Emoji marketing leads to crazy high open rates and less churn

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Emoji Marketing leads to crazy high open rates and less churn

Bryan Karas

July 24, 2018

First off…I want to thank the person at Leanplum who came up with the idea to track the effectiveness of emoji in marketing for a year – that’s some solid dedication to your craft.

The study reports that using emoji in app push notifications increase open rates by 254 percent – Emoji in email marketing increases open rates by 66 percent. Lastly, apps that use emoji in their marketing reported 26 percent less uninstalls. According to Facebook, more than 60 million emoji were used each day on their main platform while over 5 billion were sent each day on Messenger.

5 billion emoji were sent each day on Facebook Messenger in 2017? Looking back at my own communications…that number is ridiculously accurate. No wonder new emoji updates are released all the time – someone must have known something we didn’t…

But are using emoji for me?

A few years back emoji in business was seen as unprofessional but I guess people are coming around. But there is a time and place for using emoji in marketing – I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg used emoji when he emailed members of the Senate before his data hearings.

On the flip side…an emoji or perfectly placed GIF could definitely help break the ice in a cold sales email or during simple customer support communication with your customers. But I wouldn’t recommend it on transactional emails where billing information like credit card info and addresses are present.

If you want to start using emoji in simple Gmail emails then this article from Lifewire will help you get started…

Not just for open rates…

A 254 percent pop in open rates is amazing, but emoji in marketing isn’t only for getting people to view a message. Brands have actually incorporated emoji in tons of different ways including funny billboards, ordering pizza and powerful videos.

McDonald’s created multiple billboards that created a narrative using emoji. One billboard used car and traffic sign emoji followed by a sad face emoji but wait, a burger emoji leads to a happy face emoji – a clever marketing campaign to remind everyone that McDonald’s is still up to date with pop culture.

Dominos was the first company to accept ordering by emoji. Just sign up and Tweet @Dominos a pizza emoji to have your favorite pie delivered to your doorstep – remember, get it in 30 minutes or it’s free!

PETA created a marketing video called Cruelty Beyond Words. It used emoji to start a conversation about how fashion leads to the cruelty to animals. The video is very simple but finally draws on emotion when it replaces clothing emoji with knives and animal emoji with skulls.

7 Terribly Horrible Emoji Marketing Attempts from Well Known Brands

As fun as emoji marketing can seem to be there are still some terrible emoji marketing ideas that brands actually went with…this blog post from HubSpot profiles the seven worst emoji marketing ideas and why you should put a little thought behind emoji marketing campaigns.