According to Swyft Media, 41.5 billion messages and 6 billion emoticons are sent around the world every day on messaging apps.
The popularity of emojis cannot be disputed, but are you using them to their maximum potential to increase engagement, conversion, and retention of your app?
The Power of Emojis as a Marketing Tool
We might not realize it, but body language and facial expressions play a huge part in communicating effectively. It’s how we show empathy and build stronger relationships.
However, when communicating online, we’re missing a crucial element: a face. It’s why we’ve all run into problems trying to convey tone over text or found ourselves in hot water when a friend takes a message the wrong way.
According to scientists, when we look at a smiley face emoji online, it activates the same part of our brains when we look at a human face. Our brains recognize it as nonverbal information and as a result, emojis are processed as emotions.
For marketers, this makes emojis a powerful way to humanize brands and make push notifications feel personal and expressive to users.
How Using Emojis in Your Push Notifications Can Improve Metrics
Emojis Increase Open Rates by 85%
In LeanPlum’s Mobile Marketing Trends report, the open rates for push notifications with emojis increased by 4.51%. While push notifications without emojis only saw a 2.44% open rate.
With an 85% increase, it just goes to show that a simple emoji can go a long way in increasing engagement for your app. It can foster engagement, lure dormant users back to your app, and give you that pizazz your mobile marketing strategy has been missing. ?
Emojis Boost Conversion
Yup. Those little yellow smiley faces can have a direct impact on boosting your calls-to-action! ?
To test this theory, LeanPlum ran an A/B push notification campaign with Mobilityware, a mobile gaming company. It sent out a push notification offering players the chance to collect a bonus, one with an emoji and one without.
The results?
The emoji variant saw a 9% increase in users who clicked to claim their prize. ? This little experiment proves that the power of the emoji can directly affect your conversion rates.
Emojis Increase Customer Retention
In another experiment to see if emojis can affect customer retention, LeanPlum teamed up with a popular mobile marketplace. For US users on Android smartphones, their two-day retention rate increased by 28%.
This growth rate illustrates that emojis play a vital role in encouraging users to stick around after downloading. In fact, LeanPlum found that by increasing retention during the first ten days after the install, you can increase retention for the entire first month.
Are Emoji Push Notifications Right For Your Target Customer?
While emojis are universal and speak to all ages, Millennials are one of the best targets for emoji push notifications. Not only do 64% regularly communicate using only emojis, but according to LeapPlum’s report, this demographic is also more likely to engage with emoji push notifications.
Users between the ages of 13-24 spend 20% more time in apps than the average 25-44-year-old and 70% more time than users over the age of 45. If your key demographic is Millennials or members of Generation Z, adding emojis to your push notifications is a great way for your app to re-engage them.
However, don’t fall into the trap of trying too hard with Millennials. Use emojis within reason. Otherwise, you stand the chance of losing their impact and being seen as spammy.
When You Should Use Emoji Push Notifications
Now that you know how emojis can boost engagement, conversions, and retention for your app, you also need to know when to use them for maximum effect.
- Be Relatable: Emojis are most effective when the symbol relates to your message. Don’t choose an emoticon just because it is popular, choose one that is relatable and will add value to your message. For example, if you are having a Halloween special you could use the ghost emoji ? or the haircut emoji ? if you’re promoting coupons for cuts.
- Break up Your Text: Just like it is best practice to break up web copy with images, emojis do the same for push notifications. It makes it easier for the user to read and they can understand your message a lot faster than having to process a wall of text.
- Shorten Your Message Length: Emojis make it possible to convey a ? message with one simple icon. It helps you to cut down on push notification length and keeps your users happy by getting to the point faster in a more visual and harder to ignore way.
Put Your Emojis To Work
If your marketing strategy is stale or your engagement is trickling off, and you are struggling to remain relevant – start experimenting with emojis push notifications.
It’s as easy as ?!
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