Marketing & Promotion

Emojis inside app push alerts significantly influence engagement says Leanplum

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Emojis that are placed inside mobile app push alerts are proving to increase user retention and engagement according to a new study out from Leanplum.

Leanplum has announced a new Mobile Marketing Trends report, Unlocking Engagement & Growth With Emojis, that confirms the effectiveness of emoji usage in push notifications and emails. The data verifies that emojis are significantly more likely to influence mobile engagement and aid retention.

“We used Leanplum to test the effectiveness of emojis in push notification campaigns,” said Joanna Hill, Head of Digital at Miss Selfridge. “In one of our tests, we saw an 81 percent lift in open rates and a 363 percent lift in revenue from the message with emojis.”

The report, a follow-up to the popular study released last year, confirms that emoji popularity and engagement continues to rise. For this year’s report, Leanplum analyzed 300 million emails and push notifications between June 1, 2017 to June 1, 2018, including worldwide data.

Unlocking Mobile Engagement & Growth With Emojis:

Emoji usage continues to rise. The average number of emojis used per message and the percentage of messages including at least one emoji both doubled in the past year.
Emails with emojis are opened 66 percent more than emails without emojis.
Push notifications with emojis are opened an astounding 254 percent more than push notifications without emojis. That’s 3x higher compared to last year’s report.
Apps that use emojis experience 26 percent fewer uninstalls. In addition to in-the-moment engagement, emojis contribute to long-lasting user retention.

"Emojis are the sweethearts of mobile marketing. Since 2017, both the average number of emojis used per message and the percentage of messages including at least one emoji have doubled. And, more surprisingly, we discovered that emojis contribute to lasting retention, not just in-the-moment engagement. As marketers become savvier about the irresistible draw of emojis, we predict that the popularity and impact of these playful characters will keep skyrocketing." said Joyce Solano, SVP of Global Marketing at Leanplum.

Leanplum's mobile engagement platform captures more than 24 billion mobile data points daily and delivers over 50 million messages every hour, providing the real-time insights and capabilities to help marketers deliver in-the-moment engagement and build meaningful customer relationships. This gives Leanplum a vast source of data intelligence on push notifications and their effectiveness on mobile marketing campaigns.