Digital marketing has continued to evolve with a variety of marketing assets including emoji marketing.

Emoticons, as they’re known has been around since the late 90’s, and used by smart marketers to boost their business performance.

While some marketer are aware of the amazing potential of emoji marketing, many others are still unfamiliar with the power of emoji marketing to enhance their business’s ROI.

The fact is, wherever you turn to, whatever device you’re using to chat with friends, send email messages, creating content for social media, writing blog posts, etc.

You have a mass of emojis at your disposal, to add humour to your messages and boost your marketing campaigns.

Recently,Twitter became the first social media platform to offer support for emoji 5.0, with 69 unique emojis in the collection.

We cannot actually quantify emoticons at this moment, but there are currently more than 6 billion emojis criss-crossing on mobile messaging apps everyday around the world – making emoji marketing an incredible asset.

These little symbols – emojis, are so fascinating that smart marketers have combined emoji marketing to their campaigns as a unique marketing strategy for growing their businesses.

A report by Business Insider shows that emoji marketing skyrocketed by 775℅ in 2016.

Now that we’ve covered some facts and stats about emojis, let’s find out how to use these little icons in your marketing strategy.

How Can I Use Emoji Marketing To Grow My Business?

Inasmuch as emoticons has evolved to become a lucrative digital marketing asset, there’re many ways to use them in your marketing strategy.

1. Know What Each Emoji Represents

The first step is to pinpoint what each emoticon represent. This aspect is of great importance to avoid striking the wind.

Not knowing what each emoji represents is one of the biggest mistakes some marketers are making.

For this reason, they send out irrelevant emojis that hinders and prevent their message from reaching its intended target.

But understanding the meaning and features of emojis will help you send the right emoticons that are sure to improve conversion.

2. Use Emoji Marketing To Encourage Communication.

Truly said, emojis are great for improving communication with your prospects. How?

Many people underestimate the power of emojis marketing, but this little symbols are powerful communication tools.

For example, I was chatting with a prospective client earlier on Instagram.

He asked when I’m supposed to complete his project. I gave him a date, but he responded with a sad-face emoji, and told and we’ll continue the conversation later.

Immediately, I replied with 3 smiley-face emojis, and he was like, ok, “let’s see, I think I still have some time.”

So, the conversation continued and I was give the green light for the project.

The point is clear. A simple emoji can go a long way in improving and encouraging communication.

As a result, incorporating emojis to your marketing strategies can help boost the actions and decisions of your prospects.

I strongly agree with Melissa Blake of Les Saisons who said in part:

“Incorporating emojis in your social media communication can help cold prospects warm up faster. Emojis are a new universal language that you need to learn how to use, as they can really help communication.” – Melissa Blake

3. Use Emojis To Boost Email Open Rate And Engagement

Leanplum conducted a research with over 2.6 billion push notifications involved.

They found that push notifications with emojis performed well with about 85℅ more open rates on average, than those without emojis.

Jonathan Long said in his article on Entrepreneur:

“I have found that using emojis in email subject lines drastically increases open rates. More people opening your emails means more people coming into contact with your call-to-action. If they don’t open it and click-through right away, the chances of them coming back to it at a later time is slim to none.”

These insights shows that emoji marketing is an amazing marketing tool that can significantly boost engagement, increase email open rate, generate leads, and boost conversion rate.

4. Integrate Emojis Into Your Sales Funnel

Domino presented an excellent emoji marketing strategy in their “Easy Order” campaign that others need to emulate.

What made their campaign significant was that, they didn’t just promote their brand, but they made it easier for consumers to order pizza using emojis.

While many brands are using emojis to create brand awareness and connect with their audience, Domino has made emoji marketing a primary part of their sales funnel.

Domino’s emoji marketing strategy is so epic that it has already generated a lot of buzz among their clients. Everyone is now ordering pizza by simply sending emojis.

So, leverage emoji marketing by integrating emoticons in your offers, discounts, etc.

Pro Tips: In as much as you want to incorporate emoji marketing to your marketing strategy, you have to be careful not to over do it.

Excessive use of emoticons can make your message irrelevant. Below is an example of emoji marketing campaign that went overboard.

This campaign was launched by Chevrolet. You can see that the emoticons are just too many. Bytheway, do you think all those emojis represents Chevrolet?

Keep the answer to yourself.

Therefore, endeavor to use emojis that represents your brand and speaks the language your targeted audience understand.

5. Add Emojis To Your Social Media Accounts.

Nowadays, almost everyone is on mobile devices accessing social media sites, than traditional desktop computer. It’s where they go to for solutions to their problems.

So, it’s important that you use emojis on your social media accounts and on the content you share.

But first, map out your social media content strategy to integrate emoji marketing.

Instagram is unarguably the only social media platform that uses the most emoticons with tremendous results.

However, before using emojis on your social media accounts, you need to find out the types of emojis that engages your audience, how they’re using these little icons, where to place emojis, etc.

Therefore, study the market-place, your competitors, and target audience as well.

The data from your research will help you know how to use emojis, where to place them in your content, on your social media profiles, and the best performing emojis to use that’ll resonate with your prospects.

For instance, on Instagram, you can add emojis in the following areas:

• Your bio
• Comments
• Your content
• Call-to-action

Here’s an Instagram profile of Giana Elenterio. She’s an Alumna, Publicist, fashion & lifestyle blogger.

The emojis she used on her bio represents her brand perfectly well.

The concept of using emojis on your bio is to highlight keywords and keyword-phrases, and to direct users to your website, product page, or offers.

It also helps to make your comments and posts more unique and engaging.

Furthermore, its interesting to know that Facebook has offered users the opportunity to use emojis in their status update.

This is good news for emoji lovers, because recent study revealed that Facebook posts that consists of emojis gained 57% more likes, 33% more comments, and 33% more shares.

Twitter saw a 25.4% increase in engagement on content with emojis, and Instagram saw 50℅ increase in comments.

So, what are you waiting for. Leverage emojis on your social media accounts to increase conversion and sales.

Read More: How Voice Will Dominate Future & How To Prepare Your Online Business?

Wrapping Up

Interestingly, the telegraph points out that emoji is the fastest growing language in Britain.

A recent analysis of about 2.6 billion push notifications by LeanPlum and App Annie indicates that emoji usage increased by 163% in 2016.

So, emojis are now part of our everyday communication. These little icons are here to stay.

They help you reduce word count, at the same time convey your message in a visually attractive, frienmarketing strategynces your audience’s behavior.

Hence, add emojis to your marketing strategy. But please, use them wisely for maximum results.