Emoticons and Customer Experience: the Benefits of Sentiment-driven Marketing

Emoticons have transformed the way we communicate and express ourselves: from social-media to smartphones, they are becoming the new body language as they add feelings and mood to the conversation. The rise of emoticons in customer experience and marketing strategies is due to the incredible amount of information they can deliver and return.

In a 2015 study by Penn State University, researcher S. Shyam Sundar stated not only that emoticons are more powerful than pictures, but that they can display empathy and responsiveness in online interactions between customers and service representatives, especially in the ecommerce context.

In fact, emoticons make customers feel like the brand has an emotional presence: emotional content in general can increase the effectiveness of marketing as much as 70%, according to a recent Persado report, while the use of emojis in marketing communication has increased 775% year-over-year.

Facebook follows the flow, and recently expanded the ways users can express their feelings on the platform by introducing Reactions: this is not only a valuable tool for customers, but for marketers too, as it can turn to a way to segment and understand audiences better.

In a 2014 Marketing Trends Survey, marketers ranked sentiment as the third-most valuable element to be extracted within data-driven strategies, after web behaviour and browsing behaviour.
Capturing not just what customers think, but how they think and make decisions, what’s their mood and purchase intention, makes sentiment-driven marketing solutions very valuable for a business.
Adding an emotional feedback tool to your customer experience surveys is an instant effective and engaging way to gather information. It brings your brand closer tu customers developing digital empathy and creating an emotional connection with them.

As GeckoBoard states, “Being able to access and decipher language, and therefore emotion, has become the holy grail for today’s marketing executives”.