Emojis–the little button like pins with expressions ranging from happiness to sadness and from rage to boredom and everything else in between. With an increase in the usage of emoticons to help put a point across, the world has moved on from expressions to buildings, food items, animals, and even time, amongst various other things. Now while it has established its coolness when shared with friends, emojis are now holding a part in the business world as well.
With its usage rising by 163 percent and the library being increased by 108 percent, all between 2015 and 2016, it is unquestionable that it is time you should add them in your mobile app notifications.
For those who are still unsure of its potential, a research was done by AppAnnie to observe the affect emojis have on the probability of notification being opened. Let us keep it as a base of this article.
Last year, 2016, Leanplum and App Annie studiednear about 5,000 push notificationoperations, consisting of more than 2.6 billion individual push notifications all across both iOS and Android.Here is a synopsisof what they found –
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Segments using it
Out of all the industries that were surveyed, retail apps, gaming apps, and dating apps, used the most amount of emojis in their push notifications. The reason can be attributed to the fact that these are the ones that are focused on offering entertainment to their users.
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Change in open rate
When those notifications that contained emojis were compared with the ones that didn’t, they found that the push notifications minusemojis saw a 2.44 percent open rate. And the push notifications with emojisfound a 4.51 percent open rate. This amounts to an 85% increase in open rate when a brand used emoticons in their notifications.
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Reason behind this high difference
The number one reason behind the increase in usage of emojisespecially on a business front is that our brain react to emoticons exactly as it does to the expression of someone in front of us. Our brain reads them as non verbalinformation and react the same way as it’s portrayed in the emoticon, making us feel something on an emotional level.
So when a notification pops up on our screen of that of a happy face or excited gesture, we feel some emotion that makes us open the notification.
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Difference in iOS and Android
When it was studied which platform gains most from the emojis, they found it was Android which saw a 135 percent increase whileiOSsaw a 50% increase in the opening rate. For all those brands out there reading this, ask your android application development companyto add the provision of send emoticons in push notifications.
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Does more Emoji mean more Moolah?
As we know Call to Action is the only section in the whole app or notification that can collect some money for you, AppAnnie went on to find if emojis have some effect on the Call to Action activity. The research cited Mobilityware, a gaming app, which found that there was a 9 percent increase in the rate of conversion after they used emojis in their push notifications. According to Shipra Mahindra from Canva, “including emojis with plain text in our in-app messaging lifts engagement more than including illustrative images.”
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Does Emojis work on retaining user retention as well?
They found that an app dealing with transaction of second hand items, saw an increase from 25 percent to 32percent just at the back of emojis. So it is not just the engagement that is influenced by emojis but also in retaining the current users.
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What is the target group?
For finding the answer to this question, the companies surveyed all the notifications that were sent to Android users and found that on an average 13–24 year old people spend 20 percent moretime in apps with emojis than the 25–44 year old age bracket, and roughly 70 percent more than those over45.
While these are the points that came out from the research, here is a snippet of what you can achieve by adding emoticons in your next app…
With the play store revenue growing every passing day, by using something that would impart a sense of emotion in your user, your ROI would only increase and make the user stay in your app for longer.
Have you stared using emojis yet?
Bio: Currently writing for ChromeInfotech, one of India’s leading app development companies, Tripti has written on relationships, career, and real estate in her past. But now she is focusing on decoding the mobile world with Ed Sheeran playing on a record in the background.
