Emoji is just the beginning. And why business communications are no longer effective without smiles.

Emoji, stickers and similar things will increasingly enter our virtual life, because they meet the needs of a complex process of communication between people, which has evolved over a thousand years.

Emoji is no longer just about entertainment, it is now an important tool for business and client communication. We launched Emoji in the online consultant Carrot Quest and decided to analyze the history of communication and the role of emoticons in it.

By the way, Carrot Quest is not just about chat, it is a full-fledged platform for automating Internet marketing, in which functional chat is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Emoji gaining popularity

My mom sends emoticons. I send smiles. Kids of my friends send smiles. I wonder why it became so popular so quickly? What is the reason for such a sharp jump?

Communication of people is a complex topic that has changed over many millennia. The Internet is relatively young, only about twenty. Therefore, our online communications still rely on offline communication habits. In real life, it is rich in emotions.

For example, anyone who has ever flirted knows that much more information can be obtained not from the words themselves, but from gestures, tone of voice and visual contact. They add meaning and hidden signals to our words.

Classic chat rooms are like heartless transcripts of conversations. Smiles and stickers are so popular because despite their simplicity, they add expressiveness, fun and humanity to the chat. We still have a very interesting way to go in online communications, where smiles and stickers will be just the beginning.

They appeared before

For many years, while the Internet was being introduced into our lives, all communication tools were built on the basis of the text: emails and SMS. But as we have already determined, a significant part of communication is not occupied by the language itself.

Please note, animals do an excellent job with communication without words, texts and language. In fact, the language appeared only in Homo sapiens from 30 to 100 thousand years ago. Most of the story we survived and evolved only through alternative means of communication. Mostly with gestures and body language.

The first ways to communicate on the Internet excluded emotions. But people found a loophole to bring life back to the conversation. They began to use symbols to express emotions, and began to insert them into the text to explain when they were joking :) and when they were sad :(

The Japanese created the first emoji in the 90s, forcing people to break their heads in guessing whether this was a cultural phenomenon, a particular place, since a non-standard approach and love for animation is most common in Japan. But Emoji quickly spread around the world, as soon as they were entered into Unicode (character standard) in 2010 - they can be used in various devices, browsers and applications.



Communicating with emoticons is often faster, clearer and more expressive than with text.

Perhaps, the network most often uses not a word, but an image of a thumb. This is much easier than writing “ok” or “yes”, or “understood”, or “agree”. But emotions are diverse, you should not be limited to one, so even Facebook has added new reactions to its posts.

Now emoticons are not only for teenagers, but also for business.

Human emotions are not limited to our personal lives. Therefore, it was not surprising to see an increase in interest in smiles and in workers' communications. Smilies have long been common in Asia, and are becoming the norm in the Western world as people understand the benefits.

For example, the Florida Institute of Technology has conducted a study on the use of the most simple emoticons in business letters. Here is one of the comparisons:

Instead of :

“I cannot attend your event, because at this time there is a very important meeting in my schedule. Email me and let me know what I missed. ”

Did :

“I cannot attend your event, because at this time there is a very important meeting in my schedule. Email me and let me know what I missed :) "

And they found that the same message caused the recipients less negative when it was paired with a smiley. Thus, the negative effect on the letter was reduced with a single smile. It is just a godsend for business.

And how many different emotions can be conveyed with the help of emoji to control a person’s mood on “that end of the correspondence”:



There are many examples of how you can achieve greater communication efficiency with the help of emoji. We can expect a significant increase in non-text communication methods in chat rooms and letters that we use for work.

It is difficult to imagine that in the near future we will send stickers or, even better, stickers with selfies to clients or colleagues. But I am sure that we will do it and the business will need it. Don't underestimate them. This is a deep human need for communication, and not just entertainment for teenagers.

First step - Emoji in the Carrot Quest

In modern messengers we use text, emoji, stickers, as well as gifs. Already trying to record audio and video messages. This is only the beginning of many other ways by which we can convey our emotions to the client, communicating with him as in real life. This means that we will attract his attention by 100%.

Your customers perceive online chat rooms as ordinary instant messengers and do not share ways to communicate with their friends and business, they do it in a convenient place and in their usual way. The model of communication on the Internet has seriously changed and it is already impossible not to notice this.

Step by step, we are launching new chips in service to keep up with the development of communication in the network.

Now your employees and customers can use emoji when chatting in the Carrot Quest chat service, discovering new opportunities. In addition to transferring the emotions themselves, emoticons allow you to capture the user's attention in the final stages of the funnel (when he has a heightened sense of risk) and involve the purchase of a completely new level.

Revive the dialogue with users, make it less formal and show that you are a real person to whom they are not indifferent.



Pay attention to an interesting point, 2 of our clients (girls) wrote in the chat that they were happy with smiles and used the same emoji in the text. In the specific case, the smilie is associated with the reaction of the girls to something cool. People already fully represent their reactions in smiles - this is an incredibly familiar format for everyone.



But be careful, do not overdo it with emotions and emoticons. It may look unprofessional and strange:



Emoji naturally enter into our communication, and it would be foolish for companies to ignore this fact. Acknowledge that most of your users are well aware that there are autoresponders in chat rooms and they realize that some requests are answered by bots altogether. The emoticons hint that a person is sitting on that end, able to sympathize or rejoice with the user. The user feels that the operator with him “on the same wavelength” and more trusts the operator and the company as a whole. A small introduction, and how much benefit!

If you are still not with Carrot Quest, join and communicate with users most effectively;)

With pleasure, the team of Carrot Quest , service, which automatically collects information about each visitor to your site and helps to lead him to the purchase, both manually and automatically.

Based on materials from www.intercom.com