Believe it or not, emojis have revolutionized the way we communicate. Emojis are now a regular part of our digital vocabulary. These days an emoji library goes way beyond the yellow smiley face. Emojis are used in almost any context to help keep content fresh and friendly while conveying new levels of tone and intention.
That’s why, after several requests from our customers, we’re excited to release an emoji library. All SendHub users will see the new emoji library on our web application starting today!
SendHub’s Emoji Library!
Our emoji library comes stocked with a number of emojis including the regular smiley faces, a dog, car, and more. SendHub users can find the emoji library to the left of the attachment button when composing a text message from the web application.
A picture is worth a thousand words – and an emoji can save you that many characters. When characters are being counted, like in SMS, it’s important to keep concise. Emojis are here to simplify our lives. That’s why, it’s important to remember to also keep your messages with emojis to the point. This is a key point because emojis are incorporated into Unicode.
Emoji are Incorporated into Unicode
All North American phone carriers break up long SMS messages into either 160 or 70 character set blocks. These blocks are called segments and you are billed for each segment. Newer phones will piece the segmented message back together so the recipient only sees one message, but carriers still charge per segment.
The default length of a GSM segment is 160 characters. However, if your message has any special characters or emojis (aka Unicode characters or non-GSM characters), this forces the carriers to use a different encoding which will reduce the segment size to 70 characters. Therefore, anytime you send a message with an emoji, your message will be segmented per every 70 characters.
As most SendHub customers know, SendHub will allow you to send any message up to 1600 characters, but if you include a Unicode character, the carriers will segment your message per every 70 characters and you will be billed per segment.
This is why we’ve built our SMS calculator that you can view on our web application. This allows you to see how the message will be received (either via GSM verse Unicode). It also shows you how many segments your message will be prior to sending. It’s important to note that our SMS segment calculator does not include characters when attaching a file or when the system adds “Text STOP to end”.
Not convinced that emojis are a great professional marketing tool? Click here to read this blog to discover a few ways that emojis can help marketers communicate with audiences.