We have all received a text or an email from someone and wondered how we should take the message. Is the sender upset, trying to use humour, or being sarcastic? Take out facial expressions, body movement and tone of voice from communication and all you have are dry words.

When coming from a friend, you have a good chance of decoding the message behind the message but when it comes to business, we need a little extra something to add context. In the 80s this meant a 🙂 as a sign to suggest a not-so-serious message. If the message was meant to go the other way, it was accompanied by a :-(. Now, the whole marketing area of using a combination of punctuation marks to express a meaning has reached another level with emojis.

So what is it about these small emotional representations that are making online marketers search for the right emotion to go with their messages and insert them into their strategies?

Well, for one, the human brain is wired to understand images; we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Sproutsocial also lets us know that emojis actually change our mood, as we are naturally drawn to human faces – humanise your communication and there you have it, a natural way to help followers feel emotionally involved. Plus, with more than 60% of social media made up of images, it is plain to see that adding images to your campaign will grab attention and with most businesses smiling away, you won’t want to fall emotionally behind.

Just so we can grasp the gigantic importance of emojis in today’s market, look at what Durex put together to ask the public to help them get a CondomEmoji made to promote safe sex.

Emojis have evolved to include lots and lots of icons, representing objects, feelings and animals. So with the world clicking away right and left, how can an online business make use of emojis in its marketing mix? Here are just a few ways but be warned, know your audience, use appropriate emojis and keep track of what you have used and how successful it has been.

Feeling the social media marketing vibe – social media is really where all the action is. Whether you are betting on your company’s Facebook page to get you noticed, on Twitter to get the little birdy to spill the business beans, or if Instagram is your pick, you really can’t go wrong if you use emojis to get a message across. These platforms are the perfect environment for them because emojis are used in friendly, casual conversations, and you really can’t get more social than that.

Tip: be creative with it, or ask your followers to be the creative ones. Ask them to come up with a message only using emojis and the best one can win some of your products.

Make emotion part of your content – blogs are great ways to keep your audience informed, get traffic to your website and keep the lines of communication open, but all words can be a little boring, so spice things up with a few ✌in the middle of the blog to highlight the image you want to stand out. Also leaving the reader with a few emojis at the end of the blog makes the message even more memorable.

Emailing has never been more personal – we all receive a large number of emails a day, and if you are involved in the business world you probably receive lots, lots more. This means that the first part of your strategy has worked, the person you have targeted has received the email but have they opened it? Have they even realised what the email was about before deleting it straight from their inbox? Well, a great way to increase the chances of the email being opened and read is by adding an emoji to the subject of the email.

So what are you waiting for? Start sharing the emojis and wear your business heart on your sleeve to have a sea of people fall in love with what you are doing.