Do Your Customers Want Emoji in their SMS Messages?
Earlier this year I wrote about the technical challenge of using emoji in your SMS marketing. But what I didn’t mention was how your customers might feel about getting them in the first place.
That’s a big question. Fortunately, there’s some research that hints at how your customers might like, or not like, seeing them.
Attitudes Towards Emoji
Appboy, a marketing automation company, published a report on emoji usage and attitudes. The results are based on their internal data (brands that use their platform). And they also surveyed individuals around the world to understand how people felt about brands that use them.
Year over year, the number of emoji being used by brands is up 609% as of June 2016. This only includes push notifications and email though. They don’t have specific data on usage in SMS messages from brands.
So while impressive, the growth in emoji usage may or may not reflect usage by brands using text message marketing. But the rest of their analysis focuses on how people feel about emoji. That is much more interesting.
When asked how to describe their feelings towards emoji, 64% say they like or love them. This varies with age and gender to some degree. Relatively few harbour negative feelings towards them, while around a quarter to a third say they don’t have strong feelings either way.
Things get a bit more complicated though, when asked what they think of brands using emoji. Around 72% of people have what I call a positive response. In other words, they have good thoughts about brands using emoji. You can see the breakout in the image below.
Nearly a third though, have what I’d call a negative response. Most brands don’t want to be called childish or inappropriate. However, if you look at the age breakout, you can see that the negative responses definitely get larger with age. If your customers are in the older demographic, you might want to do your own research to see how your customers feel before jumping into using them.
Finally, the survey asks if people have any preference when it comes to the type of format the emoji are sent. Remember, the initial data all came from push notifications and emails. But in their answers to this question, the format (think channel) most people prefer is text messages.
What I find interesting about this data is the differences between the age groups. While text messages are the main choice for all age groups, the percentage varies. The youngest group is probably more likely to be on social media, so their preference for emoji is weighted almost equally between it and SMS.
Overall, I think it means people want brands to use emoji. And they are most open to them being used in a text message, but are happy to see them in other places too.
Using Emoji in SMS Messages
Now that you know it’s likely your customers would approve of your brand using emoji, should you start plopping them in every SMS message?
Probably not.
If you’re used to seeing emoji in your message app, email, social media, or wherever, you might be disappointed to know most of them aren’t compatible across systems. At least not when sending to a variety of different models and manufacturers of phones. You can check out this page on Unicode.org to see the differences.
Which brings me to the other main point of why you can’t just throw them around willy-nilly. Emoji are defined in the Unicode character set (as seen on the linked page above). Most mobile phones though, support the GSM character set. While some do offer support for both, or at least some combination, you can’t be sure which ones your customer has.
That shouldn’t dissuade you from using emoji though. It just means you need to educate yourself before you do.
So if you want to know more details about the technical issues, read my previous blog Are Emoji the next big thing in SMS marketing? But here’s a short summary of what you’ll find there. If you want to use emoji in your SMS messages, stick to the ones supported in the GSM character set. And you’ll want to do some testing before you send out any bulk messages. Otherwise, you might end up feeling ?.
Related Articles
Do Your Customers Want Emoji in their SMS Messages?
Emoji are showing up everywhere. Should you be using these cute, fun, and illustrative icons in your SMS marketing? Your customers probably want you to. Around 72% of people have positive feelings about brands who use emoji. But before you get started, you’ll want to find out the details in this blog.
SMS Marketing Ideas To Celebrate Wimbledon
The Truth About SMS Opt Out Rates
You’ve read all about getting subscribers, the legal and recommended guidelines, and put great offers out to your list. But people still unsubscribe. Should you be worried? Are you doing something wrong? That depends. As the saying goes, you can’t make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time. You will have opt-outs, but whether you have too many is the question you should be asking.
What You Can Learn From a Bad SMS Message
In last week’s blog I covered how the Trump campaign sent unsolicited SMS messages to voters. This week I’m stuck on the same topic, but from a totally different angle: what we can learn from that failure. Because honestly, their biggest issue might not be violating the law. It might be the people they have writing their SMS messages. It’s time to dissect the message that spawned the law suit, and learn what we can from it.
Five Things Every Marketer Needs to Know About SMS
There's no better time to take a closer look at SMS marketing - could it fit your marketing strategy? What should be at the forefront of your mind when you look at whether SMS could fit with your business? Here we've highlighted five things you should know before getting started.
How a Text Marketer can Learn Valuable Lessons from Long-Form Copywriters
In terms of storytelling, SMS text messaging is probably as far removed from long-form, direct-action copywriting as you could be. However, the SMS marketing writer can still learn a lot of lessons here with regard to overall approach, content and composition.
What to do When Your SMS Campaign is Failing
Here's some ideas on what you can do to help your SMS campaigns to do better. Use the following checklist to see if you’re using all your possible channels.
13 Words That Inspire Action in Your SMS Messages
Because they are so short, word choice is important in SMS messages. You need to convey instructions and the benefits of following those instructions in few words. If you’ve ever struggled to find just the right one, check out our list of action inspiring words for SMS messaging.
Use All The Data You Can When Personalising Your SMS Messages
It’s said over and over that SMS is one of the most personal forms of communications today. That’s mainly because people guard their mobile numbers and only give them out to those they think worthy of them. So anyone who has opted into your SMS messaging has indeed invited you into their personal world.
SMS Marketing Best Practice: Do’s and Don’ts
Whilst social media has gained the attention of many small businesses as a marketing technique, SMS marketing has become a highly beneficial way of keeping your customers and clients close and building solid working relationships. According to research, 90% of text messages are read within three minutes, meaning SMS marketing shouldn't be overlooked when it comes to your advertising and customer service strategies. SMS marketing may be an ideal tactic for your business marketing, so here's a list of what to do and what not to do to ensure you're making the most of your campaign.