Taking SMS to the next level with emojis

You’re using SMS messages to communicate with your audience ‍ ‍ ‍ and enjoying some great response rates , but what’s the next step to ensure that open rates are maintained and your audience continues to engage with you? Using emojis in SMS to keep messages fresh and inject a bit of humour might just be what you’re looking for to liven things up a bit.

An exciting and underused extension of the standard text message when it comes to promotional SMS, emojis offer a new and friendly way to reach customers via the mobile phone that never leaves their side. Adding emojis to SMS has the potential to increase engagement using just a few words and an image or two.

Emojis have come a long way since the humble smiley face was first used in 1982. Now a way to communicate all manners of things, emojis are bordering on another language  and are being used in a multitude of situations from describing the plot of a movie to being the subject of an actual movie itself.

Highly effective for reaching a wide range of markets from fast food to party planning and ticketing to beauty salons , there’s an emoji for almost every eventuality. But let’s not get carried away . Whilst emojis can be leveraged in SMS to increase ⬆ customer engagement for a multitude of applications, the sense of humour they imply will neither be appropriate or welcomed across the board. No one wants to be reminded of an impending doctor’s appointment with a syringe emoji, especially when they have needle issues and are dreading the appointment. Think more along the lines of using the bunch of flowers emoji in an SMS to remind that Valentine’s Day is coming up and that it’d be wise not to forget this year…

One 1⃣ thing to remember if you are thinking about using emojis in SMS is that the message itself needs to be formatted differently to a ‘regular’ text message and is in fact written in a different ‘language’ . Regular SMS is written in GSM whereas other text messages, including emojis, are written in Unicode. To explain how this might affect messages containing emojis, a smiley face in Unicode looks like this: ‘U+1F600’ and a heart looks like this: ‘U+2764’. What does this actually mean for the individual sending SMS? Well, it means that your character limitations get used up pretty quickly . To compound this issue, Unicode (close enough right?) SMS has a maximum of 70 characters whereas GSM has a maximum of 160. Of course getting round this issue is not really a complex thing – multiple emoji filled SMS can be concatenated to arrive as one lovely looking message at their end destination , but if in essence it’s actually 2 or 3 messages, charges per message will be applied accordingly.

You may be about to announce that ‘you’re out’ with this revelation but just take a minute ⏰ to think about the potential increase in engagement you could get by sending smart, relevant content to your customers via a medium that is usually no more than an arm’s length away from them. In reality an increase in cost would only be incurred if you were to go on at some length in your message which, when you think about it, isn’t really the idea behind a text message. Think of character restrictions instead as an opportunity to really drill down to the message you want to get across – your customer will no doubt appreciate it . Being brief and to the point is a definite advantage when it comes to grabbing attention these days – humans now apparently have a lower attention span than goldfish, so you need to make sure you grab it quickly as possible!

So next time you want to let your customers know about a flaming hot sale think about how they might respond to emojis in a text message, it could be just the kick you’re looking for to inject new life into your response rates. Drop us a line if you need any help ⁉ getting set up with sending emojis to your customer base, or if you’re chomping at the bit and just want to get started, check out a comprehensive list of emojis here. First published by CLX Communications