Affordable SMS marketing is decided by what each booked call or sale costs you, not by the headline price of a single text. A low rate per message from a tool that cannot hold consent, receive replies or talk to your CRM saves a little on the invoice and loses clients elsewhere. This article answers one question: how to keep the full cost of texting low, from segment length and list targeting to the tools and staff hours around it, on the levelpartner.ai platform, where message usage is billed as used on top of one licence.
Price per message is the wrong number
Providers compete on the cost of one segment, so that is the figure most people compare. It is rarely where the money goes. Four things usually cost more: messages long enough to split into two or three segments, sends to people who will never respond, a separate texting subscription beside your CRM and booking tool, and the staff time spent moving lists between them.
A better measure is cost per outcome. Add licence, usage and the hours spent on texting in a month, then divide by the meetings booked or sales closed from those messages. That one figure tells you whether cheap text marketing is actually cheap for your firm, whatever the rate card says.
Say approach one sends a monthly promotion to all 8,000 contacts, and each message runs to two segments: 16,000 segments per send. Approach two texts only the 1,200 contacts who replied, clicked or booked in the last 90 days, with a one-segment message: 1,200 segments. If the first books 12 discovery calls and the second books 10, the second would spend about a thirteenth of the usage for almost the same result. The numbers are invented to show the arithmetic.
How segments drive the bill
One SMS segment holds 160 standard characters. Go one character over and the message is split, and every part is billed. Each extra part holds slightly fewer characters, because some space is used to join the pieces together on the phone.
Character set matters as much as length. A single emoji, a curly apostrophe pasted from a word processor or certain accented letters switch the whole message to a different encoding, and a segment then holds only 70 characters. A text that looks short can bill as three. Write in plain characters, put the link at the end, and cut every word that does not change the reader's decision.
Merge fields need the same care. A first name adds a few characters, but a long company name, an adviser's full name or a property address can push some contacts over the limit while others stay under it. Test every template with the longest values in your data.
Targeting is the bigger lever
Trimming characters saves a little on every message. Not texting people who will not respond saves the whole cost of those messages and protects your number's reputation. Most marketing sends can be narrowed by recent activity, recorded consent and segment without losing many of the contacts who would have replied.
Exclude numbers whose last texts failed, contacts with no engagement over your chosen period and anyone with an open opportunity in a live sales conversation. For list preparation before a large send, see the guide to cleaning and segmenting a bulk text list.
Service messages are different. Do not trim confirmations or reminders to save usage. They stop booked meetings going empty, which costs far more than the texts.
The tool stack and the hours around it
Look at a typical mid-sized firm's texting and you find several bills: a texting tool, a CRM with per-user pricing, a booking tool and a connector to tie them together. Then the hidden cost. Someone exports a list, cleans it in a spreadsheet, uploads it, sends, then copies replies back by hand. At a few hours a week that work often exceeds the software.
On the platform, texting, contacts, calendars, forms, workflows and the shared inbox sit under one licence at €7,512 a year with unlimited users and contacts, and usage is billed as used, with no minimum. Affordable text marketing then means one system where every reply lands on the contact record, rather than the lowest rate from a tool that does not connect to anything.
Corners you can cut, and corners you cannot
You can safely skip images in most texts, since plain SMS works everywhere and costs less. One registered business number is enough for most firms. You do not need to text everyone, and you do not need a separate texting tool when the CRM already sends texts.
You must never cut consent records, opt-out handling, registration where your country or carrier requires it, a way to receive and answer replies, or a record of what was sent to whom. Skipping any of these to save money is how numbers get filtered or blocked, and a blocked number costs far more than any saving. Buying contact lists falls in the same category; the guide to buying SMS leads explains why.
Before you start
- A sample of last month's sends, with the message text and recipient counts.
- One business number that can send and receive texts, registered where required.
- Contacts with recorded SMS consent, and permission to edit workflows that send SMS.
- One person who owns the channel and answers replies.
How to build low-cost templates
Store every frequent text as a snippet, so each one is written once, checked for length and reused across Conversations and workflows.
- Go to Conversations.
- Select Snippets.
- Click + New Snippet.
- Select Add Text Snippet.
- Enter a descriptive name and the message in plain characters.
- Add Custom Values where personalisation is needed.
- Review the character count and SMS segment information.
- Click Save.
Rewrite any snippet that shows more than one segment before it goes into a workflow or a bulk send.
What it replaces and the time involved
A usage review replaces guessing at why the bill moved. The first pass through templates and lists takes two to three hours. After that, a lean texting programme for a 60-person firm takes about two hours a week: planning and writing, checking the list, and answering replies. Automated reminders and enquiry replies take no staff time once built; the guide to automated SMS triggers covers the two worth building first.
The mistake most people make
Optimising the wrong messages, or sending more because each one is cheap. Teams polish an occasional campaign while a reminder workflow sends a three-segment text thousands of times a month. Start with the messages that send most often. And resist weekly blasts to the whole database: opt-outs rise, carriers filter, and the contacts who would have bought next quarter have already left.
When cutting cost is a false economy
When the cut removes the action. A text without the booking link is cheaper and useless. When it removes the sender's name, replies fall because people do not know who is writing. When texting is how you win most of your business, spend on a better message, a faster reply and a cleaner list instead. Our page on unlimited SMS marketing claims explains why volume is rarely the goal.
Troubleshooting
A short message bills as several segments. It contains a special character. Retype it in plain text, replacing curly quotes and symbols.
Usage rose without more sends. A workflow is texting more often than intended, often through re-entry. Check the workflow history for contacts receiving repeats.
Failed deliveries keep appearing. Numbers that failed before are still in your lists. Exclude them from every marketing smart list.
Merge fields push some messages over the limit. Test with the longest values, or shorten the surrounding text. The automated SMS messages library covers testing templates.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters fit in one SMS?
160 standard characters, or 70 if any character outside the standard set appears. Longer messages split into several segments, each billed.
Can I send SMS marketing for free?
Not lawfully at business scale. Carriers charge for delivery, so a free offer is either a trial or a cost hidden elsewhere.
Is SMS cheaper than email?
Per message, email usually is. Per outcome, a short, well-targeted text often wins for time-sensitive actions such as confirming an appointment, so use each where it costs least per result.
How is SMS usage billed on the platform?
Texting is included in the licence and message usage is billed as used, with no bundle to buy in advance and no minimum. Inbound messages count towards usage too, usually a small share of the total.