Does a link in a text hurt delivery?

A link on your own domain, inside a registered campaign, is ordinary traffic and is treated as such. What draws attention is the pattern around it: a generic public shortener, a URL carrying a long tail of tracking parameters, several links in one message, or a domain with no relationship to the business that registered the campaign. The link is rarely the problem on its own; the combination is.

Should reminders include a link?

One, and only if it does something the customer might actually want to do: reschedule, or find the place. A reminder is read in about two seconds at a bus stop, and a second link turns a glance into a decision. There is also a cost reason: links are long, and a reminder that spills past the segment boundary is billed twice for every recipient, every time.

Why does one emoji make a message cost more?

Because text messages are encoded in a 7-bit alphabet that holds 160 characters in a single segment, and that alphabet has no emoji, no curly quotes and no long dashes. One character outside it switches the whole message to the wider encoding, where a segment is 70 characters rather than 160. A 150-character message that was one segment becomes three. The character you cannot see is usually a smart apostrophe pasted in from a word processor.

Can Frontiva send a photo?

Not today, and the honest version matters more than the roadmap. Photos customers send you are received, stored and visible on the conversation. Sending one outbound is not built: the carrier adapter has a slot for a media URL and nothing in the product fills it, so there is no composer button that would attach an image. If a picture is part of your workflow today, that part still happens from a phone.

Should we ask customers to text photos of documents?

No. Photographs of insurance cards, driving licences and anything with an account number on it should not be requested by text, because the copy then exists in the customer's phone, in your thread, and in whatever backup both of those have. A leak or a damaged part is a different matter and is genuinely useful. The rule is about what is in the picture, not about pictures.

Sending links and photos by text: what works and what gets filtered

Which links carriers distrust, how to write one a customer will tap, why a single curly apostrophe can double what a message costs, and the honest position on photos: Frontiva can receive them and cannot yet send them.

Sohail Safdar · November 11, 2026 · 6 min read

A practice writes a reminder, pastes it in from a document, and sends it to 300 people. The message looks like one text. The bill says 600. Nothing is broken, and nobody will work out why for a month, because the cause is a single curly apostrophe that the word processor substituted for the straight one somebody typed.

Links and images get the same treatment: everybody knows there are rules, almost nobody knows which rule bit them.

The 160 characters, and the invisible character that halves them

A text message is encoded in a 7-bit alphabet of about 128 characters. In that alphabet a single message holds 160 characters, and a longer one is split into joined segments of 153, because each piece spends a few characters saying which piece it is.

That alphabet has no emoji, no curly quotation marks and no long dashes. One character outside it moves the entire message to the wider encoding, where a single message holds 70 characters and a joined segment holds 67. The jump is not proportional and it is not partial: a 150-character message that comfortably fit one segment becomes three.

This is not theoretical for us. Our own HELP reply, which the carriers require a business to be able to answer, is written against a 160-character budget, and a long practice name eats a quarter of it. The first draft measured 162 characters for a practice called Bright Smile Family Dentistry, at 29 characters. The second draft, after shortening, still measured 162 for The Glow Aesthetic Medicine and Wellness Center, at 44, which is not a made-up example: a med spa really is called that. A required reply that arrives as two texts bills the practice twice for obeying a rule, so the copy was cut until it fit, and a test measures it against that same long name so it cannot quietly grow back.

Two practical consequences. Paste nothing from a word processor without checking what it substituted. And write your longest customer's name into your own templates before deciding they fit.

Links carriers look harder at

Public shorteners. The generic ones anybody can use, which is exactly why they are used to hide destinations.
Very long URLs carrying a tail of tracking parameters.
Domains unrelated to the business that registered the campaign. Your campaign says who you are; a link somewhere else contradicts it.
Several links in one message.

Links customers tap

On your own domain, short enough to read: northsidedental.com/book.

With a sentence around it that says what happens next: "Pick a time here: northsidedental.com/book". A naked URL asks the customer to guess, and a customer who is guessing does not tap.

One per message, going where it says it goes. A booking link that opens the homepage teaches people that your links are not worth following, and that lesson applies to the next one as well.

If you need short links, a custom short domain that is recognisably yours is worth the setup. It keeps the brevity and loses the anonymity that makes shorteners suspicious.

Photos, and where this product honestly stands

A picture is worth sending when it saves a conversation: the worn part a technician wants to replace, which entrance to use, a before and after the customer asked about. It is not worth sending in a reminder, where it costs more and adds nothing to a message that is read in two seconds.

In Frontiva today, that advice is one-directional, and it is worth being plain about which direction. Photographs customers send you arrive, are stored as attachments on the message, and are visible on the conversation. Sending one is not built. The carrier adapter has a parameter for a media URL, and nothing in the product passes it, which means there is no composer button to look for and no setting that switches it on. If sending a photo is part of how you work today, that part still happens from somebody's phone.

We would rather say that than describe the parameter and let you infer a feature from it.

Receiving photos, which is the half that does work

Customers will send pictures without being asked: a leak, a rash, a dented panel. Two decisions are worth making before that happens rather than after.

Who looks at them, and how quickly. A photo is usually attached to something urgent, and a photo sitting unopened for a day is worse than a text sitting unanswered for a day, because the customer believes they have shown you the problem.

And what you will never ask for. Do not request photographs of documents, identity cards or insurance cards by text. The copy then exists in their phone, in your thread, and in both backups, and the business has acquired a liability in exchange for saving somebody a form.

Counting your own templates before you send 300 of them

Worth doing once for every template you send in volume, because the cost is per recipient and per send.

Take the template and substitute the longest real value for every placeholder: your longest service name, your longest practice name, your longest staff name. Count the characters. Under 160 and you are sending one segment, provided every character is in the basic alphabet. Over it, you are sending two, and the boundary for the second is 153 rather than 160 because each joined piece spends a few characters saying where it belongs.

Then check the characters themselves. The usual culprits are a curly apostrophe in a word like "we'll", a long dash between clauses, and an emoji somebody added to sound friendly. Any one of them drops the ceiling from 160 to 70, and a message that was comfortably one segment becomes three.

The arithmetic is why it matters at volume rather than in a single message. A reminder going to 300 people once a week is 15,600 sends a year. The difference between one segment and two is 15,600 extra segments, bought to deliver nothing extra, because of a character nobody can see on the screen.

In Frontiva

SMS goes out through your own carrier account, and the delivery status of each message is recorded against it, so a message that was never delivered is visible in the unified inbox rather than assumed to have arrived. That is the piece most worth having when links are involved, because a filtered message and a delivered one look identical from the sending end.

Your booking link can be stored as a fact the assistant quotes exactly, which removes the most common way a link gets mangled: somebody retyping it. See what happens when a text fails to deliver.