An outline of what text message segments are and how to monitor them.
What is a segment?
A text message segment is typically an SMS unit comprised of 160 characters. The segment count of an individual message may vary due to the inclusion of an image, special characters or encoding, and emojis.
Text messages sent through Rinsed will be counted and billed (if applicable) by segment. Note that Rinsed credit card decline messages are not billable or subject to overage fees.
How to Monitor Text Segments
Your Rinsed package includes 2000 text segments per location per month, allocated across locations however you would like. Text segments are reset on the first of the month and do not roll over.
Any segment overages beyond your allocated 2000 segments/month will be billed at $.02/segment on your monthly invoices.
To see how many segments you have used and how many you have left for a given month:
- Open Rinsed Analytics
- Click Marketing ROI
- Scroll to Text Message Segment Monitoring
- You will now be able to see your Billable Segments, Included Segments, and Overage for each month.
- Billable Segments: The number of segments you have sent in the month that are considered viable to be billed. This would include all segments besides credit card decline texts. Billable segments does not mean “segments you will be billed for,” but rather “segments eligible for billing, if an overage occurs.”
- Included Segments: The number of segments included with your Rinsed package monthly (2000 * total # of locations in Rinsed).
- Overage: The number of billable segments you have sent in the month beyond your included segment limit. To calculate overage charge, multiply the overage number by $.02.
How to calculate the number of segments in a message
When creating text messages in Rinsed, you may want to verify the number of segments prior to sending your message. To verify the number of segments in a message, use this Twilio calculator by copy/pasting the message into the box. If using shortlinks, be sure to send yourself a test message, then copy/paste the test into the Twilio calculator to get the final segment count.
Some factors that might increase the segment count of your messages are:
- The length of an SMS message (>160 characters will be >1 segment)
- Special characters or emojis, which change the message encoding and may result in a higher segment count
- Attaching images (MMS messages are billed at 2 segments per message)
- Attaching voucher barcodes (a barcode is considered an image, and will be billed as an MMS message)
We encourage all customers to work with their CSM to optimize and plan for text segment usage.
PRO TIP: If your message character count for a standard SMS is going to exceed 320 characters, adding an image to make it an MMS will effectively lower your segment count for that message and save you messaging costs. For example, an SMS with 600 characters + no images will be counted as 4 segments, whereas an MMS with any number of characters + an image will always count as 2 segments.