SMS messages are sent using blocks of characters, called segments -- and segments are how Daisychain calculates SMS usage for billing purposes.
Daisychain will automatically do a few things to try to help with segments:
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We will automatically combine any incoming multi-segment messages that you might receive into a single message, for easy readability and cost savings. You can read about these MMS messages here.
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We will ensure that any multi-segment messages you send will be encoded in a way that most recipients with modern cell phones will receive them as a single message.
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If your message contains a special character that can be easily replaced with a standard character, we'll do that automatically to try to reduce your segment count -- here's a list of those.
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When you create an SMS campaign, the message preview will display the number of segments in your message.
If you want to calculate exactly how many segments a message will use (including lots of nerdy details), you can head on over to this SMS segment calculator.