Send Long Text Messages
When the standard 160-character SMS message is not enough, you can send longer messages of up to 918 characters.
When the standard 160-character SMS message is not enough, you can send longer messages of up to 918 characters.
Long text messages are created by linking multiple texts together.
You can send more information to customers, staff and partners.
Avoid spending more credit than planned with the character counter.
Send SMS alerts and notifications to customers or staff with messages up to four times longer,
making communication clearer.
Spend less time writing long text messages by typing them on your computer with a full keyboard.
Sell more products and services by including more detailed information about your offers.
Don´t limit yourself to 160 characters when your SMS alerts and notifications need to be longer.
Communicate clearly and accurately with longer text messages and avoid text-speak.
Here is how our customers have improved their businesses with our text messaging service.
Managing Director
“QiQ has used TextMagic for over a year now and we love this service. It is flexible in how we send and receive messages and it is cost-effective."
Read case studyVP of Ops & Technology
“TextMagic provided a reliable, professional and powerful way to send SMS for our urgent medical services organization."
Read case studyDirector
“After looking into a variety of texting services we chose TextMagic because of the variety of features it offers along with the price.”
Read case studyConvener
“We found that TextMagic´s text messaging service is a valuable tool to increase our donation income.”
Read case studyOffice Controller
“TextMagic allowed us to send and receive information to drivers and engineers all from one set point. It's much easier than different members of the office staff sending instructions on their mobiles and then when they leave the office we do not have a data trail.”
Read case studyTextMagic enables you to send longer text messages, up to 918 characters, without it being truncated (except in North America). Here are the main benefits of sending long text messages:
Unicode characters take up multiple GSM characters. When a Unicode symbol appears in a text, it is usually segmented at the 70-character mark, thus making it even harder for the recipient to decipher the message.
The ability to send long SMS messages means that you will never have to cram all the information into 160 characters again.
When they are segmented, many long text messages are displayed in a random order. This can be extremely frustrating for the reader. To help solve this problem, TextMagic displays long text messages as a single text.
To understand how long text messages work via the TextMagic SMS platform, you should take a look at these frequently asked questions.
You will have full access to all features during your TextMagic free trial. No credit card details are required.
We provide you with 0.4 credit (and a dedicated number only in the USA and Canada for one month FREE). You can test the service for a maximum 30 days.
You can test sending SMS globally, as long as you have credit left.
TextMagic allows you to configure the maximum length of your messages from the dashboard. This will help you better budget your SMS marketing campaign.
In GSM environments, text messages can contain a maximum of 140 bytes (standard 8-bit bytes) of message data. The original GSM charset was designed to include letters from the English alphabet, a few symbols and several international characters. A text message that contains characters only from the GSM 7-bit charset will be compressed into 140 8-bit bytes to produce the 160-character limit that we are familiar with.
Some symbols from the GSM charset are represented by two or more characters, but they can be used without special encoding. Texting becomes problematic when you try to use symbols that are not part of the GSM 7-bit charset (e.g., Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai letters, etc.) and require encoding in the Unicode UCS-2 character set (16 bits). Because Unicode characters are encoded with 16 bits, the SMS message will be limited to 70 characters (70 * 16 = 140 * 8).
This is when concatenation and segmentation occurs.
Most text messages are segmented when they exceed the 153-character mark because of the need for user-data headers (UDHs).
The longer the text message is (the more SMS parts there are), the more it costs.
Standard Character Set
The maximum message length is 918 characters, including spaces. A single text message, in the GSM 03.38 charset, is concatenated at 153 characters: 306 (2 x 153) for two-part texts, 459 (3 x 153) for three-part texts, 612 (4 x 153) four-part texts, 765 (5 x 153) five-part texts and 918 (6 x 153) for six-part texts.
If the text contains Unicode characters, it will be segmented at 134 (2 x 67), 201 (3 x 67), 268 (4 x 67), 335 (5 x 67) and 402 (6 x 67) characters, respectively.
Unicode Character Set
The maximum message length is 406 characters, including spaces. The maximum lengths of two-part, three-part, four-part, five-part and six-part concatenated Unicode text messages are 134 (2 x 67), 201 (3 x 67), 268 (4 x 67), 335 (5 x 67) and 402 (6 x 67) characters, respectively.
Use our free text transliteration tool to transliterate text message characters from non-Latin to Latin only.
The character count of your TextMagic messages is automatically displayed under your message box. Our software will automatically calculate the number of characters required for special symbols and display a cost estimate to help you budget your SMS marketing campaigns.
You can also use our free SMS length calculator.
Yes, but you will have to calculate the total cost of every text message and multiply it by the number of texts you send.
See what our customers are saying about TextMagic's business text messaging services.
View all case studies
SEAN Whelan
Managing Director
“I would recommend TextMagic solution to businesses who supply services like plumbers, electrician, pest control, couriers parts delivery. Anyone who supplies a service needs this solution to improve productivity.”
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