Learn to send an SMS to a single contact.
Send an SMS to a single contact
To send a single SMS message to a single contact:
- Go to SMS > Contacts > Send single message.
- On the Send single message page, enter the contact's phone number.
- In the message editor, enter your message.
A single SMS message can be a maximum of 160 characters, or 70 characters if you're using a non-Latin alphabet/character set. You can exceed this amount, meaning your message will flow into a second SMS, as indicated by the counter at the foot of the message. Adding elements like personalisation can vastly increase your character count.
To learn more, check out the articles Why data fields might increase SMS cost and SMS message length and Unicode.
- Select Send.
The message is sent immediately. A confirmation page confirms the message has sent. The contact that you've sent to is added to your All contacts SMS address book if they didn't already exist before.
Keep it short
If your SMS is longer than 160 standard GSM characters, it costs more to send. Don't get caught out by extra costs. Learn about SMS message length and using Unicode in your messages.
Use our API
You can also send a single SMS message via our API, using the Send SMS message operation in REST and the SendSingleSmsMessage method in SOAP.