Today it’s really common to ask your users to text you to start a conversation, redeem a prize, or get information from you.

But asking them to go open their SMS application, enter your number, an add the text are all actions that create friction.

Luckily, there’s a web intent link that handles this for us, you can create an <a></a> tag with an sms intent and add both the number and the starting text you want it to have:

<a href="sms://012345678?&body=SUBSCRIBE NOW">Text SUBSCRIBE NOW to 012345678</a>

It will open your SMS application, add that text to the body, and will let you send it to the number you already have there.

Known Issues

There’s something I saw when testing this on Android, if your default SMS app is set to Facebook’s Messenger instead of the regular Messages app, it will add // before the number and won’t render the starting case, or at least that was the case in my Motorola.

When using the regular SMS application it works well.