SMS

SMS (Short Message Service) is one of the most widely used communication channels, offering instant delivery and high open rates. Message2Give provides comprehensive SMS capabilities with support for both standard text messages and rich content including emojis and special characters.

This page covers SMS-specific features, character limits, unit calculations, and best practices for creating effective SMS campaigns. For general message type information, refer to the General Message Types documentation.

Unicode Characters

A Unicode character is a character that you can't type directly from your keyboard, like emojis (😊❤️✨➡️) or special symbols (▧◁◆◓).

Unicode characters are known as non GSM characters and increase the number of SMS Units that your message costs. Read more about SMS Units and their importance here.

When composing an SMS, you can use the Replace Unicode Characters checkbox above the editor. Selecting this option automatically replaces all Unicode characters with #, converting the message to strictly GSM characters to reduce the SMS Unit cost.

Message Content

The text editor used for composing SMS messages is the standard editor described in the General Message Types documentation. It supports plain text, placeholders, and templates.

SMS Units

As you may notice when creating your SMS message, there is a counter in the bottom right for how many characters your message has, but also how many 'SMS Units' it costs.

Message2Give charges you per SMS unit, not per message. Thus, it is ideal to reduce your SMS Usage. A message with more SMS units costs more money to send, so it is ideal to reduce them. They are calculated based on GSM characters. A table of all GSM characters is provided below. Most common characters are GSM characters. However, non-GSM characters include unicode characters and emojis.

If a message consists only of GSM characters, then a unit will consist of 160 characters. If there is more than one unit, then each unit will consist of 153 characters.

if a message contains any non-GSM characters, then a unit will consist of 70 charactres. If there is more than one unit, then each unit will consist of 67 characters.

Message2Give supports messages up to 10 units. That means a character cap of 1530 for all GSM characters or 670 for not all GSM characters.