Since I went full time freelance last January I have started focusing on my blog and other writing contracts more, even getting gigs where I need to produce articles and other marketing materials for additional companies and charities, which has been amazing. Whilst doing this I have also started to invest in my own development more, completing on line course, and watching webinars in my field and one subject that struck me as curious was the use of emojis and symbols in Marketing and memes to boost to business.
Personally it is something that I have always avoided. I always viewed emojis as a form of colloquial language and not very professional, especially when used on out bound emails, newsletters and adverts. Therefore as a rule I have always stuck to using words and the majority of the time, full English words and no abbreviations or slang either.
So you can imagine my surprise when I found the recent research conducted by Campaign Monitor around the topic of using emojis and symbols in marketing, which indicated that in actual fact it is not as frowned upon as I thought. In actually fact the research indicates that subject lines that include emojis on emails actually have a higher reader rate than text only subject headings. And not only that but the smiling poo emoji got the highest read rate when used in email subject headers. These findings have absolutely astonished me, even if I had been more inclined to use emojis for my marketing emails it would never have occurred to me to use a poo emoji, in fact I actually think I would have viewed that as marketing suicide, which just goes to show what I know!
The information regarding the use of emojis and symbols within social marketing doesn’t surprise me as much as the results from use with emails as I do actually use the odd emoji on my facebook, twitter and instagram posts and I even occasionally include them on the social pages of the companies whose accounts I manage. Although I was surprised to learn that the most commonly used emoji in the UK is the weary face, I guess we are a miserable bunch after all!
As I said at the start of this post the last 12 months have certainly been a learning curve for me ad this research is no different, I will take on bored all the findings and may even have a play around with emoji’s in my marketing strategies a bit more and monitor the results, although I will be honest, I won’t be using the smiling face emoji as my first experimental headliner just in case!
(This is a sponsored post).