Emojis Mostly Positive Affect on the Open-Rate of Your Marketing Emails. How including emojis in the subject line of your email can increase the open-rate of your marketing campaign.
View original post at: https://blog.dlvrit.com/2015/06/emojis/
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Smile, Wink and Pray: Can Emojis Increase your Email Open Rate? (New Research)
1. Smile, Wink and Pray: Can Emojis Increase your Email
Open Rate? (New Research)
blog.dlvrit.com/2015/06/emojis/
Debra Garber
Welcome to the new digital age – an era of hybrid communication where we revert to the ancient use of
pictographs as written language.
This is the world of emojis. From NPR, the story of the emoji starts in Japan in the mid-1990s. Back then,
pagers were all the rage with teenagers. The ability to send an image of a cartoon heart was one of the
special features on DoCoMo pagers. That’s widely believed to be the first instance of an emoji. Twenty
years later – Apple included the first official emoji keyboard in iOS 5 and emojis were standardized by the
Unicode consortium as part of Unicode 6.0.
Since then, emoji usage has exploded (image from Instagram):
2. Emojis and Emoticons are NOT the Same Thing
Before we dive further into the benefits of using emojis in social media, it’s important to point out that
emojis and emoticons are not the same thing. Being somewhat green myself, I thought they were
interchangeable. To avoid further confusion, here are their definitions:
Emoticon: An emoticon is a short sequence of keyboard letters and symbols, usually emulating a facial
expression that complements a text message. Here are some examples:
Smile
Smile with a wink
: User with mustache, smiling
:-|| Mad
3. Sad
:’ -( Crying
:~ Also crying
:-)) Really happy
Big grin
:-* A kiss
:-P~ A lick
Wow! or I’m surprised
Grim
Sticking out your tongue
:- User happens to be Popeye
:-/ Perplexed
=:O Frightened (hair standing on end)
=8O Bug-eyed with fright
:-} Embarrassed smile
:-)>>>> Basic Smiley with a necktie
;-^) Tongue in cheek
%*@:-( Hung over
:-~~~ Drooling
>:) Perplexed look
.) Keeping an eye out for you
8:-) Glasses on forehead
Definition of Emoji: The word emoji means “picture letter” in Japanese. Each character has an official
name, defined as part of the Unicode standard. The encyclopedia of emojis called Emojipedia, exists to
add more context to each emoji character than can be provided by the official Unicode name. Find
out what is this emoji by entering an emoji character or name into the search field.
For a complete list of all emojis, start with your platform preference:
4. iOS (for iPhone and iPad) and OS X (for Mac): Apple Emoji List 2015. Changes from the 2014
Apple Emoji List include skin tone modifiers (for pale, cream white, moderate brown, dark brown,
and black emojis), additional family combinations, new country flags, and some refined images.
Android 4.4 KitKat and Google Hangouts: Google Emoji List
Microsoft Windows 8 and Windows phone: Microsoft Emoji List
Twitter (when using the web interface or TweetDeck): Twitter Emoji List
Snapchat: Snapchat Emoji Meanings
And the latest addition to the emoji hot list:
Instagram: Recently, Instagram updated its app and added a crucial new feature – the ability to
use emoji as hashtags. Within the first week, these were the most popular emoji hashtags on
Instagram along with the number of times they were used:
5. Smile, Wink, Pray: How to Use Emojis
in Social Media
According to a Business Insider Intelligence
report, characters now make up 40 percent of
messaging on networks like Instagram and
Twitter. As part of your social media marketing
plan, here are a couple ways to test the use of
emojis:
Can emojis open email?
Mycleveragency.com tested the question: Can
including emoticons and emojis in the subject
line increase the open-rate of your marketing
emails?
The short answer: YES
56% of brands that Experian analyzed
experienced an increase in open-rates
when icons were included in email subject
lines.
An A/B test by Swiftpage showed higher
unique opens (+3.29%), unique clicks
(+6.28%), and click-through rates
(+18.93%) for an identical subject line that
featured a symbol.
Most popular emojis by subject line appearances
Earlier this year, MailChimp announced support for emojis in subject lines. The MailChimp data shows
thousands of marketers running email campaigns are including emojis in their subject lines. Here is a
chart listing the top 15:
6. A warning:
MailChimp warns us that not all email clients support all symbols. Whether your target audience want to
see an emoji in your subject line or not, they’re less likely to engage with any that look like this:
rather than this:
Emoji Best Practices
From Can Emojis Open Emails?:
1. Like most social media marketing tactics, understand you target audience.
2. Test thoroughly to see how your intended emoticon will appear across the popular email clients. See “A
warning” above.
3. Watch your tone-of-voice. If you’re working B2B, with a serious brand message, perhaps a smiley
face isn’t right for that email.
4. Don’t over do it – the novelty will wear off
5. Use the icon early to make sure it shows up in the preview.
6. Remember that a high open-rate doesn’t necessarily equal conversions.
What do you think of emojis?