Time to write your message!

Compose a smashing and concise message to catch your Profiles. Personlise with Data tags and direct them further with links.

Enter a Sender name for your SMS. We recommend the sender name to be no less than 3 characters and no longer than 11. Some devices will not display sender names shorter than 3 characters correctly.

The accepted sender name characters are the following: A-Z, a-z, 0-9. The sender name may not be only numbers.

Write your SMS text in the message field.

Your character limit per SMS is 160 characters. Consider this as an opportunity to be short and sweet. Longer messages will be sent as multiple SMS, and the use of special characters will affect the maximum character count per SMS.

The number to the right of the message indicates how many character you have written so far.

Remember to add an unsubscribe link, to provide the possibility to opt out! Add Unsubscribe link by using the Unsubscribe Data tag.

Do you want some inspiration and use cases? Read here!

You may add links to your SMS as www.heartland.com, http://heartland.com or https://heartland.com. The link will be turned into a short aps.is/ link upon sending.

Ensure that your visitor's browsing data is correctly tracked and saved as an Event in their Profile by only using full links. Profile merge won't take place if the visitor clicks on a shortened link, or any link that will redirect the visitor and not include GET query parameters.

Use Data tags to add a person's details. The Tag will be replaced with the data that corresponds to the tag (the Attribute). Example: A tag like ##firstname## should look like a recipients name when received (e.g. Maria). Read more about Data tags and how to use them here.

To insert a data tag, type ## and choose a data tag from the dropdown menu. We support both default and Custom attributes.

Remember to include the Unsubscribe data tag! ##Unsubscribe## to all SMS messages.

Regardless of actual length, all data tags will count as 7 characters in the SMS Content step. When your message is ready to be sent, the real character count will be calculated per SMS and the credit price of your SMS sending will change accordingly.

The reason for this is that the character count for each SMS will inevitably differ, depending on the members of your Audience and their corresponding data.

While writing a single SMS, you are free to write up to 160 characters. If your SMS exceeds this number, it will be sent as two or more linked SMS. The number of characters per linked SMS will depend on whether it contains special characters, too.

Avoid using special characters, since they require extra encoding and will shorten your message's character limit to 70 characters.

Here's a table to help you visualise how the SMS content affects the character count:

The characters considered as "special characters" are those not included in the GSM Character Set (GSM 03.38), which are contained in the following table:

SMS settings