Klaviyo SMS expands global reach to 18 countries – adding Italy and Portugal

We’re excited to announce that the Klaviyo platform now includes SMS marketing for sending of campaigns and automations to your customers in Italy and Portugal.

We have plans to expand further still, to additional countries in the near future. This expansion aims to simplify your international marketing efforts, ensuring a seamless, cohesive customer experience across all regions and channels.

Read on to learn how you can leverage these new features to enhance your global SMS strategy.

The problem

Launching a multinational SMS program can be daunting. It often requires using multiple platforms to collect consent and host local phone numbers, or it requires managing SMS separately from your email platform. This fragmentation complicates navigating compliance regulations, as consent collection and communication may be handled on different systems.

Additionally, coordinating email and SMS communications to create a cohesive customer experience becomes challenging, leading to disjointed interactions, reduced conversions, and increased unsubscribes.

The solution

Klaviyo simplifies multinational SMS marketing by integrating consent collection, compliance management, and cohesive communications into a single, unified SMS and email marketing platform.

Throughout 2024, we’ve extended our SMS support to a total of 18 countries, adding Italy and Portugal to other recent additions like Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. We’ve also enhanced our SMS capabilities in Australia by adding MMS sending and two-way messaging via long codes.

Easily add a new regional phone number

Klaviyo makes expanding your reach to new regions straightforward by allowing you to add local phone numbers directly in your account. You can have one Klaviyo account with several sending numbers for each country.

Klaviyo automatically detects where each recipient is located and sends messages using the appropriate number for that country. For example, you can use a toll-free number for the US and a long code for the UK within a single campaign.

Choose the right sending number type for your business

Depending on the region, Klaviyo offers different sending number types:

• US and Canada: toll-free number, short code, and vanity short code
• UK and Ireland: branded sender ID and long code
• Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland: branded sender ID
• New Zealand: vanity short code

Different features and registration requirements apply depending on the sending number type, such as:

• Sending MMS (images and GIFs): supported by toll-free numbers, long codes, and short codes, but not by branded sender IDs
• Receiving SMS (two-way conversations, keyword opt-ins, etc.): supported by toll-free numbers, long codes, and short codes, but not by branded sender IDs
• Registration or verification process:
  • Required for toll-free numbers and short codes everywhere
  • Required for branded sender IDs everywhere except Australia
  • Required for long codes everywhere except the UK

Collect SMS consent seamlessly across countries

Growing your SMS list in different countries can be challenging, but Klaviyo makes it easy with multiple options for collecting consent, regardless of your subscribers’ location.

Whether through sign-up forms, consent collection at check-out, email CTAs, or social subscribe links, Klaviyo has you covered with GDPR compliant forms, pre-built disclosure language, and automatic consent storage across channels. These tools enable confident, compliant expansion of your SMS marketing efforts worldwide.

Send compliant text messages globally

Sending SMS messages globally requires attention to factors like messaging frequency, local regulations, and language preferences. Klaviyo simplifies this by allowing you to segment your audience by country and language, sending messages in the recipient’s preferred language and local time. This enhances the customer experience and avoids compliance issues with quiet hours.

To maximise your SMS credits, keep messages concise, aiming for around 155 characters. Remember that special characters, emojis, and non-Latin letters can reduce the character limit to 70. Dynamic or personalised content will vary the character count per recipient. Always check the estimated character count before sending.

Klaviyo continues to support multinational brands

Klaviyo currently supports over 146,000 brands across 80+ countries. We’re committed to powering smarter digital relationships by unifying all your customer data for better, more personalised communication at scale.

This includes our continued SMS expansion and features like Klaviyo portfolio for a consolidated view of performance across separate brand or regional accounts, along with the ability to clone campaigns, flows, forms, segments, and more from one account to multiple accounts at once.