Reduce your SMS spend by removing emojis
Sending emojis to your customers is almost always a bad idea.
Whether or not your customers find them irritating or unprofessional, there’s an even stronger argument for not using them in your text campaigns.
Sending emojis costs more than sending them using plain text. A lot more.
If you use an emoji, the maximum number of characters available reduces from 160 to just 70.
That’s because emojis are not part of the GSM character set and are sent as unicode. Unicode texts contain just 70 characters per message.
So a text containing 150 characters and an emoji will use 3 text credits rather than 1. That could have a huge impact on the overall cost of a campaign.
We developed the emoji removal tool to solve this problem of unintended overspend
If you enable the filter, we’ll strip all the emojis from your messages before they are sent.
You’ll probably want to make sure that the emoji doesn’t convey any specific meaning before removing them. The texts need to make sense without the emojis.
How to easily tell if you are sending unicode or emojis
SMS insights, our complete SMS analytics tool, will show you, at a glance if you are sending unicode characters or emojis.
To access SMS Insights simply log into your account and go to SMS Insights.
How to enable the emoji stripping tool?
Log into your account and go to SMS Credits on the left, then select the Cost Saving tab.
Then scroll to Emoji Removal and switch on Enable Emoji Filtering.
What are the potential savings of emoji removal?
If you sent a 160 character text that contained an emoji, you would use 3 text credits per message. The cost to send to 1000 recipients would be £97.50 + VAT (Text cost per credit is 3.25 pence + VAT)
If you had enabled the emoji stripping tool, only 1 text credit per message would have been used and the cost would have been just £32.50 + VAT, a saving of £65.00 + VAT
Any questions?
We hope you find the emoji removal tool useful for keeping a lid on your SMS costs. We’re here to help if you have any questions or want to discuss any element of your SMS activity.
Henry.
Related articles
Another cost saving tool we’ve developed – Unicode character replacement
Explore All our SMS feature and tools on one short page
What’s the maximum length of a text? Is there a limit?
AI SMS message optimiser Save credits, use chatGPT to optimse your texts
