Why Emojis in Marketing is Important?

6 min readOct 4, 2021

Emoji is a new digital marketing tool. 😃

In today’s digital world, the use of emojis has significantly changed. Now, emojis in marketing can help you to build your brand.

As the popularity of social media emojis is increasing, the use of emojis in marketing is also increasing the engagement rate in social media posts. Moreover, emojis are important to add emotions and brand voice to your marketing campaigns.

Emojis are small digital icons used to express emotions or ideas in text messages and social networking sites. For example, people use a 😂 emoji when they joke or feel happy. While 🎄, 🎅, and 🎁 are mostly used during Christmas.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of emoji marketing and tips to use emojis.

Let’s get started. Keep scrolling!

Do emojis increase engagement?

Yes! The significant benefit of using emoji is that it helps to boost engagement. Which even results in more click-through rates and open rates. They can be used in all types of digital marketing such as email marketing or social media marketing.

Top brands like Domino’s Pizza or Sephora, frequently use emojis for their social media posts and marketing campaigns. These brands creatively use emojis in marketing to connect with their audiences emotionally.

Here are the emoji marketing statistics 📈:

Emojis in Twitter: According to Larry Kim, the CEO of Mobile Monkey, a tweet with emoji can increase engagement by 25.4% as compared to tweets without emoji.
Emojis in Email: According to Hubspot, 2.6 billion push notifications contain emojis. Moreover, emojis in Push notifications can boost open rates by 85%, and conversion rates increase by 9%.
Emojis in Facebook: According to Conversation Media, Facebook posts with emojis are likely to get 57% more likes than posts without emojis. Also, comments and shares are increased by 33%.
Emojis in LinkedIn: Sprout social ran two ads for After A/B testing; one with emojis and another without emojis. After A/B testing, they got a positive result from the ad with emoji, which brought in a high percentage of downloads (84%) on the linked content.

Besides engagement, emojis are also important to deliver your messages in an expressive way. By using emojis, you can give personality and identity to your brand. Brand personality allows the brands to relate and make deeper connections with the audience.

Just like a brand logo, emojis also help to make your brand memorable. Because the human brain tends to process visuals 6000 times faster and remember 90% of visual information than text.

How effective are emojis?

As the internet has significantly changed the way of communication, emojis are playing a major role in expressing emotions on social media.

According to the Adobe’s Global Emoji Trend Report 2021:

88% of emoji users feel more empathetic when emoji is used.
55% of emoji users like to express their emotions through emojis than phone conversations.
51% of emoji users like to express their emotions through emojis than face-to-face conversations.
89% of emoji users agree emojis helps to overcome language barriers.
70% of emoji users agree inclusive emojis helps to start a positive conversation on heavy topics like racial, equality, culture, or societal issues.

The increasing popularity of emojis

According to Emojipedia, Globally, at least one emoji is included in one in five tweets. In the below statistic, you can see the increase in the use of emojis on Twitter.

As per Adobe’s Global Emoji Trend Report 2021, the world’s most used emoji is 😂 emoji. Followed by 👍 emoji and heart ❤️emoji respectively. While 😘 emoji in the fourth position and 😢emoji in the fifth position.
On 14 September 2020, the Unicode Consortium approved the 37 new emojis named Unicode 14.0 version. It is a non-profit organization that maintains the standard of digital text and emoji.
As per The New York Times, among the new 37 emojis of Unicode 14.0 version, the melting face emoji is already getting popular all over Twitter.

Besides melting face, the new Unicode 14.0 version also includes other fun emojis like a saluting face, pregnant men, lotus, disco ball, and many more. These new emojis will be available either at the end of this year or in early 2022.

Isn’t that sound exciting? 😁

3 Important tips to use emojis in marketing

Here I have listed a few tips that will help you in emojis marketing:

Use relevant emoji clearly: Emojis are used for quick and clear messages. But at the same time, they can confuse customers if you don’t use them properly in the right manner. So, always try to use relevant emojis that communicate the message the way you want.

For instance, Baskin Robbins tweets, “They say the best apple pies are inside out, so we made a new flavor of the Month: Inside Out Apple Pie!🍎🥧🍨.” Perfect use of emojis; clear and relevant to the message.

On the other hand, the juice brand Tampico used emojis in tagline stating; Gallons of “😃 👍 😊 ❤️ 😍 😜 💚”. Wrong use of emojis; confusing and difficult to decode.

Select key emojis for your brand: Instead of using various emojis for every marketing campaign try to select a few key emojis that match your brand’s voice and goal.

This will help to make your brand’s social media voice consistent and the customers will start to identify your brand with those emojis.

For instance, Dominos use pizza emoji 🍕 in their marketing and social media post. Moreover, you can order a pizza just by sending pizza emoji 🍕 to them- a fun way to build brand identity.

Don’t use emojis that have alternative meanings: Emojis with alternative meanings can make your message inappropriate.

Therefore, make sure you know the meaning of the emojis before using them in your marketing. You can enter the emoji in the Google search bar to find out its meaning.

For instance, Emojipedia took a sample of 100 random tweets from the dataset to inspect what the peach emoji 🍑 is meant to different users. The findings were classified into five categories as follows:

33% refer to Butt, 27% refer to sexual, 13% refer to fitness, 7% refer to fruit, 4% refer to peachy, and 16% don’t fall under any of the above categories.

How to use emojis on Medium?

You can also use emojis in your writings to make them more creative and engaging. If you don’t know how to use emojis in your Medium stories then, use these simple tricks:

Type Colon(:), write emoji name and then type Colon(:). If the emoji name has two or more words, then add _ after each word. For instance, type :sunflower: for 🌻 emoji and type :maple_leaf: for 🍁 emoji.
Press Window Key + Period (.)
Press Window Key + Semicolon(;)
You can also Copy + Paste, as simple as that.

Here is the 50 facial emoji cheat sheet for you. For more, click here.

😄 :smile: 😃 :smiley: 😆 :laughing: 😂 :joy: 😅 :sweat_smile: 😁 :grin: 😀 :grinning: 😆 :satisfied: 😬 :grimacing: 😊 :blush: 😍 :heart_eyes: 😉 :wink: 😋 :yum: 😯 :hushed: 😗 :kissing: 😘 :kissing_heart: 😚 :kissing_closed_eyes: 😙 :kissing_smiling_eyes: 😛 :stuck_out_tongue: 😜 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: 😝:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:😴 :sleeping: 😪 :sleepy: 😩 :weary: 😫 :tired_face: 😓 :sweat: 😠 :angry:😏 :smirk: 😵 :dizzy_face: 😐 :neutral_face: 😌:relieved: 😤 :triumph: 👿 :imp: 😈 :smiling-imp: 😡 :rage: 😕 :confused: 😒 :unamused: 😑 :expressionless: 😔 :pensive:😖 :confounded: 😞 :disapointed: 😥 :disappointed_relieved: 😢 :cry: 😭 :sob: 😨 :fearful: 😰 :cold_sweat: 😱 :scream: 😎 :sunglasses: 😷 :mask: 😇 :innocent:

I hope you’ll find this article informative and helpful. Your suggestions and comments are highly appreciated.