SMS marketing in Europe: what it costs and how to launch it properly

SMS reads better than any other channel and costs more than all of them. It is worth having for a narrow set of messages — a delivery update, a genuinely time-bound offer, a win-back to someone who stopped reading email — and it is a fast way to spend money badly if you treat it as email with fewer characters.

Three things decide whether a European SMS programme works: who you are allowed to appear as, what you are allowed to send, and what each message actually costs.

Sender IDs are per country, and often pre-registered

An alphanumeric sender ID — your shop's name instead of a number — is what makes an SMS look legitimate. It is also regulated differently in nearly every market.

• Several countries require pre-registration of the sender ID with the local regulator or carriers, with lead times measured in weeks.
• Some markets do not support alphanumeric IDs at all for certain traffic, and your message arrives from a number.
• An unregistered ID is commonly replaced or blocked rather than rejected loudly, so the send looks fine and quietly does not arrive as you intended.
• Alphanumeric senders usually cannot receive replies, which matters for opt-out handling.

Register in every country you actually send to, before you plan the campaign around it.

Consent is separate, and so is the opt-out

A phone number collected at checkout for delivery updates is not permission to send marketing. SMS marketing consent is its own consent — its own box, its own record, its own wording.

1. A separate, unticked box naming SMS specifically.
2. An opt-out in every message. Where replies are possible, honour STOP and its local equivalents; where the sender ID cannot receive replies, a short link is required instead.
3. Process opt-outs immediately and across every campaign, not per list.
4. Respect quiet hours. Several countries restrict marketing messages by time of day, and a 07:00 send in the wrong timezone is the fastest complaint you will ever generate.

What it actually costs

Per-message pricing across the EU varies by more than tenfold, and it is set by the destination network, not by you. Two consequences that shape strategy:

• Model the cost per country before designing the campaign. A blast that is comfortable in one market is the month's budget in another.
• Watch the segment count. A GSM-7 message is 160 characters; adding one emoji or an accented character outside the basic set switches it to UCS-2 and 70 characters, so a "single" message quietly becomes three.
• Shorten links, but use your own domain — public shorteners are increasingly filtered and you lose the click data.

Because each message has a real marginal cost, SMS pays for narrow targeting in a way email does not. The top decile by past value, not the whole list.

The four messages worth sending

1. Delivery and order updates. Transactional, welcome, and the reason people accept SMS from shops at all.
2. A genuinely time-bound offer — ends tonight, and actually ends tonight.
3. Back in stock, for a product they asked to be told about.
4. A win-back to somebody who stopped reading email. One message, to your highest-value lapsed customers, not to everyone.

Everything else belongs in email, where it costs a fraction and can say more.