Emojis are everywhere and they have completely changed how we communicate via text messaging and across social media. They have quickly been adapted by society and these days it’s completely normal to include them in conversations.
Replies consisting of just emojis are acceptable and many people can communicate simply by using emojis. Imagine that? Full conversations, using simple images, and both sides fully understand what the other person is saying.
There are emojis that represent people, food, places, material objects, etc. There are emojis for almost anything you could think of, and some even have a ‘slang’ meaning. The eggplant emoji comes to mind as possible the most popular emoji used for something other than its original intent.
Emojis are now used by people of all ages and demographics, and I am willing to bet that if you opened your text messages and looked at your most recent conversations you will see a healthy use of emojis throughout multiple conversations. They are such a major part of our daily communication.
So, what do emojis mean to a business owner or a marketer? They give you the opportunity to speak to your target audience in a language that they can relate to and you can also use them to draw attention to your marketing messages.
Not all marketers are taking advantage of emoji use, so it’s a huge opportunity for many, allowing you to command more attention and ultimately attract more email opens and click-throughs across all of your marketing efforts.
Let me dive in and lay out some tips that are very easy to implement..
All of which can help you drastically improve your marketing efforts, simply by mixing in some emoji use.
Create email subject lines that are impossible to ignore.
I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters and e-commerce lists because I like to constantly stay up to date on what other marketers are doing. I use a separate email address of course, to keep all of the promotional emails out of my regular inbox. But this allows me to spot trends and see what is new and innovative in terms of email marketing.
It’s still highly effective and the value of a strong email list isn’t going to dip anytime soon. What I have noticed is that more companies are starting to include emojis in their email subject lines and there is no doubt in my mind that it’s effective, simply because it makes that email stick out in a sea of promotional emails.
One or two clever emoji placements can do a great job at drastically increasing your open rate, but this doesn’t mean you should load a subject line with random emojis as that makes it look like spam. I’ve seen good use of emojis and horrible use. The subject lines that really grab your attention use one at the beginning and maybe one in the middle of the copy, but no more. Overloading with emojis can cause the reader to miss your CTA message.
Add emojis to the copy of your marketing and promotional emails to draw attention to your CTAs.
I have also noticed a trend as it related to the actual email message copy, and more brands are now including emojis, even those not targeting Millennials. Now, with more use by the older generations, emojis have really become part of how everyone communicates.
Early on, some brands that strictly targeted Millennials and the young demo would use them throughout their message simply because their audience understood them and they were part of their daily language.
If you scroll through social media and pay attention to the profiles of older professionals, and even grandparents, you will notice emoji use. It might not be as heavy as the younger crowd, but they are being used.
When it comes to email copy, emojis allow you to break up boring text as well as draw attention to a special offer. As I stated above, I subscribe to several email lists for research purposes and the other day I saw a message from an e-commerce store that had one single call-to-action in the email, and they surrounded it with fire emojis to signal it was a hot deal. It was clever and fun, and impossible to miss. That’s exactly how to use them — and I promise their response in terms of sales was better than it would have been without the emoji use.
Include emojis in your Instagram captions and in your Story posts.
Instagram has become the social media platform of choice for brands looking to promote a product or service on social media, and with two ways to market — post captions and Story’s — you need to use every advantage you can to command attention.
While immensely popular, Instagram doesn’t make it easy for marketers. You can’t include clickable links in the descriptions and your account needs to have at least 10,000 followers to have access to the “swipe up” feature.
So, drawing as much attention and focus to your captions on Instagram posts becomes very important, and emojis are a great way to do that. You can create very long captions and even break the content down into a list, as long as you don’t type it out directly on the app. Use your phone’s notepad and break up your captions into bite-sized pieces of info, using emojis almost as bullet points.
Take a look at some of the most successful brands on Instagram and you will see that they do this well. A huge block of text is overwhelming. Break it up and use emojis to make it fun and emphasize selling points for the best results. You can also use them in your Story text to help draw attention, and that’s exactly what emojis are in terms of a marketing tool — attention grabbers.
Take advantage of Twitter’s increased character limit and leverage creativity.
Twitter is still a viable marketing channel for many brands, and their recent change in terms of character limit (up to 280 from 140) gives you plenty of room to create some clever sales copy. If you scroll through your Twitter feed it is primarily text with an occasional link thrown in, with a preview of that content in the form of the article’s header image.
To REALLY stand out, fill out the remaining character count with emojis. You can generally find emojis that related to almost any topic, so get creative. If someone is scrolling through Twitter and they come across a post that is lines of emojis it causes them to pause long enough to read the headline of the content you are sharing, and if it’s strong enough you will see more people click-through to read it than you would be not using any emojis.
Some brands will also create emoji-only posts on Twitter simply to create engagement. Every re-tweet you receive is an opportunity to attract new followers to your business. Creativity is often rewarded, so think of fun ways to deliver a message relevant to your brand using only emojis.
Use them in app and desktop push notification messages.
Push notifications are the hottest new trend in marketing, and whether you have an app or a website, they should be on your radar. They allow you to deliver a message instantly to everyone connected to your business, and adding emojis in your message just help you draw more attention to the notification.
While email marketing to your user-base if effective, it still requires the person to go into their inbox, see your message and then decide to click on it. With push notifications, you are able to deliver your message right in front of your target instantly. If it’s a mobile notification they will see it on their home screen. If it’s a desktop notification they see it while on their computer.
Push notification aren’t overly invasive and they get seen, which is very powerful. If you have a lot of apps on your phone and push notifications enabled then you may have seen some companies including emojis in their messages.
While this will eventually become saturated, right now you are able to get in on the action, and ride the wave as long as possible. I think the biggest reason why emojis in push notifications work so well is because a lot of consumers see them and automatically assume the message is a text, simply because it includes emojis.
Our brain automatically connects them with a text from a friend, which is something we tend to grab our phones for. So, it almost tricks the person into giving their attention and focus to the message.
Make your chatbot replies stand out by including emojis.
Chatbots are becoming more popular both on Facebook and on websites, and one of the easiest ways to increase conversions through your chatbot scripts is by including emojis to make your messages appear more human.
What is the purpose of chatbots? They are a selling tool, designed to help you convert visitors into sales. If the responses they spit back appear more human, rather than robotic, the person on the other end will connect with them, which then pushes them towards the path of conversion.
It’s simple psychology, really. Make that personal connection, answer all questions, and guide the person to what they are looking for, and you will accomplish what you have set out to do by implementing a chatbot. If your messages and chatbot communication feels unnatural it will simply push people away.
When writing your messages, always think of how you would reply via text to a friend. This will help you craft a much more personal reply, rather than a stuffy business-focused generic reply. The fitness and beauty industry has some of the best chatbot messages, so I suggest you engage with a few of them to see how it’s done correctly. They are very in-tune with their audience.
Use emojis in your Facebook ad headlines and copy.
Facebook ads are so popular now, and with their popularity has come increased competition and increased costs. Clicks and impressions are at an all-time high now, and in order for many brands to justify the cost spike they need to see better performance.
When you increase your click-throughs on Facebook ads you will then see more impressions and lowers costs, as their algorithm rewards highly performing ads. So, to help you attract more clicks and engagement, mix in some well-places emojis in your headlines and ad copy.
When writing Facebooks ads it’s important to make your “ads” not look and sound like advertisements. I like to write ad headlines and copy as if I was trying to communicate with a friend. This way they are more subtle and blend into the feed more naturally. Then, using emojis, you can command attention, and then if your offer is strong enough and targeted correctly, you will see a much better response and lower overall cost.
There are so many contributing factors when it comes to successful Facebook ads, and something as simple as clever emoji use can be the deciding factor in terms of a campaigns performance and affordability.
Disrupt the SERPs with emojis in your page titles.
This is something new and something most brands have not jumped on yet, although I expect that to change real soon. Now that emojis are essentially part of our language, all browsers, mobile and desktop, understand them and render them.
This gives you a huge opportunity to really stand out in the search results page, by including emojis in your page titles. This can give someone a huge advantage that sites in the lower part of the first page. A clever title with emojis is going to stand out and command more attention than the top listing.
The person will naturally be drawn to it, and if the title CTA is strong enough you can pull more visits than the top listings. Now, if you already command the top, emojis can help you pull even more clicks from organic search.
If your rankings are established and on top, I would suggest not drastically editing your titles, as they are clearly contributing to your top ranking success. Instead, simply add an emoji to the end, as to not make any drastic changes that could drop you in the SERPs.
Conclusion
Love them or hate them, emojis aren’t going anywhere. They are here to stay, so you might as well leverage the trend to improve your marketing results.
Something so simple can have a profound impact on your results, with very little extra work or effort. Like with all digital marketing, you need to experiment and test to see what your audience responds to, and emoji use is no different. You might see certain emojis pull much higher CTRs and open rates than others, so be sure to always test.
What do you think of emojis and how have you used them in your marketing so far? I’d love to hear what you think and I also have a question for everyone reading this:
What is your favorite emoji and why?
Let me know in the comments below!
