Blog / Marketing
Segmenting SMS campaigns by country: timezones, costs and rules
A single send to an international list looks efficient and behaves badly. Three separate problems collide, and none of them show up in the dashboard until after the money is spent.
Timezones
Scheduling 10am in your timezone means 3am for a chunk of the list. People do not forgive that, and the opt-out rate on a middle-of-the-night promo tells you so immediately. Some jurisdictions also restrict marketing hours by law, so this is not only a courtesy question.
Cost per message varies more than you would expect
Sending to a US number and sending to a number in Lebanon or Nigeria are not remotely the same price, and the gap can be an order of magnitude. If your list is 70 percent domestic and 30 percent spread across fifteen countries, your per-campaign cost is dominated by the tail and you have no visibility into it from a single blended number.
Splitting the send gives you a real cost per segment. From there you can decide whether the international portion earns its keep, which is a decision you cannot make without the split.
Three countries means three rulebooks
The TCPA, GDPR with PECR, and CASL disagree about what consent is and how long it survives. A blended list hides which rules apply to whom. Separate lists make each campaign auditable, and if a regulator ever asks, you can answer per market.
Doing the split
The manual approach is a spreadsheet, a column of country codes, and a lot of filtering. It works, and it breaks the moment someone's number was saved in local format without a country code, because then you genuinely cannot tell where they are without asking.
Reading the number properly is the only reliable method: parse it, identify the country, group accordingly. Grouping iPhone contacts by country during export means the files come out pre-split, one per country, already in E.164. Upload each to its own campaign and the timezone, cost and compliance problems all resolve at once.
Language follows country, usually
A split by country gives you the natural seam for translation. Sending English to your French list is not a compliance problem, it is just a worse campaign, and the fix is free once the lists are already separate.
Sender IDs differ by market
Alphanumeric sender IDs, where the message shows your business name instead of a number, are available in much of Europe and prohibited in the US and Canada. Some countries require pre-registration of the sender ID with the regulator, and Saudi Arabia and India will drop unregistered traffic entirely.
You cannot configure that per-market on a single blended campaign. Separate sends let each market use whatever its carriers actually accept.
Measure per market too
A 3 percent conversion blended across six countries might be 7 percent at home and under 1 percent abroad. Blended numbers hide the markets worth investing in and the ones worth dropping.
Numbers without a country code are the hard case
A number saved as 3123456 with no prefix is not assignable to a country by inspection. It could be Beirut, it could be half a dozen other places. A parser will fall back to your own region, which is a guess dressed as an answer.
The honest handling is to flag these rather than assume. They are usually a small slice of the list, and a short list of ambiguous numbers you check by hand beats a large list of confident mistakes.
Start with the two markets that matter
Splitting into fourteen country campaigns when twelve of them hold under thirty contacts each is busywork. Group the long tail into one campaign and give proper treatment to the two or three markets carrying real volume.
The split tells you which those are. Before you group by country, you are usually guessing about your own distribution, and most people guess wrong about the tail.
Get Pluck for iPhone
Pluck does the steps in this guide on your iPhone, with no server, no account, and no analytics. Group your contacts by country, find duplicates the iOS tool misses, and export to CSV, Excel, TXT, or vCard.