Understanding your SMS settings

You will learn

Learn about your SMS settings and how to edit them to fit your business needs.

Before you begin 

Before you can get started, you need to have set up SMS. Once done, the SMS settings page will populate. 

For information about credits per country, see understanding the SMS credit system. 

Review the SMS settings page

1. Click your account name in the bottom left corner.
2. From the dropdown, click Settings.
   
3. Click SMS.

Here, you'll be able to access the following tabs: 

• Sender information
• Sender preferences
• Tracking
• Keyword responses
• Quick responses
• Short links
• Terms of Service

Sender information

Countries

Your SMS numbers are listed in the Countries section.  This section includes information on the region, specific number currently used, the status, or if the regional number still needs to be added or activated. 

For details about these numbers, check out this article on SMS sending numbers.

Company information

The Company Information section contains an option to turn on virtual contact cards and the following details about your organization: 

• Company or organization name
• URL for your website
• Company email address 
• Logo
• Company phone number
• Address

SMS message add-ons

There are 2 sections that you can edit within Message Add-Ons: organizational prefix and opt-out language. These are added to the beginning or end of your SMS messages, respectively. 

• Organizational prefix
The organizational prefix is your business name. It should be the word or phrase customers recognize as your business title. Prefixes are optional (except in France, where they're required). However, these prefixes are highly recommended because, unlike emails, text messages don't have a built-in way to identify the sender. This prefix allows customers to understand that this text came directly from your store.
• Opt-out language
Opt-out language is the phrase added to the end of a message that gives customers the option to opt out of further SMS communication. This is similar to the unsubscribe language in emails, which helps to limit negative customer experiences and make sure you don't get marked as spam.

Opt-out language must include STOP in the message and is required in some jurisdictions. 

Sender preferences

There are a few aspects to the settings for SMS sending: 

• Smart Sending
• Auto-responder
• Email notifications
• SMS quiet hours
• Unsubscribe known SMS litigators

Klaviyo warns you if your campaign will potentially violate quiet hours.

Smart Sending 

Smart Sending allows you to limit the number of SMS messages someone will receive in a given period of time.

Klaviyo sets the default window of time to 24 hours, although you can adjust this, as shown below.

It is best practice to enable Smart Sending to ensure that customers are not overwhelmed with messages from your business, especially if you're sending emails in addition to text messages.

Auto-responder

This message sends when no keyword is recognized. This means that someone texted your SMS number but didn't include any known keyword (like STOP, JOIN, or HELP). 

There are 3 options for when this message might send:

• All profiles (default)
  Recommended when you are not using SMS Conversations or flows to respond to inbound SMS. 
• Only non-consented profiles
  Recommended when you are using SMS Conversations or flows to respond to inbound SMS. 
• No profiles
  Not recommended, as this means non-consented profiles will not receive a reply. (In Conversations, you can only send SMS to subscribers, sending to non-subscribers is not allowed.) 

Email notifications

If you want to be notified when someone texts your SMS number, you can turn on email notifications. This is recommended if you want to use SMS conversations but don't have a dedicated support resources. Alternatively, this is helpful for those wanting to stay informed about when subscribers are texting them.  

The setting for email notifications is off by default.

If you choose to enable these email notifications, you must set at least 1 recipient; however, you can add any number of email addresses.

SMS quiet hours

Klaviyo's SMS quiet hours limit when flows can send SMS messages to recipients.

This is beneficial for 2 key reasons:

• Providing a better customer experience
  Text messages actively ping the recipient's phone, so they're more intrusive than email or social media messages. Quiet hours help you avoid texting subscribers at odd hours of the day, leading to more positive customer interactions.
• Sending at only compliant times
  Quiet hours is also a key part of SMS compliance. In the US, for example, the TCPA forbids sending anytime before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m., and in Florida, it is further restricted to between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. The default window ensures that your messages can only send at compliant times, regardless of where the recipient lives and their time zone. 

Quiet hours are based on the recipient's phone number: typically on the country code, but in the US and Canada, you have the option to base quiet hours on area code. 

By default, Klaviyo's SMS quiet hours are from 8 p.m. to 11 a.m. (using Eastern Time in the US and Canada, BST for the UK, and Australian Eastern Time in Australia).

Unsubscribe known SMS litigators

By default, you will not collect SMS consent from a known litigators, reducing the risk of complaints or lawsuits for your brand. Anyone who is a known SMS litigator is automatically unsubscribed by Klaviyo. 

Tracking

Check this box to exclude bot clicks from your account's reporting data. You can filter bot clicks from email, SMS, or both channels.

Enabling this setting will exclude bot clicks in calculations of click rate, total clicks, and unique clicks across most reporting surfaces. Learn more about excluding and monitoring bot clicks in your account.

Note that any A/B tests created after this setting is enabled will use a click rate that excludes bot clicks, which may impact the winning variant. For this reason, we recommend not enabling this setting during an ongoing A/B test that uses click rate as a metric.

Keyword responses

Compliance keywords

Compliance keyword responses are SMS messages that are automatically toggled on to respond to customers who answer one of your messages. Note that:

• Keyword responses do not apply to branded sender IDs.
• You cannot add links to editable responses. 
• Keyword and their responses are available in a variety of languages. 

Certain keyword responses can be edited to fit your brand and desired content.

Subscribe keywords

A subscribe keyword is any keyword that allows someone to opt in to your SMS marketing program (e.g., JOIN)

Subscribe keywords are different from compliance keywords (e.g., HELP, STOP, START). Subscribe keywords are an opt-in method, while compliance keywords must, by law, provide certain information or perform a certain action (such as removing SMS consent).

You can create custom subscribe keywords that match your branding. These custom keywords: 

• Must be between 3 and 20 characters
• Include only alphanumeric characters *A–Z and 0–9)
  • Do not use any other special symbols.
• Should not be words:
  • Related to sex, hate, *alcohol, firearms, or tobacco (SHAFT).
    *Alcohol may be allowed with age-gating in certain countries.
  • That are too common (i.e., could be used in a normal text conversation), such as “the,” "that," "are," "can," "here," "about," or “and,”

Quick responses

Quick responses allow you to create and store responses you can use in your SMS conversations. In the SMS settings page, you can search through your existing quick responses or add a new one. 

For more information, please see how to create and use quick responses.

Short links

Custom links

Custom links allow you to brand shortened links in your SMS messages, either by adding the brand as a prefix to Klaviyo's link (i.e., a branded Klaviyo link) or by branding the entire link (i.e., branded custom link). 

Learn how to brand shortened links for SMS.  

Subscribe links

After you post an SMS subscribe link, anyone who clicks on it can easily opt in to your text message program. Those on mobile devices can opt in with tap-to-text, while those on desktop are directed to a subscribe page. 

Learn how to create an SMS subscribe link. 

Terms of service

Whenever you collect SMS consent, you should link to your mobile terms of service (TOS). You can use Klaviyo to:

• Generate a mobile TOS that you can customize to fit your needs.
• Either:
  • Host the TOS for you and add a link to your TOS anywhere (like forms where you collect SMS consent)
    Or
  • Copy the text in the TOS and paste into another page, like your existing TOS page.

SMS opt-in disclosure

Including SMS disclosure language on your popups, website, and any other consent-collection method is extremely important. Many countries require that companies inform potential SMS subscribers of exactly what they are agreeing to if they opt in to SMS marketing.

In Klaviyo, you can create default disclosure language to add to your sign-up forms and subscribe pages. 

Import SMS unsubscribes

You can bulk unsubscribe people from SMS by uploading a CSV file. This is useful when cleaning your SMS list, as it's better to unsubscribe someone than delete their profile.

This is not located within the SMS settings, but rather under Settings > Other > Profile maintenance. 

Read this article on how to bulk unsubscribe SMS profiles.

Tip: target by country 

With both branded sender IDs and toll-free numbers, the same number is used to collect consent and send to multiple countries. They do so automatically too, so if you don't want to collect consent or send to a certain country, target your forms and campaigns by country, and add location-based splits your flows. 

Separating by country is also key if you want to know where to use your SMS credits. Since credits vary by country, targeting based on location helps you track how much you spent, who engaged, and your ROI on a per-message basis. This way, you'll know where and with who to send SMS messages to.

The table below lists all of the countries where these numbers will send to. 

Additional resources

• Understand SMS sending numbers
• Understand Klaviyo's SMS credit system
• Basics: multi-national SMS sending with Klaviyo