The Role of Emoji
No wonder emoji has big impact for business.
Emoji is one of things I excitedly waiting for from a platform, whether they would including an emoji for their content or not. This has been my (mini) observation lately if there’s at least one emoji within platform to engage their users. A little bit background, working as two-month UX Writer Intern had me a chance to gain some insights and brainstorm with my team, especially for product that we were gonna release. One day, when I got a task to review the app, I got a push notification from that app. The one I noticed that they already given an emoji to that push notification. I love how they start considering using emoji to their push notification.
Talking about emojis, our face every day within the internet, WIRED told that the first emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist who worked for DOCOMO — Japan’s main mobile carrier in 1999. His first intention was want to make an attractive design for interface to convey information in a simple way. For instance, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” In that time, there were characters to show the weather, technology, traffic, and all the phases of the moon.
Emoji can represent us in every mood and every emotion. Not just that, especially for business sector, do not be surprised if only one emoji can increase the conversion. Now, emoji has different shapes (even have different versions for each platform, like Android and iOS). It’s not only used for our “companion of words”, but there are another function behind them.
So, what can emoji do? Is it so essential?
Emotion representation of users
Like what we usually do when chatting, we really love to use emoji to represent our feelings or moods. Emojis are like our body language, which if we just talk is not enough and we need a gesture or facial expression to show what we mean. According to Auto Monkey, emojis were designed as a symbol of human emotions and they are used to show expression of irony or humor, emotion, and even tone of voice in text. That’s why emoji can be used to help the reader understand what writer mean.
A systematic review from Qiyu Bai et al. explained some motivations like simplicity, convenience, and conduciveness to emotional expression is attracting users to use emoji. In detail, emoji can help users to build their own personality and identity. Emojis have a role to promote interaction for communication, including establishing emotional tone, reducing discourse ambiguity, enhancing context appropriateness, and intensifying or weakening speech acts. It also used to greet and to maintain and enhance social relations in digital platform.
Increase conversions
Who knows that an emoji could help boost a company’s performance?
Most of us, for sure, often seen a feedback page that contain some emojis and we are asked to choose which emoji more suits us when we use a platform. Well, a method named Feedback Emoji will make users more interested to choose the emoji rather than to write out their opinion.
Emojics explained that feedback is easier to be analyzed — and still able to be analyzed normally — and we can use it for decision-making. For example, if big smiley face has the highest percentage, it means most of respondents satisfied with our performance. Feedback emoji also found that popular among user because they are used to using emoji in their digital life.
Just like feedback emoji, the use of emoji in push notifications can increase click-through rate or CTR. John Koetsier in his article in VentureBeat, wrote that digital marketing managed to increase the open rates of their push notifications by 85%. From research shows that common push notifications (without emoji) has click rate to 2.44 percent. Push notifications with emoji managed to increase it by two percent to 4.51 percent.
According to Emojics, some reasons why emojis have big effect to the highest engagement:
Visual appeal: According to research, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of the information sent to the brain are visual. Like YouTube, it is very popular among many of us because YouTube presents visual products that are more attractive to the human eye. Same with YouTube, this tiny yet colorful “faces” instantly grab user attention. The focus instantly shifts to the emoji and this is what makes a feedback emoji a perfect technique to approach your customers visually, as well as in push notifications that are dominated by words, emoji helps to attract an attention.
Emotional analysis: Emoji will help users choose what they are feeling; if they feel happy, they will happily choose the big smiley face, and vice versa. An easy example is what we do every day; a conversation on an online platform that only contains words will have a different meaning and feeling if (at least) an emoji is added, right?
Same thing for digital marketing. Businesses are most concerned about the feelings of their customers and they will make their customers happy with the products they develop and feedback emoji is an easy technique to grab users’ attention. It should be noted that if you are going to use an emoji in a push notification, it must be adjusted to the content of the message and in accordance with the target market. Emojis make the message more human and closer to the user.
Oh, if need to know more about emojis meaning, Emojipedia will kindly help!
High response rate: Emoji is always be part our life and people always including at least an emoji to their online communication. Why? Of course they’re fun and unconsciously engaging! Most of internet user or 95% of them using an emoji and over 10 billion emojis are sent daily (data of 2019 from South Florida Reporter) and it keeps increasing. Emojis can create massive engagement increases if it is used correctly. Emojics also stated that emojis are more reflective of users’ answers than text which can cause misunderstandings, and also make users feel as if their voices or feedback are heard.
Those two main functions we know from implementing emoji are inspiring most of digital marketers to increase their click rate. To sum up, emoji makes them stand out and humanize their message. Interesting, right? 😉
