SMS has become one of the most effective communication methods to engage with customers, but what exactly is an SMS?
Short Message Service (SMS), also known as text messaging, is a mobile phone service that enables the sending and receiving of short text messages between mobile devices or between platforms like Instasent and customer mobiles.
This service has several key features:
The maximum length of an SMS is 160 characters for Latin characters (GSM). If you include Unicode characters (such as accents, emojis, Chinese or Arabic characters, etc.), the SMS length is reduced to 70 characters.
If an SMS exceeds the character limit, it will be split into multiple messages, but it will still be received as a single SMS by the recipient.
URLs can be included in SMS messages, but images cannot.
SMS messages are delivered and received almost instantly.
Spam is virtually non-existent in SMS messaging (although SMS messages could be flagged as spam if sent from suspicious senders or contain malicious links, which goes against Instasent's purpose).
While you can usually create and send SMS messages on our platform without any issues, certain countries may have restrictions. If you plan to send SMS messages to countries outside of Spain, we recommend contacting our customer service or referring to our guide for more information.
When an SMS is sent from our platform, the mobile operator provides us with the status of the message: Delivered, Sent, Failed, or Expired. To learn more about SMS message statuses, you can refer to our dedicated article.