Best practices for SMS marketing campaigns

Before you create an SMS campaign, review the best practices, message character count considerations, and quiet hours to optimize campaign performance and reduce chances of customer opt-out. Following these guidelines helps you maximize campaign effectiveness, reduce costs from message splitting or filtering, and maintain high engagement rates.

Best practices for creating an SMS marketing campaign

Review the following best practices for creating an SMS campaign:

• Ensure that your campaign clearly identifies your store as the sender, that it's a marketing communication, and it provides an easy, localized opt-out option.
• Send SMS messages in the local language of your target market, or English, when English is a standard language in your market.
• Keep messages concise with one clear call-to-action to improve customer engagement and reduce opt-outs.
• To avoid higher messaging costs and spam filtering, aim to keep your campaigns within the character limits for a single message.
• To ensure full click and sales tracking in your Shopify Messaging analytics, and to keep your character count down, shorten your links when you create a campaign.
• Avoid sending messages during quiet hours.
• If you're a new sender, or are creating a new campaign, then consider doing the following:
  • Send a test before scheduling your campaign to view how it displays to your subscribers.
  • Send your campaign to a small percentage of your audience first, so that you can monitor campaign performance before sending it to a full customer segment.

Understanding SMS character limits

SMS messages have character limits that affect both your costs and message delivery. Keeping your messages concise improves readability for your customers and reduces costs, as you're charged per message sent.

Character limits per message

The character limit depends on the type of characters that you use:

• Standard characters: 160 characters per message
• Non-standard characters: 70 characters per message, including emojis, special characters, and accented letters

The character count displays in the message editor when you create your campaign. If a personalization variable, such as First name, contains a non-standard character in a customer's data, then the sent message's character count might be higher than what displays in the editor. Personalizations containing only standard characters don't impact the character count.

Standard and non-standard characters

Standard characters come from the GSM-7 character set, which includes the following characters:

• Latin characters (A–Z uppercase and lowercase)
• Numbers (0–9)
• Some Greek characters
• Some symbols and other characters

Non-standard characters are any characters that aren't in the GSM-7 character set, including emojis, Unicode characters, and À, á, â, ç, ê, É, È, Ì, î, í, Ò, ô, ó, Ù, and ú.

You can use Twilio's Messaging Segment Calculator to check your message for non-standard characters. A result of GSM-7 means that your message contains only standard characters, and UCS-2 means it contains at least one non-standard character.

Exceeding the per-message character limit

If your campaign exceeds the character limit, then it's automatically split into multiple messages:

• You're charged for each message that's included in the campaign. For example, a 200-character campaign counts as 2 messages.
• Each message counts toward your total message costs.
• Your customers receive the content as one continuous message in all supported countries except for in Luxembourg. Messages that exceed the per-message character limit to customers in Luxembourg are split into multiple messages, and don't display as one continuous message.

To reduce costs, you can do the following when you create a campaign:

• Select Shorten links to shorten the URLs in your message.
• Select Replace special characters such as é and ç in personalized values to replace special characters. For example, "ç" becomes "c".

If you choose not to replace special characters in your message, then the character count remains 70 characters, and your sending costs might be higher. Learn more about pricing and billing for SMS marketing campaigns.

SMS marketing quiet hours

Quiet hours ensure that you comply with laws and regulations that prevent customers from receiving marketing communications at unreasonable hours. You can't send promotional messages during quiet hours, which vary by location.

Quiet hours are based on the local timezone of your customers. Messages sent during quiet hours are dropped and then retried after quiet hours.

Canada, European Union, and United Kingdom

Quiet hours in Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom are from 20:00 to 08:00 daily.

United States

Quiet hours in the United States are from 21:00 to 08:00 daily, with exceptions in the following states: