Did You Know Emojis Boost Open Rates?

You spend so much time crafting the perfect marketing email or push notification. It's a shame when it goes unread.

Luckily, there's one easy way to get customers to open emails. Strange though it may seem, emojis in subject lines and notifications are more than just friendly emotional shorthands. Research says they dramatically boost customer engagement.

Customers Love Emojis

It's not just you: everybody loves emojis. They're fun, eye-catching, and pique users' curiosity. Experts estimate the number of emojis used in messages doubled over the last year.

That statistic includes the marketing world. Marketers are turning to emojis because they work. Customers are 66% more likely to open an email if it has an emoji. For push notifications, the statistics are even more impressive: customers are 254% more likely to open a push notification with an emoji. And they're 25% less likely to uninstall an app that uses emojis in its notifications.

Normally, these would be engagement rates you'd have to pay marketers impressive sums of money for. And all it takes is adding a few characters!

Appropriately Using Emoji

Unfortunately, it's very easy to use emojis incorrectly. Like a lot of communication etiquette, the exact line between proper and improper use can be difficult to find. Keep the following questions in mind:

• Are emojis appropriate at all? Effective though they are, they're informal, so they're not for every purpose. If you're in a line of business that depends on maintaining a serious professional persona, you should probably skip emojis entirely.
• Which ones are you choosing? Every emoji communicates something. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, you should probably skip the more offbeat choices (like the famed "poop emoji").
• Are you using too many? Emojis are like punctuation: there's a point of diminishing returns. One or two is clever, and adds meaning, texture, and fun to a message. If you use more than a few, you risk confusing your audience.
• Have you done A/B testing? If you're not sold on the power of emojis -- or you're not sure you're using them properly -- try running an A/B test with and without (or with different emojis). Watch how open and response rates change, and fine-tune your marketing campaign accordingly.