SMS campaign planning
Plan SMS campaigns that land
Build a text-campaign blueprint per client — write the message against a live character and segment counter, set the audience, plan for opt-in, preview it in a real phone, then submit it as a brief. Try the demo below, or start your own workspace.
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- Plans from $99/month
- Built for multi-client agencies
- Your brand across the console
SMS campaign planning
SMS marketing campaign planning software for agencies
A text message lands in a pocket within seconds, which is exactly why an SMS campaign deserves to be planned rather than fired off. Every character costs money, every send needs the right audience, and the wrong tone or a missed opt-in rule turns a high-intent channel into a complaint. SMS Planning in AI Marketing Dashboard makes the planning step deliberate and quick: a text-campaign blueprint per client where you choose the theme, name the campaign, write the message against a live counter, set who receives it, and preview it in a real phone before it ever goes out. It is the leanest planner in the console because SMS is the leanest channel — and getting a short message exactly right is the whole job.
What the counter knows
Segments, counted before anything is sent
Plain text fits 160 characters in one segment, and 153 in each once a message runs longer. A single emoji switches the whole text to Unicode, and the numbers shrink.
160
characters in one segment of plain text
153
characters per segment once a message needs more than one
70
characters in one segment when an emoji makes the text Unicode
67
characters per segment in a longer Unicode message
Three short steps
A text campaign, planned in three steps
Setup, message and review: the whole plan fits one short flow.
Set it up
Name the campaign, pick its Theme and the brand name recipients know, and choose the audience: contacts from the client's CRM who have a valid phone number.Write against the counter
Pick a saved message or write one. The count shows characters and segments as you type, and the plan flags a text with no opt-out line or no brand name.Preview and submit
See the text in a phone bubble beside the audience count, then submit for approval. SMS sending is not connected, so you send the campaign from your own SMS tool and mark it sent.
Plan the text before it is sent
Set the audience and the message in three steps, watch the segment count and send the plan for approval.
Plans start at $99/month.
On this page
Text-campaign blueprints planned one client at a time
Pick the theme, name and audience in a guided builder
An SMS campaign should never start as a stray line in a chat thread, so the builder opens on the few decisions that actually shape a text send. You choose the marketing theme the campaign belongs to, give it a name your team will recognize on the board, and set the audience it speaks to — all in a short, ordered flow rather than a blank message box. The plan that comes out is a tidy blueprint scoped to one client, not a one-off draft that lives in someone's phone.
Keeping each text campaign tied to a single client means your roster of SMS plans stays organized by account and by angle, so a promo blast for one client and a reminder sequence for another follow the same predictable shape. Anyone on the team can open a blueprint and immediately see who it is for, what it is about and where it sits, which is what turns a quick text send into reviewable, repeatable agency work.
Write the message with a live character and segment counter
Control length and cost before a single text is sent
SMS is billed in segments, 160 characters of plain text or 153 once a message needs more than one, and only 70 or 67 once an emoji switches it to Unicode, so the composer shows a live character and segment count as you type — a message that quietly tips from one segment into two doubles the cost of the whole campaign, and the counter makes that visible while you can still trim a word. You see exactly how the carrier will split the text, so length is a deliberate choice instead of a billing surprise after the send.
When the campaign should reuse copy the team already wrote, you can pull a saved message straight from the client's marketing library rather than rewriting it from scratch. Either way the message ends up on-brand and within budget before it leaves the planner — the counter keeps the wording tight, and the library keeps it consistent with the rest of the client's voice.
Set the audience the text campaign targets
Decide who receives the message at planning time
A text reaches people instantly and personally, which makes the audience the most important decision in the plan. The builder captures who the campaign is for — the subscriber segment the message should go to — as part of the blueprint, so a VIP offer reaches the right list and a broad announcement is scoped on purpose rather than blasted at everyone by default.
Settling the audience while you plan, alongside the message and the preview, means a reviewer sees who will be texted before anything goes out. The recipient list lives with the plan, so when the campaign is handed to whoever sends it there is no guesswork about which segment it targets — the audience was agreed when the campaign was designed, not improvised at send time.
Plan the send with opt-in and compliance front of mind
Keep text marketing responsible from the blueprint up
SMS is a permission channel, and the plan treats it that way. The planner flags a missing opt-out line and a missing brand name, but it does not record consent, so choose an audience of people who asked to hear from the brand rather than a cold list, and keep proof of that elsewhere. Planning the send responsibly is part of building the blueprint, not an afterthought once the text is already drafted.
The wider registration work that legitimate text marketing requires, such as A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration in the US, is done with the client's messaging provider rather than in this planner. Because the approved text is then sent by hand from that provider, confirm the registration is in place before a plan reaches launch. That separation keeps the planner focused on the message and the audience, and it means the SMS you plan can go out the right way.
Preview the message in a realistic phone bubble
See the text exactly as a subscriber will read it
A short message reads differently in a composer than it does on a phone, so the builder renders the campaign in an iMessage-style bubble — the real wrapping, the real line breaks, the real way the text lands on a screen. Stakeholders see the actual message a subscriber will receive instead of a row in a spreadsheet, which makes an approval decision immediate and obvious.
Because the preview reflects the plan, tightening a sentence or swapping a word updates the bubble as you edit, so an awkward break or a sentence that runs too long is caught at planning time when it is trivial to fix. What you approve in the preview is what arrives in the subscriber's thread — the planner closes the gap between the draft and the delivered text.
Hand the finished text campaign over as a brief
Segment count, audience and send window settled before anyone texts anybody
A text send commits things a display ad never does: how many segments each message bills at, which audience receives it, and the window it is allowed to land in. So the closing step turns the blueprint into a brief that carries them — the named audience and its recipient count, the message with its character and segment count, the teammates who will run the send, and a description where the send window, a quiet-hours constraint or anything else the client insisted on is written down.
Submit it and the brief opens as a review task in the In Review column of Projects, addressed to the reviewer you picked, and Launch takes only a plan approved as it stands. The text that was counted and previewed is the text attached to that task, so nobody retypes a message on the way to the send — which is exactly where a broken link or a phrase that trips carrier filtering tends to appear.
How SMS segments, encodings and cost add up
A text is billed in segments, and the characters you type decide how long a segment is.
GSM-7 and Unicode: the two encodings
One segment of plain GSM-7 text holds 160 characters, and each segment of a longer message holds 153. Add one character outside that alphabet, such as an emoji, a curly quote or a letter the alphabet lacks, and the whole message switches to Unicode: 70 characters in one segment and 67 in each of several, where an emoji counts as two characters. A few symbols (the caret, braces, backslash, square brackets, tilde, vertical bar and euro sign) count as two characters each even in plain text.
The same offer, written four ways
Take this message: "Pinecrest Dental: cleaning slots are open this month. Book at pinecrestdental.example/book", followed on a line of its own by the standard opt-out text, Reply STOP to opt out. The table shows what four small edits do to it. The figures come from the planner's own counter.
| Version | What changed | Characters | Encoding and segments |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Plain text, brand first, opt-out line on its own line | 112 | 1 segment · GSM-7 |
| B | A tooth emoji added after the brand name | 114 | 2 segments · Unicode |
| C | A curly apostrophe pasted from a document: Pinecrest Dental’s slots | 113 | 2 segments · Unicode |
| D | A second sentence added to version A | 174 | 2 segments · GSM-7 |
What a segment costs
The sender is billed for each segment sent to each recipient, so the cost of a campaign is the segments in the message times the people in the audience. A message that crosses a boundary by a few characters costs every recipient another segment. Trim before you add, and type straight apostrophes and quotation marks, because text pasted from a word processor often arrives with curly ones.
Walking through the SMS planner: setup, message, review
Name the campaign and the audience
Pick the client's positioning theme, name the campaign, type the brand name recipients know it by, then choose the audience. The count shows the contacts with a valid phone number and how many were left out.
Compare messages by segment
Choose a saved message from the copy library or write one. The counter shows characters, encoding and segments, and how many characters remain in the current segment. Remove the emoji and watch the count change.
Add the opt-out line and the brand name
If the message has no STOP-style wording, the planner warns and offers a button that adds the standard line. It also warns when the message never names the brand.
Review and submit
The review step shows the audience count, a phone preview and any warnings, and says plainly that SMS launches by hand. Choose a reviewer and submit; the plan is locked until they decide, a review task opens in Projects, and the reviewer records the decision in Team > Approvals or on the plan.
Launch, send and record
After approval, Launch runs its checks again and opens a task. Send the texts through your own SMS tool and, once they have gone out, mark the launch as sent.
Who gets the text: contacts with a usable phone number
The audience comes from the client's CRM. Choose pipelines, stages and tags, or use a saved audience. A lead counts only when the number in its phone field can be read as a real number. The planner forgives spaces, dots, dashes, slashes and parentheses and drops a trailing extension because a text cannot dial one. A number written without a country code is read as a United States number only if it fits the US numbering plan; numbers from other countries need the + or 00 country code, or they are left out as unreadable.
The count shows who is in and who was left out: leads with no phone, an unreadable number, a repeated number, a Do Not Disturb mark (counted as do not contact), or a place on a saved list in a restricted pipeline. It is a count of reachable phones. It says nothing about whether those people agreed to be texted.
Opt-out wording, brand name and sending hours
The planner checks wording and reminds you of the hours. It cannot prove that anyone agreed to be texted.
- Opt-out wording
- A STOP-style instruction such as Reply STOP to opt out. The planner accepts STOP, opt out or unsubscribe as a whole word, warns when it finds none, and can add the standard line on its own line so it never runs into a link.
- Brand name
- A text arrives from a number, not a name, so the message should say who it is from. The check looks for the brand name entered in the plan (the client's name when none is entered), or its first word when that word has three or more letters.
- Sending hours
- The launch checks remind you to send between 8 AM and 9 PM in each recipient's time zone. The send happens in your own SMS tool, so keeping to the window is your call at that moment.
- Consent
- The planner does not store or check proof that someone agreed to be texted. Keep that record in a lead note or custom field in the CRM, or in your SMS tool, and text only people who opted in.
- STOP replies
- The planner does not process STOP replies. Your SMS tool has to honor them, and setting Do Not Disturb on the contact in the CRM keeps them out of the next audience.
None of this is legal advice. Rules differ by country and by carrier, so confirm them for each client's market before a campaign goes out.
Approval, launch checks and the manual send
What approval freezes
Approval covers the message, the audience and the brand name as they stand. When a launch is created, those are frozen as a spec together with the encoding and the segment count. If anyone edits the plan after approval, the approval no longer matches and the plan needs a fresh decision before Launch will take it.
What the launch checks look at
| Check | What happens |
|---|---|
| Message | Fails when there is nothing to send |
| Opt-out wording | Warns when no STOP, opt out or unsubscribe wording is found |
| Brand name | Warns when the message never names the brand |
| Length | Warns above one segment and fails when the message runs past the maximum |
| Audience | Fails when nobody in the audience has a valid phone number |
| Sending hours | Reminds you to send between 8 AM and 9 PM in each recipient's time zone |
SMS sending is not connected to the product, so every SMS launch is a handoff. A failed check stops the launch, while a warning is information for you to weigh. Record the launch as sent only after the texts have gone out, so the log matches what happened. Both starting a launch and recording it as sent need the Publish permission; a request from someone who lacks it waits for a publisher.
Writing a text people can act on inside one segment
- Name the brand first, so the message says who it is from before it says anything else.
- Make one offer and ask for one action.
- Put the link last in the message body, then the opt-out line on its own line.
- Spend an emoji only where it earns the cost, and check the segment count before and after.
- Keep the wording that worked in the copy library, so the next plan starts from lines you already trust.
Plan
Plan availability
The SMS planner belongs to every plan, from Studio at $99 a month upward. The same flow for email, with drips and subject-line tests, is described in email campaign planning.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters fit in one SMS segment?
One segment holds 160 characters of plain GSM-7 text, and each segment of a longer message holds 153. A message containing an emoji or another character outside that alphabet becomes Unicode, which holds 70 in one segment and 67 in each of several. The counter shows characters, encoding and segments as you type.
Why did my text message jump to two segments?
Either it crossed the length limit, or one character pushed it into Unicode. An emoji or a curly apostrophe pasted from a document switches the whole message, so a segment shrinks to 70 characters, and each emoji counts as two. A few symbols, such as square brackets or the euro sign, also count as two characters each even in plain text.
Can the SMS planner send the texts?
No. SMS sending is not connected to the product. The planner builds and checks the campaign, gets it approved and freezes it as a spec. The texts go out through your own SMS tool, and you then mark the launch as sent. Marking it earlier would make the record say something that has not happened.
Does an SMS plan have to include STOP wording?
The planner warns rather than blocks. Carriers expect marketing texts to say how to stop them, so it flags a message with no STOP, opt out or unsubscribe wording and offers a button that adds Reply STOP to opt out on its own line. Whether you add it is your decision, but the warning stays visible in the launch checks.
What time of day should an SMS campaign be sent?
The launch checks remind you to send between 8 AM and 9 PM in each recipient's time zone. The planner does not schedule the send, because the texts go out through your own SMS tool, so keeping to that window is up to whoever presses send. Confirm local rules for each client's market as well.
Does the planner record consent or process STOP replies?
No. It counts reachable phone numbers and checks the wording, but it does not store proof of opt-in and it does not process replies. Keep consent records in a CRM note or field, or in your SMS tool, text only people who agreed, and make sure your SMS tool honors STOP messages.
Which plans include the SMS campaign planner?
Every plan includes it, Studio at $99 a month among them. The Paid and Social planners are the ones that need the Agency plan. SMS planning also needs the client's CRM leads to carry phone numbers, since the audience is built from them.