully. Do not just sprinkle them wherever you want in the texts. Too much of emojis can ruin the message that you wanted to convey.
This is something I have learned from Chevrolet’s press release, where they took their emoji marketing strategy a bit too far. Their press release looked something like this
The audience was supposed to decode the message. But, honestly, who has the time?
Do not repeat the same mistake when you use emojis in your marketing strategy.
Wrapping Up
You need not worry about the success of your social media marketing efforts once you get the emoji marketing strategies right. These little symbols can do wonders for your business growth, sales, and revenue. From Burger King to Dominos nearly all giant brands have focused on emojis to bring in more traffic and leads to their business. Why shouldn’t you?
Plain old texts may not serve your purpose all the time. Breathe some life into your brand with the help of relevant emojis while sending emails or in your social media posts. Just make sure you don’t offend anyone with the emojis. Good Luck. 👍
