5 Ways to Use Emojis in International Marketing

Emojis are small digital pictures designed to express emotions, feelings, or concepts without using text or sound. The power of these little icons is so remarkable that brands are increasingly using emojis in international marketing to communicate and connect with potential customers. Why? It’s because they help to enrich marketing messages by adding emotions. The result is that more is said with fewer words. Read on to learn five ways to use emojis.

The Rise of the Emojis

The number of these little pictograms keeps rising. In 2020, 117 new emojis were released, bringing the total number up to 3,136. Emojis have been under the Unicode Consortium's coordination since 1995, when the first 76 of these small icons were adopted in the US. The Consortium sets standards for symbols, characters in different scripts, and emojis. They are encoded in a uniform manner across various platforms, even though styles vary somewhat between providers.

Today it is estimated that no less than 5 billion emojis are used every day on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. New Year's Eve is the most popular day for their use. The most popular emoji on Facebook and Twitter is the laughing face with tears of joy, while the heart emoji is number one on Instagram.

International marketers in every industry are using emojis as an essential marketing tool to grow their businesses. These small smileys and other symbols can significantly impact how your customers view your brand. The following will give you some insight on ways to use emojis to increase engagement with your target audiences.

1. Know the Meaning of Each Emoji

Number one of the ways to use emojis effectively is to develop a thorough knowledge of the message that each emoji is intended to convey. This process also involves understanding which emojis connect well with your different audiences. Your emoji research will help you send the right emojis to engage recipients and lead to higher conversion rates.

2. Establish an Emoji Marketing Strategy

Like any other marketing undertaking, you need to put together a viable strategy if you want to succeed. This step involves having a plan to effectively integrate emojis in international marketing and digital tactics to improve communications with your prospective consumers. Your strategy should aim to sustain coherence across all of your marketing channels.

3. Add Emojis to Your Social Media Posts

Emojis reign supreme on social networking sites. Therefore, adding them to your social media posts will help you relate better to your target audiences. Statistics bear this out:

• One test found that using emojis on a Twitter update increased the engagement rate by over 25%.
• An Instagram study found that the engagement rate skyrocketed by 48% when emojis were used.
• On Facebook, posts that include emojis received interaction rates 39% higher than average.

Using emojis on social media platforms will help you attract targeted traffic, increase your conversions, and bring you return customers.

4. Use Emojis on Email Subject Lines

The human brain reacts to visuals much faster than to text. This means that consumers will make quicker decisions to open your email if there is an emoji in the subject line. However, be sure to use emojis that align with your marketing message to attract the attention of recipients and increase your email opening rates.

5. Ways to Use Emojis - Use Them in Your Push Notifications

Mobile internet accessors across the world surpassed desktop users several years ago. In many countries, there are vast numbers of people who only log on to the internet through their smartphones. This means that online activities such as search queries and purchasing decisions are happening more and more on mobile devices.

Push messages provide direct interactions with consumers on their handheld screens. You should not ignore the potential power of mobile push notifications, which is why you should add emojis to enhance your push messages. Your aim is to capture the attention of recipients and inspire them to take action. Therefore, ways to use emojis includes inserting them when announcing, for example:

• Special offers
• Product discounts
• Coupon codes
• Gift cards
• Contests

Ways to Use Emojis in International Marketing Content

Emojis constitute a non-verbal global language you see and read all over the internet. These small images are everywhere on smartphones, other mobile devices, messaging apps, and more. They help you connect with your targeted audience by communicating in ways that may not be possible through text content only. But when you use these little icons, it's important to ensure that the ones you choose align with your brand message.

The Same Emoji May Mean Something Different

Emojis offer you so many opportunities to improve your content marketing strategy. They instantly convey feelings and emotions and can grow your business dramatically if used correctly. In this context, always keep in mind that an emoji may mean one thing to an American audience and an entirely different thing to someone in a different country. So, just as your written content needs to be localized, so do your emojis. Therefore, do your research to make sure you are sending the message you intended to send.

Localize Can Help You Localize Your Emojis

Ways to use emojis correctly means avoiding the wrong emoji or misinterpreting an emoji's meaning to your local audience. Using the right emojis can definitely help you increase conversions. However, the wrong emoji can convey the wrong message and create a negative impression of your brand. Creating an emoji glossary for every language you are translating into will help you translate and localize these little visuals accurately. Talk to Localize to find out how we can help you translate and localize your marketing messages and increase your conversion rates.