Link Leads Blog · September 22, 2026
A text message doesn't have one fixed price — it has a segment count, and the segment count depends on encoding, not just length. A template that looks like a single 160-character text on screen can quietly go out as three billed segments because of one curly quote a word processor inserted for you. On a 10,000-lead campaign, that's not a rounding error.
Every SMS platform and carrier bills and throttles by segment, not by message. A message that fits inside one segment's character budget goes out as one segment. A message that runs even one character over gets split into multiple segments, and most platforms pass that cost straight through — a two-segment send costs roughly double a one-segment send, whatever your per-segment rate is. The character budget per segment isn't fixed either; it depends entirely on which of two encodings the message uses, and the switch between them happens automatically, based on the characters in your template, whether you notice or not.
If every character in a message falls inside the GSM-7 character set — standard A–Z, 0–9, basic punctuation, and a handful of accented Latin letters — a single segment holds 160 characters. Once a message needs more than one segment, each segment's usable space drops to 153 characters, because 7 characters' worth of space in every segment goes to a header that tells the receiving phone how to reassemble the pieces back into one message. A small number of GSM-7 "extended" characters — brackets, the euro sign, the caret, the pipe — count double against the budget, since they need an escape character to encode. Most insurance SMS templates, written in plain English with standard punctuation, fit comfortably in GSM-7.
The moment a single character in the message falls outside the GSM-7 set, the entire message — not just that character — switches to Unicode (UCS-2) encoding. A Unicode single segment holds only 70 characters, and a Unicode message that needs more than one segment drops to 67 characters per segment for the same reassembly-header reason. The characters that trigger this switch are easy to miss because they look identical to their GSM-7 equivalents on screen: a curly "smart" quote (’ instead of '), a curly double quote, an em dash (—) instead of a hyphen, a bullet character, or any emoji. Word processors and note-taking apps auto-convert straight quotes and hyphens into their curly, "typographically correct" Unicode versions by default — which means a template written in a document editor and pasted into an SMS platform is often already in Unicode before you've typed a single intentional emoji.
Say a 155-character opener fits in one GSM-7 segment with room to spare. Paste it out of a word processor that swapped the two straight quotes and one hyphen for curly versions, and the same 155 characters are now Unicode. At 67 characters per concatenated Unicode segment, that message needs three segments — not two, three — to carry the same words. Sent to a 10,000-lead list, that template now costs roughly three times what the agent priced it at, for text that reads identically on the screen. The same jump hits 10DLC throughput: a registered campaign's daily segment allowance gets consumed three times faster by a Unicode template than a GSM-7 one carrying the same message, so a list that should clear in one day's sending window instead spills into two or three.
A few spots in a standard insurance template are worth checking every time, because they're the most common source of an accidental Unicode switch:
Before a template goes out to a full list, not just a test number: type or paste it into a plain-text editor first (a basic text editor, not a word processor) to strip any auto-formatting, then search it for a curly quote, an em dash, or an emoji and replace each one with its plain-ASCII equivalent. Most SMS platforms show a live character count and segment count as you type — if the segment count jumps from 1 to 2 or 3 without the visible character count crossing 160, that's the encoding switch, not the length, and it's worth finding which character caused it before sending to the full list. Run this check once per template, not once per campaign — a template that's clean today can pick up a stray character the next time someone edits it.
None of this matters if the list underneath the campaign is small or stale. Link Leads sells aged SMS lead lists at $0.012 per lead (minimum order 5,000 leads, $60), phone-validated and filterable by state and age band, delivered as an instant CSV — pair it with the follow-up cadence from our SMS cadence post and a template that's been through the checklist above before the first send goes out. Build an order in the order builder, or pull a free 100-row sample to see the fields before you write the template around them.