🧠 THE BIG IDEA
Same offer. Same list. One version cost 3 SMS credits. The other cost 1. On a 37,000 person list, that's a $666 difference on a single send, just from formatting.
Most brands never check this. They watch CTR and revenue per send and assume the bill is fixed. It isn't. The credit count is decided by the message itself, and almost nobody is auditing it.
Here’s the math…
THE MISTAKE
📲 Same Message, Different Bill
We sent the same Mother's Day offer two different ways. Same 20% off. Same 24-hour window. Same list.
One version cost 3 SMS credits. The other cost 1.
Nothing about the offer changed. What changed was everything around it.
That's the version most brands send without thinking twice. An image because it "looks nicer." An emoji because it feels friendly. A little extra copy to explain the offer before the link.
Every one of those choices adds credits. And credits are where your margin lives or dies.
THE FIX
✂️ What 1 Credit Actually Looks Like
Here's the same sale, sent for a third of the cost.
24-HOUR SALE. 20% off. Link. Done.
No image. No emoji. No warm-up sentence. It says less and it still says everything the customer needs to act. Save the extras for the email.
This is the part that's hard to accept if you've been trained to think more context equals more conversion. For a lot of SMS sends, it doesn't. The offer does the work. The formatting is just cost.
THE MATH
💸 What This Actually Costs You
Every 160 characters of GSM-7 text pushes you into another segment, and every image adds one on top. Emoji work differently.
Some of them flip your entire message into a different encoding before you've said anything, which is its own cost problem worth understanding on its own (more on that below).
That's why a longer, image-heavy text can cost 3 or 4 credits for what should be a 1-credit send.
Send that 3-credit version to a list of 37,000 and you've paid for 111,000 credits. Send the 1-credit version and you've paid for 37,000. Same reach. A third of the bill.
At $0.009 per credit, that's $999 versus $333, a $666 difference on a single send.
Most brands watch open rate and click rate on SMS and never once look at what each send actually cost to deliver. You can have a great CTR and still be bleeding margin if every text is priced like a picture message.
THE LEVERS
🎯 3 More Cost Levers
Three more things worth checking in your own account.
1️⃣ Watch your emojis. Certain emoji or special characters force your message into UCS-2 encoding, which drops your per-segment limit from 160 characters down to 70. That single emoji doesn't just cost a little. It can cut your character budget in half.
2️⃣ Test images with real A/B splits before you assume they help. We've seen images lift engagement on some sends and add nothing on others, while adding a credit every time. If it's not proven to earn its keep, it's just cost.
3️⃣ Segment before you blast. Not every send needs to hit your whole list. Restocks, new releases, and time-sensitive discounts get better engagement and revenue per send than general updates. Reserve texts for what actually earns the credit, and route lower-priority updates to email instead.
Every credit you're not paying for on noise is a credit you can spend on the sends that convert.
THE TAKEAWAY
📓 The Retention Wrap-Up:
Your SMS program doesn't need more sends. It needs the same sends for a third of the cost.
That gap doesn't disappear when you fix it, it shows up as profit, which is the whole point of PPT.
Pull up your last 5 campaigns this week and count the segments on each.
If you're regularly hitting 3 or more credits for a single offer, the problem isn't your SMS strategy. It's your math.
Want us to audit where your SMS program is leaking profit?
Until the next one,
— Anthony R.