TLDR: Using an emoji in your communications with customers after a delivery will not necessarily cause them to tip you more money if you didn’t.
In 1995, Bruce Rind and Prashant Bordia did a study at a Philadelphia restaurant. They had waiters and waitresses draw smiley faces on the back of customers’ checks. The result?
Waitresses averaged 28% tips when they did not draw a smiley face and 33% when drawing smiley faces. The difference was statistical significance. Meaning it’s unlikely to be due to random chances. Waiters saw their tips decrease from 21% to 18% on average. It wasn’t statistically significant. And they never figured out exactly why it declined.
I think it probably made the customers believe the men were hitting on them.
There. Mystery solved.
That was in the 1990s. Long before this study, a study in 1978 showed that smiling resulted in more tips.
That was before the internet. Now, we have to deal with emojis. Research shows that in marketing, emojis can enhance the experience of consumers and their willingness to purchase.
Question: Does Using An Emoji At The End Of A Delivery Impact Tip Earnings?
This study will see if ending your communications using an emoji impacts the tip you get with grocery delivery.
I collected data on some grocery deliveries I did back in March and April 2021. I would conclude my communications with the customer with an emoji, a smiley face emoji. Basically, after all my delivery, I’d leave the Shipt customer with, “You’re all set. Delivered 🙂”
Data Collection:
Between March 8th to March 14th, I completed 75 Shipt orders that were not bundled together. For these 75 orders, I did not end my communication with any smiley face or emojis. These will serve as a control.
Between March 22nd to April 11th of 2021, I completed 100 Shipt orders not bundled together. For these 100 orders, I ended my communications to the customer with the smiley face text above.
Afterward, I waited for all the tips to come in.
Results:
As you can see, the average total payout (pay + tips) for both conditions is about $15.30. And the average payout was not too far apart: $9.58 and $10.45.
But it was the tips that were very different.
Under the normal condition, 41 out of 75 orders earned a tip or 54.67%. Among the orders with a smiley face at the end, 61 out of the 100 orders earned a tip or 61%.
The average tip was $10.60 for orders without the emoji used at the end of the communication.
The average tip earned with the smiley face emoji was $7.85.
I ran a Student’s T-test (a fancy statistical analysis) on the tips to see if they are different by chance or not. Here’s the result:
What does this mean?
We only care about that row with P(T<=t) two-tail 0.05799633.
This number means that there’s more than a 5.79% chance the differences between the two averages for the tips are significantly different. In science, you want it to be under 5% to say the difference is statistically significant.
Discussion
There are other things to consider, also. For example, order size would impact the number of tips for a given order.
That said, I don’t believe the smiley face causes the customer to tip more in the amount of money. But I think it does increase the likelihood that they do tip (even if a small amount).
Do smiley faces in your communication with the customer result in more money? I don’t think so (on a statistical level). But I think it’s good to be using emojis in your communications with customers when possible.
Why? Because it will affect your rating as a shopper.
One of the things that Shipt customers rate their shoppers on is friendliness. Using an emoji will make you come off as more friendly and keep your overall rating above 4.7 to avoid deactivation.
The same goes for food delivery. For example, in the food delivery app, DoorDash, you can see that the Customer Rating has similar metrics as Shipt (communication, friendliness).
And if you click on the “Friendiness” in the DoorDash app, a bunch of tips from elite Dashers will appear. And they all use expressing yourself with a smile on your face (emoji included).
In conclusion, using emojis will probably help pad your stats when it comes to your rating as a grocery shopper, food delivery driver, or even rideshare driver. Still, it won’t get you a lot of tips.
But if you choose to use emojis for the sake of being friendly, be careful. Research has shown that emojis that express strong emotional meanings are considered more proper for women than for men. Emojis that are weaker in an emotional sense but still convey friendliness are more appropriate for men. So guys, keep it suitable; otherwise, you might see a reduction in your tips like those waiters did in the Philadelphia experiment.
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