When sending SMS you should be aware of the limitation in characters.
Background
The technology uses the GSM default alphabet, meaning that if you send an SMS you can use up to 160 characters (from the GSM alphabet) before the SMS will be interpreted as two messages.
Most mobile devices have no problem with binding together two messages so if you want your message to exceed the limit for one SMS you should be just fine.
Character count
You can see the character count in the preview and where you type your text.
Please note that using handlebars to display data in your text message can change the character count quite dramatically, e.g. {{contact.firstName}} can return “Bo” or “Christopher Robin“.
The image below shows a text without any special characters which consists of 97 characters (one SMS).
Extended encoding is off.
However, all characters are not included in the GSM alphabet. Emojis and the euro (€) character for example will not be displayed correctly.
To enable special characters you can activate extended language encoding (select ON in the dropdown). BUT by doing so, you will only have in total 70 characters before you hit the roof of how long an SMS can be before the SMS will be interpreted as two messages.
The image shows the same SMS as above but with extended encoding switched ON and "SEK" in the text above is replaced with the character €. Even though we have even less characters (95) than the previous example, the message is interpreted as two messages, due the extended character space.
Character warnings
If you’re editing an SMS with extended language encoding switched off and you add a character, not supported by the GSM default alphabet, you’ll get a warning. To solve this, you can either switch on extended langauage encoding or try to refrase your text to exclude the special character.