How often should you send SMS marketing?

How many texts a week is too many?

There's no single number that's wrong for everyone, but there is a range where most brands land. Here's what three of the biggest SMS platforms say:

So the consensus is roughly one to two a week. Notice that all three sell SMS, so none of them has a reason to tell you to send less. Treat these as a ceiling to work up to, not a target to hit in your first month.

Klaviyo also suggests a monthly mix of about two important announcements, two early-access or last-call messages, three targeted campaigns and three or more flow messages. That's a useful shape even if your numbers are smaller.

Why should you text less often than you email?

Because SMS is a more acute form of marketing. It's timely and urgent, it interrupts whatever someone is doing, and it builds very little brand awareness on its own.

I think about it this way: texts are reminders, emails are branding and awareness. Your emails can carry the story, the product education and the offer, and they can go out several times a week because they're easy to ignore. A text is not easy to ignore. So the best use of a text is often to remind people to read the email you already sent.

If you want the email side of this question, I cover it in how many emails per week.

What happens to opt-outs when you send more?

They rise, but later than most founders expect.

Attentive's analysis of more than 25 billion messages found opt-out rates don't start to increase until brands send 10 to 15 messages a month to their full subscriber list. Postscript, looking at its own merchants, found that each additional send in a subscriber's first 30 days added about 0.5% to unsubscribes in that period, or about 5 extra unsubscribes per 1,000 subscribers for one more text.

Postscript also found that unsubscribe rates are about 5 times higher in the first 30 days after opt-in than later on. That's normal, and it's a reason to make your welcome texts good rather than to stop sending.

To judge your own numbers, Klaviyo's campaign SMS benchmarks call an unsubscribe rate under 0.5% great, 0.6% to 1.4% good, 1.5% to 1.9% room for improvement, and 2% or higher critical. If you're in the green, you probably have room to send a bit more. If you're in the red, cut back before you do anything else. More benchmarks in my SMS marketing benchmarks post.

How should SMS frequency change around the holidays?

Go up around real deadlines, then come back down.

For shipping cutoffs, my rule is at least one text on the cutoff day or the day before. If you have spare credits, send one a week or two ahead so people see it coming, then increase the cadence as the date gets close. BFCM works the same way: a handful of texts timed to the moments that matter, not one every few hours.

What doesn't work is texting every day in a normal month because you had a good BFCM. Holiday frequency is borrowed against the urgency of the holidays. When the deadline passes, the reason for the extra texts is gone too.

Do automated SMS flows count toward frequency?

They count toward what lands on someone's phone, but they're a different kind of message. A flow text goes to one person at a moment that makes sense for them: they just subscribed, they left a cart, their order is about to run out. That's why flows tend to do so much better than campaigns. Klaviyo's 2026 SMS benchmarks show flows are 7.6% of SMS sends but drive 45.2% of SMS revenue.

Two settings keep flows and campaigns from piling up:

• Smart Sending. In Klaviyo, the default SMS Smart Sending window is 24 hours, so someone who got a text recently is skipped. Leave it on for normal campaigns. Turn it off for restocks, deadlines, launches and multi-send days so the important reminders actually go out.
• Timing gaps. For upsell texts after an order, give the idea no less than 2 weeks after the purchase, so it doesn't land on top of their order and shipping texts.

Does sending more texts cost more?

Yes, and it adds up faster than email. Every text is billed per message segment, per recipient. A segment is up to 160 characters, or 70 if the text has an emoji or special character, and MMS costs more than plain SMS. So five texts to 10,000 people is 50,000 billable segments at minimum.

That's one more reason to make every text earn its place. Before you add another weekly send, check what it costs against what your last few sends made. The full breakdown is in Klaviyo SMS credits.

Do you have to tell subscribers how often you'll text?

Yes. The CTIA's Messaging Principles and Best Practices say the opt-in confirmation message should include a disclosure that the messages are recurring and how often you'll send them. Klaviyo's default confirmation handles this with a line that frequency may vary.

You also need to send at reasonable hours. Klaviyo's guidance is to avoid sending before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time, and some states, such as Florida, are stricter.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you're unsure what applies to your list, ask whoever handles compliance for you.

What's a good SMS frequency plan to start with?

If you just turned on SMS, start here:

1. Weeks 1 to 4: one campaign text a week, plus your welcome and abandoned cart flows. Send your highest-leverage marketing (a bestseller, a restock, a real offer) and see what works.
2. Month 2: try two texts in one week, and compare revenue per text and unsubscribes to the one-text weeks.
3. After that: settle at the number where revenue per text holds up and unsubscribes stay in Klaviyo's good range.

For most brands that lands at 4 to 8 campaign texts a month. If you're still deciding whether SMS is worth it, start with should I add SMS marketing.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

Instagram @jackintheinbox LinkedIn