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You're using SMS messages to communicate with your audience 👨👩👧👦 and enjoying some great response rates 😄, but what's the next step to ensure that open rates are maintained and your audience 🌎 continues to engage with you? 🤔 Using emojis in SMS to keep messages fresh 🍏 and inject a bit of humour 😂 might just be what you're looking for 🔍 to liven things up a bit.🎈
An exciting 🏂 and underused extension 🏠 of the standard text message when it comes to promotional SMS, emojis offer a new and friendly 🐶 way to reach customers via the mobile phone 📱 that never leaves their side. Adding emojis to SMS has the potential to increase engagement 💍 using just a few words and an image 🏜 or two.
Emojis have come a long way since the humble smiley face 🙂 was first used in 1982. Now a way to communicate 📣 all manners of things, emojis are bordering on another language ㊙ and are being used in a multitude of situations from describing the plot of a movie 🎬 to being the subject of an actual movie itself. 🎥
Highly effective for reaching a wide range of markets from fast food 🍔 to party planning 🎉 and ticketing 🎟 to beauty salons 💅, there's an emoji for almost every eventuality. But let's not get carried away 👜. Whilst emojis can be leveraged in SMS to increase ⬆ customer engagement for a multitude of applications, the sense of humour 😆 they imply will neither be appropriate or welcomed across the board. No one wants to be reminded of an impending doctor's 💊 appointment with a syringe 💉 emoji, especially when they have needle issues and are dreading 🙎 the appointment. Think more along the lines of using the bunch of flowers emoji 💐 in an SMS to remind that Valentine's Day 💘 is coming up and that it'd be wise 🐦 not to forget 🐘 this year...
One 1⃣ thing to remember if you are thinking about using emojis in SMS is that the message itself needs to be 🐝 formatted differently to a 'regular' text message and is in fact written ✍ in a different 'language' 🉐. Regular SMS is written in GSM whereas other text 🔤 messages, including emojis, are written in Unicode. To explain 📊 how this might affect messages containing emojis, a smiley face 😀 in Unicode looks like this: 'U+1F600' and a heart ❤ looks like this: 'U+2764'. What does this actually mean for the individual 🚶 sending SMS? Well, it means that your character limitations get used up pretty 🌹 quickly 🏎. To compound this issue, Unicode 🦄 (close enough right?) SMS has a maximum of 70 characters whereas GSM has a maximum of 160. Of course getting round 🍩 this issue is not really a complex thing 🚀 - multiple emoji filled SMS can be concatenated to arrive as one lovely looking 🍰 message at their end destination 🛬, but if in essence it's actually 2 or 3 messages, charges 💰 per message will be applied accordingly.
You may be about to announce that 'you're out' 🏏 with this revelation but just take a minute ⏰ to think about the potential increase 📈 in engagement you could get by sending smart, relevant content 📝 to your customers via a medium that is usually no more than an arm's 💪 length away from them. In reality an increase in cost 💵 would only be incurred if you were to go on at some length 😴 in your message which, when you think 💡 about it, isn't really the idea behind a text message. Think of character restrictions instead as an opportunity to really drill 👷 down to the message you want to get across - your customer will no doubt appreciate it 👍. Being brief and to the point 🎯 is a definite advantage 🎾 when it comes to grabbing attention these days 📅 - humans now apparently have a lower attention span than goldfish, so you need to make sure you grab it quickly 🏇 as possible!
So next time ⌚ you want to let your customers know about a flaming 🔥 hot sale think about how they might respond to emojis 😎 in a text message, it could be just the kick you're looking 👀 for to inject new life 🐣 into your response rates. Drop us a line 🖋 if you need any help ⁉ getting set up with sending 📬 emojis to your customer base, or if you're chomping 🐛 at the bit and just want to get started, check out 💳 a comprehensive list 📋 of emojis here. First published by CLX Communications
