In this article, we will explain how to create and send an SMS campaign directly from Brevo.

Good to know

If this is your first time creating an SMS campaign, make sure your SMS account has been validated. To learn more about how to get your SMS account validated, check our dedicated article Account validation for SMS campaigns.
In addition to sending SMS campaigns directly from Brevo, you can also send them from the Brevo API or from some of your plugins.
Understand and follow the SMS marketing regulations in your recipient country.
If you are sending an SMS campaign to recipients in the United States or Canada, you have to register for a toll-free number and comply with the regulations. If you send an SMS campaign without complying with these regulations, your campaign will not be sent and will be suspended. To help you comply with the United States SMS marketing regulations, we enabled the Manage compliance for United States 🇺🇸 feature. To learn more, check our dedicated article Always comply with the United States SMS marketing regulations with our compliance feature.
Warning: it is strictly prohibited to send via Brevo passwords in a readable format, or to use any methods allowing the recipient of the SMS to read or to have access to a password-protected content or to any content requiring authentication (for instance sending an auto-login link).

🖌️ Step 1: Create your SMS campaign

Set up your SMS campaign

To start creating your SMS campaign, go to Campaigns > SMS.
Click on Create an SMS Campaign.
In the Campaign Name field, enter the name of your campaign. This name will only be visible to you (not to your recipients).
In the SMS Sender field, enter a personalized name for your sender using up to 11 alphabetic characters or 15 numerical digits.

Alphabetic characters Numerical digits

💡 Good to know
Recipients in some countries (including the U.S.) cannot see sender personalization. Instead, the sender appears as a numerical short code. Learn more in our dedicated article Short codes, long codes, and personalized SMS senders.
If you are sending an SMS campaign to recipients in the United States or Canada, enable the Manage compliance for United States 🇺🇸 feature to comply with the United States SMS marketing regulations. If you send an SMS campaign without complying with these regulations, your campaign will not be sent and will be suspended. To learn more, check our dedicated article Always comply with the United States SMS marketing regulations with our compliance feature.

Write the content of your SMS campaign

💡 Good to know

An SMS message can have up to 160 characters, including spaces and line breaks. For SMS messages above 160 characters, the length of 1 SMS message changes to 153 characters. For example, if your message has 320 characters, your campaign will be sent as 3 SMS messages (153+153+14 characters).
Special characters (Unicode & emojis) reduce the SMS character limit from 160 to 70 which could increase the overall SMS count.

In the SMS Message field, enter the content of your SMS message.

❗️ Important
You must include an unsubscribe option in all your SMS campaigns. To learn more, check our dedicated article Include an unsubscribe option in your SMS messages.
Optional: personalize your SMS campaign with any contact attributes stored in your Brevo contact list, such as your contacts' names. To learn more, check our dedicated article Personalize your SMS messages with contact attributes.
Brevo SMS supports GSM characters, Unicode content used in non-Latin alphabets (e.g. Arabic, Russian), and emojis. If your SMS message contains Unicode characters, check the Unicode (supports more languages) option.

💡 Good to know
For SMS sent to the Bahamas, India, Indonesia, and Portugal, only GSM characters are supported.

Optional: Send your SMS campaign in batches

The Send SMS in batches option allows you gradually send your SMS campaigns to your contacts by setting up the number of SMS messages that you want to send per day.

If you select this option, you'll be asked to enter the number of daily SMS messages you want to send and the desired increase percentage per day. We recommend you set the number of daily SMS messages to 3,000, with an increase of 30% per day. You can also choose to add a delay between each batch sent.

Optional: Send a test SMS

💡 Good to know

The recipients of your test SMS must be existing contacts in your database with a phone number saved in their "SMS" attribute. Learn how to format a phone number in our article Format your contact import file.

Once your SMS campaign is ready, you can choose to send a test SMS to view how it looks. Note that the test SMS will be deducted from your SMS credits.

👥 Step 2: Select your recipients

💡 Good to know

The recipients of your SMS campaign must be existing contacts in your database with a phone number saved in their "SMS" attribute. Learn how to format a phone number in our article Format your contact import file.

Once you are done creating your SMS campaign, click Next step and choose to send it to one or several contact list(s). You can also choose to exclude certain lists of contacts.

Optional: Create a filter

After selecting your recipients, you can choose to apply the following options:

Don't send to unengaged contacts: select this option if you do not want to send your SMS campaign to your unengaged contacts. You can customize the criteria for unengaged contacts from the Unengaged Contacts page.
Apply filters on the selected lists: select this option to apply a new or existing filter to your selected lists in order to send your SMS campaign only to contacts who match the filter.

Once you are done selecting your contacts, click on Update recipient count to view how many contacts you are going to send your SMS campaign to, and click Next step.

⏲️ Step 3: Schedule your SMS campaign

❗️ Important

Mobile carriers do not allow the sending of SMS campaigns between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. on Sundays and holidays. Be respectful of your contacts and avoid sending SMS campaigns late in the evening.

After reviewing your SMS campaign, click Schedule and choose whether to send it immediately or schedule a date and a time to launch it in the future.

⏩ What's next?

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.