Emojis in Marketing: Express Your Emotions without Words

People are using Emojis to express their emotions frequently in the captions, creatives, and videos on their social media channels and during conversing with their friends, and families over text messages, WhatsApp chat, or on any other chatting platform.

The reason behind the popularity of emojis is their ability to communicate different types of emotions. This way emojis have become an essential part of the way we communicate. If you have still not started with emojis in marketing, then you can give it a try after going through this article.

What are Emoticons and Emojis?

Emojis are dominating everywhere, in every sale, website, ad, and social media copy. But the use of emojis didn’t start just a few years back, it’s been used since the 80s as emoticons.

Emoticons can be said as the ancestors of emojis. There were no smartphones in the 80s and 90s, so, people started to show emotions by combining certain keyboard characters to make emotional facial expressions.

On the other hand, emojis are small pictures made up of pixels. They are not only limited to facial expressions but are also used to showcase activities and objects. In every New Year and in every field, new emojis are designed and added to smartphone keyboards.

Even though emoticons inspired the innovation of emojis but they’re two different things. We’ve seen that emoticons are made up of only keyboard characters but emojis are small pictures made up of pixels.

Emojis look more realistic than emoticons but both have their own places in the world.

Let’s see some of the statistics regarding Emojis in marketing:

1. Emojis in ad copies generate 33% higher attention than general ad copies.
2. Emojis can increase user engagement on Social Media such as FB, Instagram, and Twitter by 3 times.
3. Emojis in email subject lines can increase open rates by 20%.
4. According to Brandwatch, 10B (Billion) emojis are sent every day. Out of 10 B, 900M (Million) Emojis are sent only on FB Messenger even without any text.
5. According to Adweek, 92% of Internet users use emojis to convey their emotions and enthusiasm.

 We’ve seen the statistics regarding emojis in marketing, now let’s explore Emoji Marketing.

What is Emoji Marketing?

Making the use of Emojis in Marketing to boost engagement, revenue and sales are called Emoji Marketing. Somewhat every big brand is using emojis in marketing materials to communicate with their target audiences, infiltrate their mobile phones, and be on top of the latest communication trends.

Below are some of the reasons for using emojis in marketing:

1. Emojis have become part of our native communication. They’re present on every communication channel consumers are using such as FB, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, and Pinterest.
2. Emojis play an important role in tapping into emotions. Strong relationships are essential elements for the success of a brand, and strong relationships are established through emotional connections. Emojis help brands in establishing strong relationships by conveying emotions.
3. The best way for conveying non-verbal communication. You can put brand approaches, and what is the product and brand is all about into the texts. But there are some more elements such as how’re you feeling after using a particular brand’s products and services and what is the intent of the brand behind a particular promotional campaign and much more. To convey your feelings and emotions, even in what intent you’re putting the words, Emojis are irreplaceable.
4. Emojis make a brand memorable and easily recognizable for everyone when they’re encountered again.
5. Emojis make the brand message more believable because they invoke emotions. But it works only if you’re using the right emoji at the right moment. They can naturally add context to your content.
6. Emojis boost user engagement across the brand marketing channels.
7. Emojis humanize your brand.
8. Emojis help in building Brand Personality. Add proper emojis and at proper places in your marketing materials and communications.
9. Emojis are a great attention grabber. So, they help in building rapport, driving traffic, leads, and sales

We’ve seen the pros of using emojis but we need to consider the cons of emojis before you start to think about incorporating them into your marketing strategy.

Below are the reasons for not incorporating Emojis in marketing materials;

1. As everyone is using Emojis, so not using emojis in your marketing materials can help you in standing out from the market.
2. You can lose your professionalism by incorporating emojis into your marketing strategies. As there are businesses where emojis don’t fit. Sometimes your brand voice doesn’t go with emojis, so it’ll be a bad decision if you’re going to incorporate emojis.
3. As of 2020, there’re 3300 emojis on the Unicode Standard List but still, they’re not universal. They can be lost in translation as people from different countries and different age groups are having different meanings of the same emojis.
4. Generation gaps are also one more reason barrier to the use of emojis in marketing. A generation may feel a particular emoji pixel perfect but another one may have an awkward feeling about the same.
5. Too much overuse of emojis can harm your brand’s reputation. So make it effortless and natural.

We’ve seen the pros and cons of using emojis. As we know if there’s something then it definitely has some advantages and some disadvantages too. We need to decide how to get the best out of the advantages and how to avoid losses.

You need to figure out a way of using emojis in your marketing, making it effortless and natural in your content. It should look like you’re forcing emojis in the content, it should look like it is part of the content and natural.

Let’s move ahead and have a look at how we can use emojis in different marketing segments.

How to use emojis in different marketing materials and channels?

Emojis can be used in several places in marketing materials and are a part of somewhat every marketing channel. You need to decide whether you want to go ahead with emojis in marketing or not. Understand your audience first before making emojis a part of your marketing strategy.

Here are the ways of using emojis in different marketing materials and channels;

Emojis on Social Media Channels

Emojis are everywhere on social media platforms. People are using Emojis for commenting, chatting, and expressing themselves, even social media platforms themselves are promoting emojis.

Every social media channel has provided a particular set of its own Emojis for consumers to interact with the platform.

Let’s have a look at some of the most popular social media platforms and the Emojis they’ve provided for their users:

• Emojis on Facebook: In the starting, Facebook just provided the like button to its users to interact with the post. But in 2016 they incorporated some other reactions in the form of emojis. The other reactions are; Love, Cute, Haha, Yay, Wow, Sad, and Anger.
• Emojis on LinkedIn: Same as Facebook, LinkedIn has also provided a certain set of reactions as emojis. The emojis are; Like, Celebrate, Pouring love, Haha, Love, Insightful, and Curious.
• Emojis on Instagram: Instagram is the most suitable for Emojis. You wouldn’t find so many options for sharing your opinion on a post just by pressing the button. But you’d find so many emojis in the bio of the profiles, captions of the posts, Stories, and reels. The comment section of posts on Instagram is completely filled with emojis.

Along with the aforementioned platforms, there’re many other platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, and WhatsApp. All the platforms are filled with different types of emojis. Emoji marketing is the best way for approaching Twitter because an emoji can save you a lot of words, and you don’t need to worry about the character limits on tweets in conveying an impactful message.

Emojis in Email Marketing

Emojis are being used in Email Marketing, but they might look different on different browsers and can end up ruining your brand reputation. It’s safe if you test the emojis on different browsers which you’re going to use in email marketing.

One thing more, don’t overuse emojis and don’t use them to replace the texts otherwise they can be lost in translation or can end up in the junk folders because of filters.

Proper placement of emojis in subject lines can increase opening rates, click-through rates, response rates, and engagement rates exponentially.

Emojis on Websites and Blogs

Emojis on Websites and Blogs should be used carefully. It depends on your brand voice if emojis would be a good option for you or not. If your brand voice doesn’t support emojis, then don’t use them. Because people resist the changes and if it’s not aligned to your brand voice then it’s disastrous.

It’s not that brands are not using them on their websites and blogging platforms, they are but with a proper strategy and precautions. Most brands prefer to use emojis on landing pages, and blog posts.

Emojis in Paid Advertising

Emojis in paid advertising can give your results an extra boost. It’s not just in theory but has been proven by many marketing researchers. One of the famous companies named Adespresso performed A/B testing on two ad copies; one with emoji and one without emoji. And you’ll be amazed to find out that ad copy with an emoji in the headline got 241% higher click-through rates (CTRs).

You can think about it yourself if you want to use emojis in your marketing or not.

We’ve seen the places where emojis are being used frequently, now it’s time to discuss some tips for making your emojis marketing strategy successful and avoiding the impact of negative factors.

Tips for a Successful Emoji Marketing Strategy

Determining how to use Emojis for business is a big task. But the following tips will make the path smoother for you. The best practices that you need to keep in mind while using emojis in marketing are;

1. Knowing your audience is the first and most important step you need to take before incorporating not just emoji marketing but any marketing strategy. Collect consumer data and segment those data sets into different categories such as who might like emojis and who doesn’t! Analyzing the data will provide you the insights regarding emojis that’ll suit your audiences.
2. Know the meaning of the emoji you’re going to use. If you don’t know the proper meaning of a particular emoji, you’ll definitely end up choosing the wrong one. So, make sure you know what they mean.
3. Place your emojis strategically.
4. Don’t let emojis confuse your audience by replacing them with text. Emojis can add emotions to text but replacing the texts with emojis can confuse your message.
5. Us non-common emojis to stand your brand out from the rest.
6. In email copies, put emojis in the subject lines for emphasizing the message and a particular color of emoji to showcase the urgency of your message.
7. Emojis may not be suitable for every brand so you need to start small and if that works for your brand, you can go ahead with more tactics. But think first about whether you should be using emojis at all 🙂
8. Test your emojis on different web browsers and devices before publishing your marketing campaigns and materials. The reason behind this is the same emoji can look different and can convey completely different emotions on different browsers and devices.
9. Emojis should match your brand voice. Brands that align with seriousness and exclusivity might not be interested in emoji marketing. The use of emoji marketing can ruin their brand image and voice.
10. Don’t make your marketing flashy with Emojis. It can disrupt your brand communications and ruin your brand reputation. Don’t overuse emojis.
11. Making consistency a friend in words and emotions. Don’t force the use of Emojis in marketing materials. Only use Emojis in those places where they’re getting fitted.
12. Make a list of 3-5 emojis that’s aligning according to your brand voice and consistently use them in your social media posts, ad copies, ad creatives, blog posts, marketing collaterals, and other places. The consistency in emojis will help your consumers associate those creatives with your brand and whenever they’ll interact again with the same emojis they’ll definitely think about your brand.
13. Be mindful of the context and quantity of emoji usage. Decide when, where and how much you’ll use emojis. Create your own emoji guide so that you don’t need to bother again and again whether you want to use emojis or not.
14. Make the use and meaning obvious and clear. It’ll help you in conveying the right brand message and will also help audiences in understanding the right meaning of the emojis.
15. Make a relation between the content and emojis, it’ll convey the right context you want to interpret.
16. Let your audience promote your brand by creating some contests with emojis. Some of the brands use some simple contests such as putting the emojis in a sequence and asking consumers to guess the conclusive meaning of the emoji sequence. If you don’t like this then you can ask for a reply to a poll in terms of emojis. Choose what suits you the best!
17. If you want to completely stand out from the rest of the market, then creating new emojis for your brand will be the best option for you. But it isn’t easy as it’s a completely thoughtful and creative process. It’ll suck the juice out of your brain.

Remembered all the tips? If not, then go through all of the tips once again. Don’t start creating your own emojis at first but start small and make an emoji guide, list some of your favorite and relevant emojis and define the rules of using them. Use only defined emojis in the emoji guide to making emoji marketing consistent and relevant to your brand voice and image.

Some of the favorite and frequent emojis that are used by audiences and marketers are;

1. Black Sunglasses
2. Bowing
3. Car
4. Couple
5. Crossed Fingers
6. Dollar
7. Face with tears of joy
8. Fire
9. Growth
10. Heart
11. Heart Eyes
12. Hug Emoji
13. Loudly Crying Face
14. Money
15. Party Popper
16. Pumpkin
17. Red Flag
18. Red Stop
19. Ring
20. Rocket
21. Smile
22. Star
23. Stunned
24. Sunshine
25. Thumbs Up
26. Tired Emoji
27. Watch

We’ve listed the top 27 most used emojis by audiences. You can choose the best 5 that go with your brand and make them part of your emoji marketing strategy.

If you don’t know the resources where you can find your favorite emojis, then look down, Team DigiAvtar has listed some of the best emoji websites only for you;

• Emojicopy
• Emojipedia
• Emojisaurus
• Emojiterra
• Get Emoji
• Joypixels
• Openmoji

So, which types of emojis have you chosen for your emoji marketing campaigns? Choose wisely and by taking proper time as it can give wings to your campaigns and also ruin your brand reputation.

It’s time to count the uncountable benefits of emojis. Let’s count together!

Benefits of Emoji Marketing

There are a lot of benefits emoji marketing can provide you and some of the most known are;

1. Emojis can be incorporated anywhere in the marketing materials and channels such as texts, emails, social media (FB, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn), and any other chat application.
2. Emojis humanize your brand and brand messaging. As we know from the blog “Brand Marketing” business has brands but humans have personalities. So, emoji marketing provides your brand with a personality as it humanizes brands.
3. Emojis are the digital form of your emotional expressions so they can transcend even language barriers.
4. Emojis can convey a lot of information without any words. Emojis can convey what words can’t.
5. Emojis in Email subject lines can increase your open rate by more than 20%.
6. Emojis boost engagement. The engagement boost can be more than 3 times than earlier.
7. As we’ve seen that emojis in paid social advertising can boost engagement by more than 200%.
8. Emojis in push notifications can increase your sales and revenue.

I hope that these benefits are enough for you to consider emoji marketing for your brand if emoji marketing suits your brand voice.

Now, let’s conclude the blog here!

Wrapping Up

Emoji marketing is making use of emojis for achieving your marketing goals. Emojis can be more effective than promotions because they represent the emotional part of communication. Emoji marketing is a fast way of achieving better engagement, increased personal interactions, sales, and revenue.

Afraid, what if it could go wrong?

Don’t be, start small and with building your own emoji guide where choose only some relevant emojis that are going with your brand voice and personality. Play safe by using the tips mentioned above, the chances of getting success would be better.

Rest, you can only know after the implementation, but if you don’t you’ll never learn the truth.

Let’s know in the comment section if you are going to implement the emoji marketing strategy for your brand!

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