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Can I use emoji or emoticons in my SMS?
Can I use emoji or emoticons in my SMS?

Yes. Emoji and some other special characters are allowed

Steph Stevens avatar
Written by Steph Stevens
Updated over a week ago

Yes! Emoji are supported in SMS, along with specific other special characters.

Hints and Tips for using emoji in SMS

Using emoji can be expensive

Emoji may look like 1 character, but some combined emoji (such as a family with specific skintones 👨🏼‍👩🏼‍👧🏼‍👦🏼) can be up to 50 extra "hidden" characters. This makes SMSs longer, and therefore uses up more of your SMS Balance.

Tip - If you're using emoji, keep the rest of your message short.

Tip - Don't use more emoji than necessary.

If an emoji is too new, it may not show for your recipients

It takes a few years for emoji added to the standard Emoji List or Unicode Set to reach mobile devices, so don't use emoji that are too new.

Tip - Use sites like Emojipedia to check the age of the emoji you want to use.

Tip - Try to use emoji released 3 or more years ago.

Emoji can vary wildly depending on platform, or not appear at all

Some emoji look very different depending on platform. For example, the gun emoji appears as a squirtgun on most platforms, but as an actual gun on HTC and LG devices.

Some older platforms MacOS 10.6 and Windows 7 and earlier can't support emoji at all, so be sure that you're not using emoji to convey critical information (for example, using 😷 to tell students to bring face coverings).

Tip - Use sites like Emojipedia to check what emoji look like across platforms.

Tip - Use Can I Emoji? to check what support is like for your chosen emoji.

What other special characters can I use in my SMS?

SMS grabs and touchpoints also accept the following characters:

@£$¥èéùìòÇ ØøÅåΔ_ΦΓΛΩΠΨΣΘΞÆæßÉ !"#¤%&'()*+,-./ 0123456789:;>=< ?¡ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ÄÖÑܧ¿ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz äöñüà

This is a good set of core characters which will let you:

  • Personalise your message with names in some European languages

  • Include a URL or link to your enquiries form or further information on the web.

  • Send contact telephone numbers

  • Include a reminder about fees or other facts and figures.

What happens if I try something funky?

Any other characters, which can't be sent by SMS, will be stripped out of your message or replaced with something which is valid for SMS.

For example, if your SMS contains the following characters, then:

` ‘ ’ will be replaced by '

“ ” will be replaced by "

~ ¬ will be replaced by -

Tip - Compose your message directly in the editor, or in a plain text editor like Notepad. Many of the above characters are brought over when copying from MS word.

Do get in touch with CRM Support if you have a particular character you need to use which isn't supported and you need an alternative idea.

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