In Sarbacane Campaigns, SMS messages are encoded according to the GSM 7-bit standard. Unaccented letters, numbers, common accented characters (é, è, à, ç) and standard symbols work without any issues. Emojis, certain accented characters (ê, ï, œ), typographic apostrophes and quotation marks, and non-Latin alphabets are not supported: Sarbacane flags them in the editor and offers to replace them before you send your message.
Simple characters count as one character:
letters from A to Z and a to z;
numbers from 0 to 9;
common accented characters: é, è, à, ç…;
common symbols: @, ?, !, &…
Double characters are accepted, but count as two and reduce the available length:
braces { } and square brackets [ ];
the vertical bar |;
the symbols ^, ~ and \;
the euro symbol €.
Unsupported characters:
emojis (😊, 👍, ❤️…);
characters from other alphabets (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic…);
accented characters such as ê, ï or œ;
typographic quotation marks “ ” and curly apostrophes ‘ ’.
A Sarbacane Campaigns license.
At the Message step, write your SMS in the phone-shaped preview.
If your message contains an unsupported character, Sarbacane will notify you and suggest a replacement: accept it or edit your text.
In the panel on the right, check the character counter. Double-byte characters count as two.
At the Review step, click Send a test, then check the SMS received on your phone.
Best practice: use simple characters and avoid emojis. Your SMS will display the same way on all phones and cost fewer credits.
The test SMS displays exactly as you wrote it.
Your message contains a character that phones cannot display. Accept the suggested replacement (for example, ê becomes e, ï becomes i, œ becomes oe) or rephrase your message. If it is an emoji, remove it from your message.
An unsupported character is still present in your message. Correct it or accept the suggested replacement, then try again.
If you wrote your message in another program (Word, Google Docs, an email, etc.) and then pasted it into Sarbacane, the apostrophes and quotation marks are probably typographic (’ “ ”). They are not supported. Type them directly in the Sarbacane editor.
Double-byte characters (€ , [ ], { }…) count as two. Your message may exceed 160 characters without you noticing and use 2 credits instead of 1. The full pricing scale is in the article about creating an SMS campaign.
