Emojis: Friend or Foe In Your Marketing Efforts?

We’re all familiar with emojis. They’ve been around for over 2 decades now, starting out on mobile phones and in instant messaging services. They quickly became widespread and in 2015 an emoji was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year (this one 😂 if you’re interested).

We use them in text messages, emails, and on social media. You can buy notebooks and blankets plastered in them. Emojis have even had a movie! They’ve been part of our common lexicon for years.

It was inevitable that they would also find their way into marketing, and their use in campaigns skyrocketed quickly. A 2016 study by Braze noted an astonishing year-on-year increase of 777% in emoji usage in marketing campaigns. For email marketing, it was a colossal 7,100% increase.

However, that doesn’t mean you can simply add your favourite emoji to your next blog headline or social media ad, and automatically see your results improve. As more and more brands have embraced the use of emojis in their digital marketing over the years, we’ve seen examples of it going right, as well as examples of it going very wrong.

Emojis are a complex topic and can hinder as much as they can help if used without a proper understanding of your audience. Whilst using the wrong symbol can hurt your brand and results almost as much as the right one can help it.

In this post, we’ll look at what the research says, how different audiences respond differently to emojis, and what best practices you can follow to optimise emoji usage if you choose to use them in your marketing efforts.

Do Emojis Help or Hurt Your Marketing Efforts?

Without a doubt, emojis have become a part of how we communicate. A universal language that can reach across language, cultural and demographic barriers. But does that automatically mean they should be used in marketing?

The answer, perhaps not surprisingly is, it depends.

Studies have shown that using the right symbols in your messaging can increase email open rates, ad clicks, social media engagement, and conversions from push notifications. Yet, others have shown a decrease in those same metrics, suggesting that it’s not as simple as you might think.

Sure, emojis can increase the clarity of your message, set the tone, and add playfulness that simple text may struggle to do. But they can also annoy your audience or make it seem like you’re trying too hard to be relatable. The channels you use and the makeup of your audience are the biggest variables in determining whether or not emojis can help or hurt your marketing.

How the Effectiveness of Emojis Changes by Age

Last year, CNN made waves with a simple but devastating headline: Sorry, millennials. The emoji isn’t cool anymore. In it, young people were cited talking about the ‘crying with joy’ emoji, and how it’s gone out of use among Gen Z.

This admittedly anecdotal evidence is backed up by more quantitative evidence, as well. A study by Brandwatch showed that age, gender, and culture all had a major impact on the types of emoji shared and preferred by different audiences.

For example, Gen X preferred the heart emoji more than any other generation, while women were more likely to share emojis associated with positive emotions.

In other words, every audience is different. Those nuances are impossible to discern in a single blog post. Understanding the makeup of your target audience, industry expectations, and extensive testing for your specific users is key to determining whether emojis can work as part of your marketing and messaging strategy.

Emoji Usage by Channel, Explained

The second core variable for the success of emojis is understanding just how their preferred and optimal usage differs across your marketing channels. Here, we tend to distinguish between three core channels: social media, email, and your website.

Emojis and Social Media

In many ways, social media is tailor-made for brand emoji usage. It’s how your audience communicates, and it’s perfect to quickly get core emotions, tone and ideas across to your audience. Especially on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. They are a great fit for testing these symbols as part of your messaging. 

But what about paid ad messaging? Here, it’s more complicated. As mentioned above, emojis can work to improve your click-through rate and conversions, but only when aligned with both your audience and brand voice.

Nobody would blink at Wendy’s using an emoji in an ad; Chanel, however, might not be as successful.

Emojis and Email Marketing

The picture also gets more complicated when it comes to email marketing, especially for their most important component, the subject line. A study published by Search Engine Journal found emojis to decrease open rates, while a study from Experian saw the opposite. 

The key, it seems, is the strategic use of emojis in the right spaces. Emails that use symbols to accent rather than replace their messages tend to perform best, as do those that use the symbol as an attention-getter rather than a core part of the subject.

Emojis and Your Website

Finally, your website can also benefit from emojis if used the right way. It should never be overloaded with symbols, but used in a few strategic spots they can help to gain and keep your audience’s attention:

• In your meta tags, which allows your result to stand out on search engine results pages. Google says that emojis have no negative SEO effect, minimising risk.
• In your content, like using emojis to emphasise individual points made. Emojis in this case become design tools to guide your audience’s eyes.

Again, testing is key. If an emoji increases your conversion rates, keep finding new potential spots for it. If it has the opposite effect, consider playing it more straightforwardly.

6 Best Practices for Using Emojis in Marketing

Given the nuances of these little symbols, how can you leverage emojis in a way that improves your marketing efforts across channels? These 5 best practices can help:

1. Stick to the basics. Use only emojis your audience is intimately familiar with. This cheat sheet can help you get started in selecting the right symbols for your audience.
2. Use only when adding value. It’s tempting to use emojis to appear fun or just because you can. Instead, restrict yourself to using a symbol only if there is a tangible case for the emojis to improve your message.
3. Keep your audience in mind. As mentioned above, this is the biggest variable in the success of your emojis. Research your target audience’s preferences and attitudes towards emojis before implementing them.
4. Test against non-emoji copy. Never trust that emojis will automatically improve your messaging. Instead, test your social media ads email subject lines, etc. both with and without the emojis to determine individual effectiveness.
5. Find the brand overlap. In an ideal world, your emojis overlap perfectly with your brand voice. Stay away from them if the fit is awkward or wouldn’t make sense otherwise in your messaging.
6. Common sense. Always approach the use of emojis with common sense to guide you as to whether their use is appropriate.

So if you’re thinking about introducing emojis into your marketing communications, proceed with care and common sense. Know your audience, use sparingly and only where they make sense, and test everything.