Brief:

• Push notifications that include emoji are opened 254% more often than those without the digital smiley faces and icons, according to a Leanplum study provided to Mobile Marketer. The response to push notifications with emoji is three times higher than last year, the mobile marketing firm found.
• Email messages that use emoji in the subject lines are opened 66% more than those without, even as the average number of emoji used per message and the percentage of messages including at least one of the icons have doubled in the past year.
• In addition, apps that use emoji show 26% fewer uninstalls. Leanplum analyzed 300 million emails and push notifications during a 12-month period ending on June 1 for this report.

Insight:

While emoji were once derided as unprofessional for business communications, brands are steadily beginning to incorporate them into marketing messages to attract consumers' attention and convey more meaning and emotion than words alone. Leanplum's study of open rates for push notifications and emails shows how emoji can help to capture mobile users' attention amid the flurry of text-based communications they receive throughout the day. The firm's survey includes the results from marketers such as Miss Selfridge, a women's clothing retailer that saw an 81% lift in open rates and 363% surge in revenue from outgoing messages that contained the icons.

When used appropriately, emoji can help to convey emotion and personality from brands, which support marketers in driving in-the-moment engagement and can help to build long-lasting user retention. Emoji have grown from an original set of 176 characters to a collection of more than 3,000 unique icons, expanding the range of their communicative power for marketers, per Wired magazine.

Emoji have shown massive influence on internet communication. Last year, Facebook said more than 60 million emoji were sent every day on its core social network, while 5 billion were sent via its Messenger chat platform, numbers that don't appear to be waning any time soon as more people and brands grow comfortable using the digital icons in everyday communications. Facebook may provide updated emoji data with today's World Emoji Day, whose organizers will present awards for Best New Emoji, Most Anticipated Emoji, Excellence in Emoji Use and which emoji best represents 2018 as Emoji of the Year.