Four ways brands are embracing emojis

Editor's Note: This post was originally created by Spredfast before Spredfast and Lithium merged and became Khoros.

When words are simply not enough, there’s always emojis. From french fries to tulips, awkward smiles and see-no-evil monkeys, there’s an emoji for almost everything.

Not only have these fun graphics become a staple in text conversations, they’ve also been taking the marketing world by storm. From retailers to restaurants, brands around the world are using emojis to communicate with fans on social, smoothly joining consumers’ everyday conversations by using the characters they speak.

For World Emoji Day, we took time to celebrate the characters that add that extra oomf. Here are our four favorite ways brands are using emojis to express all the feels:

You have mere seconds to grab attention. The same is true in social or email. A lot of brands are turning to emojis to stand out in an inbox full of text.

In fact, more than 214,000 email campaigns have been sent using emojis in the subject line, according to MailChimp. Combine that with emojis sprinkled in the body of an email and it’s a total of 1.4 billion emojis in inboxes worldwide.

When Spring sprung, Miracle-Gro launched a first-of-its-kind interactive emoji garden.

Fans around the world Tweeted their favorite garden-inspired emoji, which was then planted in Miracle-Gro’s #springmoji virtual garden. In total, more than 140,000 emojis were planted within 24 hours, proving the growing power of the emoji trend.

In May, Domino's introduced an even easier way to ‘za—Emojis.

The results? Easy ordering, excited fans, and more than 1.7K orders through Twitter on launch day. Not only did this saucy initiative set Domino’s apart from competitors, it also connected internal customer profiles with social handles.

Bill Nye is bringing science back. To talk climate change, The Science Guy used emojis.

This video is part of a bigger initiative by General Electric to make science more engaging and relatable to students. With #EmojiScience, GE talks to millennials in the language they speak best—Emojis.

Consumers and their communication habits change, and it’s important for your brand to keep pace. If you’re looking to embrace emoji marketing, remember the golden rule: Tweet others the way you want to be Tweeted. Before implementing an emoji-heavy strategy you should test the waters to make sure emoji marketing works for your brand.