Did you know that the crying laughing face – one of the most popular emojis in the world - won word of the year (note we said word of the year) in the Oxford Dictionary last year – the first time an icon/symbol has ever won the prestigious award.
So why have emojis become so popular? Could it be due to the fact that we process visual data 60,000 times faster than text? Or have we all just become so lazy we can’t type words anymore (but really, who needs to when you can now order a slice of pizza with Dominos just by tweeting them the pizza emoji?) Whatever the reason, our favourite picture characters have become one of the biggest visual trends online and they’re not going to disappear any time soon.
Brands and celebrities alike have jumped onto the emoji bandwagon with Kim Kardashian releasing her own emojis in 2015, Disney just about to and Geordie Shore’s Gary Beadle’s already topping the app store charts! More and more retail outlets are using emojis in their email marketing campaigns in hope of their emails standing out in crowded inboxes and sure enough, it works - research from Campaign Monitor shows that brands see a 45 per cent increase in their email open rates if emojis are used in the subject headers, so why wouldn’t you use them?!
Last month, Twitter announced that from today it was to introduce emoji-based marketing (which does exactly what it says on the tin),– so if you’ve tweeted the pizza emoji or used the champagne bottle recently, expect to be targeted with an advert from a local pizza shop or new bar in the near future!
Clearly, advertisers will need to make sure that the people they’re targeting are using the emoji in the right context, but we’re giving a big thumbs up to the move!
Only time will tell if we will be able to narrow users down by demographics and location when using the emoji but we’ll be keeping an eye on how it pans out in the next few weeks…
