How emojis can improve your push notification performance

The evolution of marketing communication through TV to giant billboards and newspaper ads, to digital, has been an overwhelming phenomenon. Moreover, the use of marketing collaterals depending on the content formats has gone through the changes too. The advent of digital marketing has made the application of images, videos, and textual content more interactive and engaging.

However, since the attention span of users is on a decline, the marketing communication they receive must be engaging enough for them to interact. The marketing content must evoke trustworthiness, improve engagement, and draw attention within your users. Push notification is a mechanism to do it, but you must establish a sense of engagement among your users to improve the performance of it.

So, how to improve the impact of push notifications and make communication through it more engaging? An unconventional method known as Emojis can help in improving the push notifications performance by as much as 85%. Ever since the arrival of emojis, expressing emotions has become a lot interesting, but does the inclusion of it in push notifications make sense? Let's find out.

What are emojis? Why have they become relevant in marketing communications?

Emojis or emoticons are tiny images or icons that are used to communicate an emotion or idea to the receiver. It shows these emotions with human faces or miniature objects, communication becomes much enriched.

The smiling or surprised human face helps us to associate our feelings with actual human interactions. Since these are nonverbal communication invoking feelings and sentiments, it makes the digital conversation much more interactive.

Emojis are already in use in marketing communications and can improve social network engagement by 3X and email open rates by 20%. Replacing certain words with the emoji provides a reason along with the sentiment of opening the communication. Thus, a message with "deals that you will love" that has a heart emoji instead of the word "love" makes the message more engaging.

However, will the method that shows promising results through other marketing channels work similarly through push notifications too? Let’s find out.

The impact of emojis in Push Notifications

Emojis are small icons that act as the replacement of texts. Thus, they can convey more than what words can do in push notifications. Also, they have more colorful textures and stand out among textual content. So instead of writing a long sentence about what the push notification is about, you can add a few emojis to convey the same meaning with better intent.

Enhancing communication has been a hallmark of push notification and is evident from the fact that daily 5 billion emojis are sent on Facebook. The following are the benefits of using emojis in your push notifications.

a) Can improve open rates - Since you can display certain expressions through emojis, you can nudge them to take positive actions.

b) Can increase engagement and brand awareness - Emojis can work great in improving the top-of-the-mind recall about your brand among your users, and turn them into brand advocates.

c) Increased use of emojis among users, particularly millennials - Preference among youth to use emojis as these help in conveying better expressions.

d) Brings in more emotion in push notifications - Helps you expressing the exact feeling and emotion of the message

e) More engagement in Android smartphones than iOS - Helps you strategize your marketing drive better while targeting Android users

f) Fewer words, easier to read - The convenience of using emojis while writing or reading makes the message more interactive.

Do’s and Don’ts of emojis in Push Notifications

Before you start replacing every word in your push notifications with an emoji, you must know the best practices of using an emoji in your push notification service. You should maintain the following to optimize your push performance.

a) Identify the right emojis - You need to identify the right emoji for your campaigns among the total of 3178 emojis available as of 2019. Also, you need to check for emojis that might look similar but have different meanings. While using emojis in your notification, you must choose the right one, or else, it’s better to avoid them completely to avoid confusion.

b) Strategic use of emojis in push notification - You should only use the relevant emojis that interprets the meaning of the text used in the notification. Relaying a different meaning than what the message is intended for would leave your users perplexed.

c) The segment you emojis according to user behavior - You can also use emojis according to your audience segments. A flight emoji by a travel marketer in his push notification makes the message more appealing to users.

d) Don’t overstuff the notification with words and emojis - Using too many emojis would only make the message look more cluttered and non-appealing. Avoid overstuffing your message and use these emojis strategically to improve the performance.

e) Don’t use emojis for the sake of it - Just that everyone is using emoji, you don’t need to do it to stay relevant. Emojis are important as long as it is relevant to your message, but using for the sake of it would have a negative impact on your push performances.

Conclusion

Communicating by using the most engaging language is the key to having an engaging conversation with your users, and emojis are adding to the relevance to it in modern times. There are push notification platforms too, which lets you carry out the task and help you to create more compelling and engaging marketing communication to win more conversions for your business.

Varsha Singh is a Digital Marketing professional from Bangalore at Affle India Pvt Ltd. I use my articles to provide quality content & tutorials to assist marketers.