Should you use emojis in your business communications? 👍 or 👎

Emojis are a common part of social communications, but what about their use in business? Turns out, they can help you persuade your customers but only if they reiterate your message rather than replace it. 

Emojis go mainstream

Emojis are images used to emotionally cue a message. Most commonly you’ll see different facial expressions, like a smiley face, laughing or shocked face. The face with tears of joy was even named word of the year in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries, so it’s fair to say they have become mainstream.

Emojis now also include pictures of places, like a house or church, food items, animals and gestures, like clapping or giving a thumbs up. 

While the library is ever expanding, the challenge with emojis is they are subject to interpretation. In some cases, this is due to technology. An emoji design selected in one operating system, say when sending a message through Apple iOS, will be rendered slightly differently in the system being used by the recipient, like Facebook or Android. What looks like whimsy in one system can look like concern in another.

In other cases, the sender might use an emoji assuming its literal interpretation – like a smiley face to indicate happiness – but the recipient receives it assuming an ironic message, thinking the sender is being sarcastic and is not really happy at all.

With that in mind, is there any upside to using emojis in your business communications?

That’s what some researchers were interested to know. More specifically, they wanted to know whether facial emojis increase how persuasive a message might be.

Emoji in eWOM

Electronic Word of Mouth, or eWOM, is the term used to encompass any customer sentiment expressed electronically. That might mean reviews on sites like Facebook or TripAdvisor, forums and discussion boards.  

If you are selling, it’s highly likely that your customers will be referring to eWOM before they decide to transact. The researchers were therefore interested in how emojis used in these communications impact decisions.

Zeroing in on facial emojis, the researchers ran a series of six experiments, some in the lab and some in real-life situations. They specifically wanted to know whether you should use an emoji instead of text (the replacement condition) or to reinforce the text (the reiteration condition). 

In the replacement condition, instead of typing “happy news” I might insert a smiley face to say it for me. In the reiteration condition, I would type “happy news” and include a smiley face to reinforce those words.

In one of their studies, the researchers examined whether people were more likely to “like” a Facebook post that contained a facial emoji. 

They had 118 real Facebook users post a message about a Netflix comedy program as follows: “Yesterday, I watched [comedy show] on Netflix. It was so funny. Don’t you agree?”

Some posted the message as text only. Others posted the message with the emoji of a face with tears of joy, with some posting the emoji in place of writing “so funny”, and some using the emoji to reinforce it.

The researchers then monitored how many “likes” were received 24 hours after posting.

The result? There was no difference in “likes” between the text only and replacing emoji versions. 

Both received an average of around three likes. But those who use the emoji to reinforce the “so funny” message? They received double the number of likes, at an average of six.

I know, it seems innocuous. Who cares whether you receive three or six likes, right? But think of the scale. 

The extra reach you gain by people liking your post simply by using an emoji in the right way! 

It’s pretty impressive.

But it’s one thing for personal posts, what about brands?

Emojis in brand communications

Turning their attention to how businesses interact with their audience, the researchers scraped over two thousand tweets from ten well-known brands, like Amazon, Pepsi and Mercedes-Benz, over a six-month period.

When they analysed the impact facial emojis had on the number of likes and retweets, here’s what they found:

• When emojis replaced text, they did not influence likes or retweets. 
• When emojis reiterated text, they increased both likes and retweets.

Exploring this further, the researchers then created a fake brand for headphones and ran three ads on Facebook. They then monitored the click-through rate (CTR) of each version generated.

The ad read: “Our new headphones now help you fall asleep. This is guaranteed fun”.

In condition one, the ad was text only. In condition two, the “face with tongue” emoji replaced the word “fun”. In condition three, the “face with tongue” emoji reiterated the word “fun”.

Once again, there was no difference in clicks between the text only and replacing emoji conditions. 

The click-through rate was around 3%. But when the emoji reinforced the “fun” message, the rate of clicks increased to 4.5%.

The reiterating emoji also had a lower cost per click, 0.55€, compared with the replacing emoji (0.68€) and text-only ad (0.73€), which tells us more people clicked on the reiterating ad links.

Emojis affect arousal and ambiguity

When it comes to persuasion, facial emojis serve two roles. 

They provoke feelings – this is emotional arousal and the use of emojis is usually positive in this regard. They give life to your message.

And they affect perceived ambiguity. How clear the message is. The less ambiguous something is, the more persuasive.

It is the impact emojis have on ambiguity that is key. 

• Facial emojis that REPLACE text can increase ambiguity and therefore reduce persuasion, and
• Facial emojis that REITERATE text can reduce ambiguity and therefore increase persuasion.

So, should you use emojis? It seems there can be significant upside.

As with all things, the context of your communication will matter.

• The more formal your brand and product, the more considered you need to be in your use of emojis;
• The greater context you provide the recipient in the communication, the more likely the meaning is likely to be inferred and you can probably use replacing emojis, and
• The stronger the ties between the sender and receiver (i.e. how well they know each other), the more likely they will be to infer meaning.

But as a general rule, when using emojis, use them to reiterate text rather than replace it.

Bri Williams is a behavioural science expert.