The Word of the Year is Not a Word

AUTHOR

Team Braze

2015 is the year of the emoji. National Emoji Day celebrated its first birthday in July, Taco Bell successfully petitioned for the creation of a taco emoji, and as of this morning, Oxford Dictionaries announced the 2015 Word of the Year was, in fact, not a word at all, but the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. While linguists may be outraged, mobile marketers should be overjoyed at the recognition of an industry-changing mode of communication.

International use of emojis (ClickZ)

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Emojis have become a universal language that transcend international and cultural barriers. Demographics that have previously been unable to communicate are now easily understanding each other with modern-day hieroglyphics. Even more, beyond simply acting as a practical shorthand for communicating thoughts, emojis are also especially adept, as the name implies, at conveying tone and emotion–often lost in translation in other media.

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Domino’s harnessed the power of the emoji in multiple ways and won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes this summer. Not only did they increase brand awareness with their pizza emoji order-placing campaign, but they also influenced the creation of highly-personalized Pizza Profiles and incorporated innovative smart technologies with their social media savvy customer base. With the help of a single emoji, they received dynamic customer data and increased the number of channels they can engage with (and market to) their users.

Can emojis help increase conversion rates?

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Appboy data, show below, drawn from thousands of campaigns, showed that short, relevant messages are the highest-performing messages and the optimal message length is short: keep it under 50 characters on Android and trim it to 25 characters on iOS, all things being equal. Considering that emojis are only classified as two characters in a push notification or tweet, they are are big bang for your marketing message buck.