Who doesn’t enjoy unfolding Salesforce comercial contracts?
One of the items I have found myself trying to decrypt recently are how exactly ‘Super Messages’ are consumed, something that would be one part of your contact if you use Marketing Cloud.
Super Messages are any type of message sent to a customer including an email, CloudPage impression, push notification, or an SMS or MMS message. The number of Super Messages consumed per message varies by type of message.
If you are not sure your current utilisation and the split by type, I would certainly advise you to reach out to your Account team to provide you a break down as per the example below:
From there some of the things I want to highlight:
High Priority Emails
The basic difference here is that if you have marked an email as ‘high’ within Marketing cloud, that small change would cost you 4 super messages instead of the 1 super message cost for a normal email.
I’d recommend you to change those as the only difference there is that if marked ‘high’ it goes into the queue in 10 seconds, otherwise it goes into the queue in 60 seconds.
TEST Business Unit
As of right now Marketing cloud does not have the concept of a Sandbox, so the approach that I see most often is to purchase a business unit and sync it with one of your Salesforce sandboxes.
Try to get from your Account team the above chart with the breakdown by business units, as you may be able to exclude automated emails from test. Check out this video from Eliot Harper about how to use exclusion scripts for test emails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q_iXMGag2o
SMS length
I have found recently through this exercise that in one Marketing Cloud org there were sending every time 2 or 3 sms in length which actually translated to 40-60 super messages each time.
The character limit for a single SMS message is 160 characters, however most modern phones and networks support concatenation. Careful with the concatenation as it will reduce the amount of available characters, something between 3 – 7 characters less per sms.
Non-GSM danger characters
From the above situation we also had a non-GSM character in that text which ends up having a repercussion of sending 5 sms to each subscriber each time which is 100 super messages.
As the above image you have the ability to easily highlight the non-GSM characters within Marketing Cloud so you can remove or change them. More on characters sets here: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_moc_character_sets.htm&type=5
Within the builder you also have just there the count of characters and an alert if any non-GSM characters are in use.
But essentially the simple difference is that instead of using (’) you can use (‘) for example.
Country-varied SMS cost
Last but not least is the intricacy of ‘Country Multiplier’ which impacts the number of super messages per sms. The multiplier applied is determined by country destination for each individual message sent.
It’s again best to check with your Account team but I have found the following document which shows towards the end a table with the multipliers:
Phew thats it for now, I hope you find these items useful to have a good eye and get the most out of your contract!
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