Emojis in Marketing Up 777% in 2015
Emojis, or digital picture characters, are being used 777% more by marketers, nearly eight-times as much as they were from the start of 2015, according to statistics from mobile marketing automation company Appboy.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this number is on the rise, as The 2015 Emoji Report from Emogi found that 92% of online consumers use emojis in some capacity. Breaking it down even further, the company said 78% of women and 60% of men use emojis several times per week.
There’s also a greater need than ever to communicate in short order, as Jesse Tao, senior manager at Appboy, noted on Relate, Appboy’s blog.
To put things into perspective, at an average adult reading speed of 300 words per minute, you need to communicate your message in under 40 words—or a little more than a Tweet,” he writes. “How do you communicate more and more powerfully with less? Well, isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?”
The stats from Appboy are downright intriguing. The use of emojis, which was on the rise all of 2015, started to spike after the “tears of joy” or “crying laughing” emoji was named as the “Word of the Year” by Oxford Dictionaries.
Perhaps even more shocking is the medium where emoji use saw the most growth: e-mail. Appboy found that e-mail use of emojis were up 7,123%, while Android emoji use was up 1,070% and iOS emoji use was up a still-impressive 662%.
Which industry saw the greatest rise in emoji use? Retail and commerce, according to Appboy, as brands heavily used emojis such as the party-hat and confetti, a 
hand pointing to the right, and the pink heart with a blue arrow through it. Meanwhile, the “tears of joy” emoji wasn’t even in the top 10. Go figure.
Emojis likely won’t go away anytime soon, Tao writes, so it will be up to each brand to figure out how they can best utilize these modern-day emoticons.
Witten by Hal Conick at AMA