Sending a campaign doesn't have to mean watching your costs climb. With a few habits around how you compose your message and who you send it to, you can cut spend significantly without sacrificing reach or results. This guide walks through the practical levers you can pull.
How campaign cost works
Your campaign cost is a simple multiplication of three elements.
For an SMS message:
Number of recipients × number of message segments × cost per segment
The cost per segment is a fixed rate, so the two factors you control are the number of recipients and the number of message segments. A message segment is the billing unit carriers charge for. For more information on message segments, please see How to Calculate Message Segments. A single send can be made up of one or several segments depending on its length and the characters it contains. Because the three elements multiply together, a change to either lever ripples across the whole campaign. Trimming one segment off your message saves that cost on every recipient.
Your two biggest levers:
- Reduce the message segments in your send (each message costs less to send)
- Reduce the number of recipients (you send fewer messages overall)
A quick note on terminology: the word "segment" gets used two ways in messaging. There's the message segment (the carrier billing unit in the formula above) and the audience segment (a group of members you're sending to). This article uses "segment" for the billing unit and "audience" or "filter" for the group of people.
Part 1: Lower the cost per message
Start by understanding how segments are counted
Everything in this section builds on how your sends are composed of message segments. The short version: plain text fits 160 characters per segment, but the moment you add something like a special character, like an emoji, the encoding changes and each segment holds only 70 characters.
For the full breakdown of how segments are calculated, including the character thresholds and what counts against them, see How to Calculate Segments. The tips below are the practical ways to keep that count low.
Trim the copy
The simplest lever is also the most reliable. Tightening your wording to stay under a segment boundary directly lowers cost on every recipient. Cutting a single sentence that tips you from two segments into one saves that extra segment across your entire audience.
A few easy wins:
- Cut filler words and redundant phrasing.
- Lead with the offer or action instead of a long preamble.
As you adjust your message, watch how your segment count changes. Community displays a live message segment counter while you compose, giving you full visibility into the number of segments your message will use. You can find it in the bottom right corner of the compose window.
Watch for the hidden encoding traps
Emojis are the obvious culprit, but they're not the only ones. Plenty of innocent-looking characters quietly force your message into UCS-2 and inflate your segment count. For more information, see A Guide to Segment-Based Billing.
- Emojis of any kind.
- Curly "smart" quotes (“ “ ‘ ‘) instead of straight quotes (" ').
- Em dashes and en dashes (— and –) instead of hyphens (-).
- Accented or non-Latin characters beyond the limited set GSM-7 supports.
- Ellipsis characters (...) instead of three periods.
These often sneak in when you copy and paste from Word, Google Docs, email, or a CRM, which auto-convert quotes and dashes behind the scenes. Before launch, paste your copy into a plain-text editor first to confirm the encoding reads as GSM-7.
Avoid the characters that count double
A handful of symbols technically live in GSM-7 but are billed as two characters because they require an escape sequence: ^, {, }, [, ], ~, \, |, and the euro sign €. They won't flip you to Unicode, but they eat your character budget twice as fast. If you can swap them out, do.
Shorten your links
A full URL can easily run 40 to 60 characters, which is a meaningful chunk of a 160-character segment. Using Community’s Link Shortening reclaims that space, often enough to keep a message in a single segment, and has the added benefit of cleaner click tracking.
Convert long messages to MMS
Here's a counterintuitive one: when a message is long, MMS can be cheaper than SMS. An MMS counts as a single billing unit and holds up to roughly 1,600 characters regardless of length or encoding, while a long SMS keeps stacking up segment charges.
So if your message is going to run several segments anyway, adding a piece of media (an image, for example) and converting it to a single MMS can drop the cost below what the multi-segment SMS would have been. As a rule of thumb, any message running over 2 segments is a strong MMS candidate. It also tends to look better and drive more engagement, so you're often trading up on both cost and performance. Note that media is required for sending an MMS. You can not just send the 1,600 characters via an MMS without a piece of media.
Part 2: Send to fewer, better people
Prioritize your most engaged members
You don't always need to send to your entire audience to hit your goal. One of the most popular ways to control cost is to narrow your send to the people most likely to actually engage or convert.
In practice, this means building your audience filter as usual, then sending only to the top slice by engagement. For example, take your target audience and send to the top 25% most engaged members. You concentrate on the people most likely to click, which protects your budget. If the campaign performs, you can always send a follow-up wave to a broader group.
Suppress the chronically unengaged
The flip side of prioritizing engagement is trimming the dead weight. Members who haven't opened, clicked, or responded across many recent campaigns rarely start now, and they cost you a segment every time. Excluding long-inactive members from routine sends lowers cost and keeps your engagement rates healthier.
Quick pre-send checklist
Before you hit send, run through this:
- Is the copy as tight as it can be?
- Any stray emojis, curly quotes, or em dashes hiding in pasted text?
- Are long URLs shortened?
- If it's a long message, would MMS be cheaper?
- Have you checked the message segment counter before sending?
- Am I sending to the right audience, or could I focus on the most engaged?
Small adjustments on each of these compounds quickly. Tighten the message, watch the encoding, and aim it at the right people, and you'll see the difference on your next invoice.