7 Evil 🧿 Mistakes that Ruin Your |Emoji Marketing Strategy| 😨 🙊

 

Image by Christian Dorna on pixabay

Be cautious about these mistakes if you want to be successful in |emoji marketing |

Usage of emojis in digital marketing is getting popular day by day. Now it doesn’t matter which platform an organization belongs to, everyone is running after emoji trends of digital marketing campaigns. 

Well, following trends are fine but appreciable only when you do it successfully. Even a small mistake might break 💔 your deal instead of cracking the same. It’s like attending an MCQ test with negative marking when you have no preparation. You are selecting random answers with blind guesses 🎯. Out of 10, 4 answers are correct and 6 are incorrect. 🤣 

I have come across lots of social media marketing campaign used emojis for marketing but found lack of customer or audience engagement. Here are the seven common mistakes; most of the digital marketing new bees do…..

1. Overlooking the value of a specific social media platform

Emojis are in trend now but it should meet your digital marketing platform expectations. Random use of emojis might impress your audience on Facebook and Instagram pages but it can break your digital marketing campaign effort to the LinkedIn audience.

Reason? Well, the first two social media platforms are more focused on entertainment while the third one is on professionalism.


Still, confused? Okay, suppose, in this pandemic situation you are struggling to find a suitable job opportunity on LinkedIn. You are already pissed off and worried. In the meantime you found a job posting that demands a description of your dream job in the following way:

Emoji Job Posting of LOreal Recruiter

Source: business.linkedin.com

How will you feel??

Now consider the second scenario. You hold a secure job but casually searching for a better opportunity. On a Saturday evening, you are scrolling your Twitter feed and found the above post. You consider it funny and encouraging. Within a minute you got engaged in translating the emoji message. 

Here is the importance of platform analysis before grabbing emojis for social media marketing strategy. Your humor and trendiness boost up your marketing success until it irritates the target audience. Otherwise, it will break your deal. 💔💔

2. Using full emoji transcript without a word

It’s understandable that you want more customer engagement and wants them to translate your message, comment, reply, hot likes. All are fun, but for gaming. People looking for something reliable and valuable with vivid product descriptions or introductions might categorize your product or service as a ‘Big No.’ Even you have offered a very promising service or product. The reason is they have not understood your vision and mission related to the product/series.

Chevrolet Emoji Press Release for Cruze Blends.

Source: media.chevrolet.com

Above is the most discussed press release of Chevrolet for 2016-Cruze Blends (You can find the translated version here).

If you are in hurry and searching for a Chevrolet car that meets all of your technological and economical needs, then no doubt, the above press release will make you move to another company’s page instantly. I am not saying that this kind of press release will not get audience engagement and responses but the fact is those audiences will not become your customer. Even this press release has been proved the worst emoji marketing strategy of this automotive giant.

Here you have to understand the key significance of using emojis for marketing.
The key importance of emoji marketing campaigns lies in expressing the tone and type of emotion associated with your written word. Only a balanced association of your word and tone in your digital marketing campaign can drive customer (not only audience) engagement. It’s always better and safer to use emojis along with words until you are not promoting any contest or an IQ test.

According to a blog post of Commbox, 38% of our communication depends on our tone of voice.

The prime focus of digital marketing is to convey your thought, product features, and, benefits to your customers. Customer engagement is a way to make customers feel more personal about your company's services. This encourages them for choosing your product and services. Following the trends in this regard is no doubt a plus point for competitive advantage but getting deviated from the main goal might not offer you a second chance to get back up. Below is a perfect example of the Instagram emoji marketing campaign by Starbucks for its new summer drinks.

Instagram Emoji Campaign of Starbucks Kiwi -Coconut Summer Drinks

Source: Instagram

The emojis of kiwi and coconuts here, serve their respective purpose very well. It makes the post caption eye-catchy and also drives better customer engagement with emoji replies. 👀

Here is a pro tip: Light use of emoji boost up your marketing effectiveness and drive more customer engagements. Another impressive emoji campaign example from Google (14th September 2020)

Google's Thanks Giving Emoji Campaign Dedicated to coronavirus helpers

Each of the emojis here seems to be relevant and interesting. Hovering of the cursor over these emojis displays the massage ‘To all the coronavirus helpers, thank you.’

3. Not checking up the cross-platform appearance of emojis

All emojis are standardized by Unicode but still, their look varies from platform to platform. Look at the below example.

Ghost Emoji in LG, Apple, and Google

Source: Emojipedia

Suppose you are a Samsung phone user and a writer. Now you want to post an Instagram update about your upcoming scary ghost storybook. You typed ghost emoji ‘’ thinking, it representing a scary ghost but your followers whoever using Apple and Google platforms will find ‘/’ and misinterpret your next book as a comedy ghost storybook. 

Hope you can now understand how much cross-platform check-up of your emoji is important? 😉

4. Skipping app or browser emoji compatibility check-up

This is the most common mistake in regards to emoji marketing. A range of emojis is there that are exclusive to a specific platform or do not display properly on another platform. Below is a snapshot of a sample marketing document sent to a customer. The company uses Google Docs for such document formation and the customer has opened this in MS-Word 2007.

Incompatible Emoji appearance in MS-2007

Just imagine. Customers will have no idea about “They ‘what’ me ❕❔”; “They take care of my ‘what’❕❔”.

This emoji marketing effort will be a complete disaster. If you are a startup bee, then maybe next time this customer will not show any interest to download the attached document from your promotional mail. 

Always check app or browser compatibilities of emojis before hitting the send button. It might be possible few customers are using a degraded version of applications but maybe your most promising customer is hidden within them?
It’s not a good idea to ignore or underestimate any of your audience if they own the probability of being your customer. 😟
The best solution for this problem is to download and integrate the EmojiCompat library into your individual apps. If you are not a software person you can tech help from a professional in this regard.

5. Using Emojis in Customer service email or chatbot

Emoji email marketing got a huge craze. You can find lots of promotional emails containing emojis in the subject line from Amazon, Zomato like brands. Hope that entertains you open a few of these mails also.

But think, your air conditioner is not working for 5 days. You already registered a complaint on the brand’s website. Now you are working sitting inside your hot room and sweating a lot. In the meantime, you receive a mail from that company with the following subject line.

‘We are at yours 🛠. Happy to help you against Service request ID [XXXXXXX] 💁‍♂️’
Surely you will be hitting your head to the wall!!

One and half years back, I received such a customer service reply against my AC repairing complaint.

There is no scope for doubt that such kind of emoji usage will irritate your customer, even you may lose them.

The same thing applies to chatbots. Although it sounds less formal than email, still. you are handling customer service related chat, be aware of words, and tones.

Following opening line very common for customer services chat nowadays.

Opening Text of a Customer Service Chatbot

No doubt it looks charming but if your client is in big trouble then this approach might go against you. Below is a brief idea: 😂

A sample conversation in a customer care Chatbot

It’s better to go slow. Use emojis only after becoming sure about the mood of your client or customer. Never open a conversation with emojis. 

Apart from that always keep track of what emojis are going better for your customer handling. This helps you to identify your customer expectation better.

5. Using lots of emojis in promotional email subject line

It’s true, using emojis in the subject line partially increases the opening rate of your email but excessive use of the same can might give your email the identification of SPAM. Less than 10% of people check their SPAM folders. So, your promotional emails get automatically deleted without being read. 

Below is a zomato promotional email that I received in my SPAM box.

A Promotional Email of Zomato Inside the Spam Folder of Gmail.

6. Ignoring the regional differences in emoji usage

Wondering about how regional differences affect the use of emoji for business? In fact, it decides the possibility of customer acceptance for your emoji marketing approach.

Hope you are all ready aware of ‘Word Emoji Day’ (17th July of every year). Emojipedia releases the list of the latest trends and most popular emojis around the world on this day. But do you know, several surveys have been done for analyzing the regional popularities of emojis? Such a survey reveals although few of the emojis get world-class popularities but still there remain some regional favorites.

A July 2018 survey of emojipedia reveled,
https://blog.emojipedia.org/facebook-reveals-most-and-least-used-emojis/

• Canadian, Australian, German, and Swedish people like the food emojis 🎂🍔🍕 most.

•  ‘Heart’ ❤obtained the highest popularity in South Korea.

• ‘Face with tears of joy’ 😂 has always been the most popular in the US and UK but South Korean people are not much fond of that.

Pro tip: Always use emojis in your marketing campaigns keeping the client/ customer’s region in mind. Along with the popularity, it’s always better to keep track of the dislikes also.

7. Taking emojis casually

Since you are doing a professional job (email marketing or social media marketing) so you can’t take any of your professional elements casually. 

So, here emojis also become professional material. You need to research more and more to stay updated about emojis and boost up your emoji marketing skill.

As of March 2020, the Unicode standard owns a total of 3,304 emojis. It’s better to search emojipedia to know the all possible meaning of an emoji before using it in your marketing content.

Now you can experience a new feature of emojipedia in collaboration with Google. The feature enables you to check the latest emoji trends of each and every emoji. Follow the below step.

•  Go to emojipedia.com

• Select the emoji you want to know about. 

• Scroll down until you find ‘’ 

• Click on this ‘Trends’ button. 

• You will find the interesting trend of that particular emojis.

Emoji Trend Generated by Google Trends

[Note: Presently the ‘Google Trends’ option is not properly working in several browsers. In such cases, you can directly copy the emoji and paste it into the search bar of https://trends.google.com/.
You can use Google Trends for analyzing regional emoji popularity also. ]

In the end, keep in mind, there is no best strategy for an emoji marketing campaign. Everything depends on the customer’s expectations and acceptance probabilities. First, learn the basics well. Then only continuous research and skill up-gradation about emojis can lead to successful emoji marketing. Keep learning about emoji marketing and……..

DON’T REPEAT THE ABOVE MISTAKES. 😀😀