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Add Emojis to Push Notifications for Powerful User Engagement (Infographic)

Shivkumar M 20+ yrs shaping technology Product & GTM strategy. Fintech, healthcare & retail industry expertise. Leads product launches, adoption & GTM as Director, Product Marketing.
Add Emojis to Push Notifications for Powerful User Engagement (Infographic)

Emojis are everywhere: on your phone, mobile apps, social media, even in the news. We use them every day for casual messages, quick reactions, and one picture replies. We also use them as a seasoning: to inject zest, emotion, or humor into our conversations.

Emoji History: It’s All About Emotion

Emojis were first created in the late 1990s by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese employee for mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo. He invented the language out of frustration with text information. Kurita realized that he’d rather see a picture of a shining sun than text saying “the weather is fine.”
He and his team decided to create a set of 176 pictograph characters (each 12×12 pixels) that could encapsulate an entire breadth of human emotions. Today, that initial set of 176 has exploded into 2,666 official emojis.

Emojis in Push Notifications: Powerful Results  

Over 6 billion emojis are sent every day. Not all of those emojis are comments about the weather and mood swings. Many of them are from brands like yours, persuading users to take action.
As mobile marketers, we know that buyers engage with emotional messaging. And what better tool to convey emotions and increase app engagement than emojis?   
Here’s why using emojis in push notifications can strengthen your marketing efforts:

1. Emojis raise CTRs by 124%

We analyzed the open rates from our own 2017 Q1 data, and CleverTap customers saw an average increase in open rates of 124% for push notifications that used emojis.

2. Emojis boost conversions by 9%

Including emojis in push notifications with a clear and simple call-to-action can raise the number of users who click the CTA by 9%.  

3. Emojis raise retention by 28%

One app testing popular emojis in push notifications was able to increase day 2 retention rates to 28%.

Best Practices for Inserting Emojis

The infographic below gives you four best practices for using emojis in your push notifications and in user engagement campaigns in general.
In addition, we looked at over 11 billion push notifications in our system and found the top 25 emojis that drive the highest CTRs for our customers. Feel free to use them in your own campaigns.
Emojis + Push Notifications = Better User Engagement Infographic
Share the infographic on your website with this embed code:

 

For More Emoji-nal Support  

We collected a longer list of best practices around using emojis in push notifications in this blog post: Boosting Mobile App Engagement & Retention Using Emojis

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Last updated on March 26, 2024