Using Emoji in Push Notifications

Emoji is a huge part of today’s online and mobile experience, whether you like it or not. So, if you’re not using Emoji in your push notifications yet, now is the time to try.

Why send push notifications with Emoji?

Including Emoji characters in your push notifications is easy. However, we see that many of our users aren’t taking advantage of this neat little feature. So, here are some reasons why you should add Emoji to your push messages:

• Many people’s decisions are more easily influenced by emotion rather than facts. Seeing those little positive images can provoke a pleasant association and influence the user’s emotion
• Add some visuals for grabbing user’s attention (this is especially relevant for iOS push notifications, since iOS doesn’t let you send images via push)
• By using Emoji characters instead of words, you can shorten your text and pack more words into the first line of your push message (remember that many users don’t read the entire push notification and instead just briefly look at the first line).

How to add emoji to your push notifications

With Pushwoosh, you can easily send push notifications with Emoji characters. Let’s say you want to announce a holiday sale with the following push notification: “This Holiday Season, get 30% off all products” and you want to include a christmas tree Emoji. If you’re sending a push manually from Pushwoosh Control Panel, simply click on the yellow smiley as you type in your message and choose the Emoji character you want.

You can also set-up sending push notifications automatically using our Remote API feature. It takes an extra step, but it’s also very easy. Emojis are described by their Unicode characters, so all you have to do is find the Unicode value you need and send it within the JSON payload.

Going back to our holiday sale example, “This Holiday Season, get 30% off all products” with Christmas trees Emoji, you would need to find the universal Unicode value for the Christmas tree, which is \uD83C\uDF84 and add it to your /createMessage request, like this:

"content": "\uD83C\uDF84 This Holiday Season, get 30% off all products \uD83C\uDF84"

*Note: You may find info online that in order to send Emoji pushes you’d need different codes for iOS and Android. This information is outdated. Today, the same Unified Unicode character works for both iOS and Android.*