Short links in SMS marketing (with notes for India)

Every character is money

A single SMS segment is 160 GSM-7 characters, or 70 if any Unicode character sneaks in — a curly quote or an emoji silently halves your budget. Long URLs push messages into extra segments, and you pay per segment per recipient.

SMS has no preview

There is no card, no title, no image. The URL itself is the only signal the recipient gets about where the link goes. A branded short domain is therefore doing much more work in SMS than anywhere else — it is the entire trust cue.

Shared shortener domains get filtered

Carriers filter aggressively on domains with a history of abuse. Public shortener domains are a common trigger. Sending from a domain you own, used only for your own traffic, keeps you out of that bucket.

India: DLT registration is mandatory

Commercial SMS in India must be sent through a DLT-registered sender ID with pre-registered message templates. Templates are approved with fixed variable slots, and a link that does not match your registered template can get the whole message rejected. Register the URL pattern you will actually use before you launch a campaign.

Consent and opt-out

Keep a clear record of consent and honour opt-outs quickly. Beyond the regulatory requirement, complaint rates directly affect whether your later messages get delivered at all.

Measure delivery and clicks separately

Delivery reports come from your SMS provider; click counts come from the link. A big gap between them usually means the message was delivered but the link looked untrustworthy — which is a domain and copy problem, not a targeting one.