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Título
Boost your email marketing campaign! Emojis as visual stimuli to influence customer engagement
Autor(es)
Materia
Digital marketing campaigns
Customer engagement
Email marketing campaigns
Emojis
Clasificación UNESCO
5311.05 Marketing (Comercialización)
Fecha de publicación
2023-05-04
Editor
Emeral Publishing Limited
Citación
Valenzuela Gálvez, E. S., Garrido Morgado, Á., & González Benito, Ó. (2023). Boost your email marketing campaign! Emojis as visual stimuli to influence customer engagement. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 17(3), 337-352. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIM-02-2021-0033
Resumen
[EN] Purpose – In an effort to evaluate if and how emojis might boost customer engagement in email marketing, the
current research aims to analyzes emojis’ effects and investigates how certain features, such as the type of emoji
or the way of emojis’ presentation (repetition and position), moderate their effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach – This research comprises four experimental studies. The first two analyze
whether the presence and the type of emoji (facial vs non-facial) influence customer engagement. Then, two
more studies analyze the influence of the presence and type of emoji, as well as repetitions (repetition vs no
repetitions) and positions (left vs right). The data collection is through email marketing campaigns, with two
types of brands. The analysis is a fractional factorial design in one- and two-way interactions to identify the
influence of presentation features.
Findings – Emojis influence customer engagement and can trigger interactive behaviors and increase
customer engagement, even in a channel that generally is less prone to interaction. The emojis increase the
probability of opening the email, the number of times email gets opened and clicks to access additional content.
Research limitations/implications – The varied results suggest the need for more research to confirm the
findings regarding presentation features. This research offers novel implications for interactive marketing and
the theory of visual rhetoric because the research establishes how visual stimuli such as emojis can persuade
and capture customer attention and increase customer engagement.
Practical implications – Practitioners can optimize email marketing by using emojis strategically to attract
audience interest, provoke interactions, build relationships and generate word of mouth, leading to better
consumer experiences, loyalty and brand profitability.
Originality/value – Most studies use semantic analysis to analyze emojis; the current study instead tests
whether emojis can increase customer engagement in a less-interactive channel and then also considers the
moderating role of several emoji-relevant variables. In addition, the authors apply the theory of visual rhetoric
to explicate the original findings, which are gathered from a unique data set involving real marketing
campaigns.
URI
ISSN
2040-7122
DOI
10.1108/JRIM-02-2021-0033
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