Notification SMS: Template content requirements for India

Notification SMS: Template content requirements for India

Once you've configured SMS notifications in your organization, you need to create SMS templates and get them approved by the telecom regulatory authority of your region. In India, to send SMS notifications, you need templates approved by distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Content requirements 

Below is a list of the content requirements for DLT approval:
  1. A maximum of 4,000 characters (no Unicode characters) can be sent in a single message as a multi-part message.
    All non-English characters not found in the GSM-7 character set are considered to be Unicode characters.
  2. Multi-part messages are sent in multiple parts but received as a single message. Each part is considered to be an individual message for which a unit of cost is deducted.
  3. Note that once a template is approved, the number of characters allowed to be substituted in the merge field while sending a message is between 0 and 30 characters.
  4. As of April 22, 2021, it is mandatory to have a brand name in all message categories. 
    Any template requests without a brand/entity/trade name will be summarily rejected.

Causes of SMS template rejections 

The templates sent for DLT approval could be rejected for any of the following reasons:
  1. The template content may be an already-existing one.
  2. The content is in an invalid format.
  3. The template is too long/exceeds the character limits.
  4. The content has objectionable words.
  5. The number of variables in the template exceeds the allowed limit.
  6. Where it appears to the registrar that the variable character length in the content template may be more than the maximum allowed limit of 30 characters.
  7. The template content is misleading.

Part calculations

  1. In multi-part messages (i.e., messages with a length of more than 160 characters), the maximum length of each part is determined by the type of characters present in the message content.
  2. If the message content contains a single Unicode character, the entire message will be considered a Unicode message.
  3. For Unicode messages, the maximum characters that each part can hold is 60 characters (for a single-part message). If the message contains more than 60 characters, the maximum characters that each part can hold is limited to 53 characters.
  4. For non-Unicode messages (i.e., messages using GSM-7 characters), the maximum number of characters that each part can hold is 160 for a single message and 153 characters for multi-part messages.

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