Holiday Season SMS Marketing Guide 2025: Campaign Ideas, Examples, and Compliance Tips

This year, consumers are spending more than ever, despite the financial crisis and economic pressures. In fact, according to a Numerator Survey, 80% of consumers are planning to spend more than $100 on Christmas.

The 2024 holiday season drove over half of all online shopping via mobile devices, with smartphones driving 54.5% of all online purchases. The continued mobile shopping dominance this year, tapping into SMS marketing, is more important than ever this festive season.

The rise of economic concern is causing more consumers to worry about the rising cost of living, making them seek exclusive deals and the best discounts that offer high value for money. To meet these consumer demands, businesses can offer the best discounts via SMS marketing to reach consumers and drive sales.

The festive season induces a sense of emotion, gratitude, and togetherness. This allows businesses to send personalized and thoughtful messages to build connections with consumers. Businesses can send thoughtful greetings, personalized festive offers, and heartfelt festive wishes to enable consumers to drive brand loyalty.

SMS has an incredible 98% open rate compared to other communication channels like emails. Besides, it has seen a staggering 300% growth rate between 2013 to 2025 according to TXTImpact’s 15-Year Industry Study Report, making SMS an excellent marketing tool during the holidays.

SMS provides instant customer reach by delivering messages directly to customers’ mobiles compared to social media marketing, where posts can get lost in the crowded feeds and algorithms.

SMS is ideal for time-sensitive festive deals and offers, including last-minute promotions, countdowns, and discounts that trigger immediate action amongst customers.

Thus, SMS during the holiday season allows businesses to boost conversions and engagement while strengthening relationships with customers in the long run.

Hi Grace, wishing you and your closed ones a joyous Christmas! Here’s a little gift from us - grab 15% off from our exclusive Christmas collection using the code MERRY25 before it’s gone [short link]

You can also leverage MMS marketing to include enticing product images or festive greetings, and short videos to enhance the messaging experience for your customers.

TXTImpact’s MMS messaging and marketing solution lets you add images, videos, audios, speech, and animations to your messages to enable personalized and targeted messaging campaigns

For example, A peach delivery company, The Peach Truck, based in Nashville, emphasizes buying local, sends personalized and colorful MMS messages to their customers with their first name, with a reminder of their VIP status, and a limited-time offer.

Use precise CTAs, like ‘Claim Your Gift,’ ‘Shop Now,’ ‘Grab Your Discount,’ and ‘RSVP Today.’

For MMS messages, make sure to add scannable QR codes or include clickable links to offer an intuitive and engaging experience to your customers.

Without a clear and compelling CTA, customers will just view your message and move on to the next brand deal that facilitates their buying journey.

Alo Yoga uses SMS marketing to send exclusive rewards and updates to its customers using clear and actionable CTA ‘Click to shop now,’ driving engagement and conversion rate.

Ensure a unified campaign theme with the same tone, similar visual types, and colors across all channels; however, with different content. Consumers want brands to send different email and SMS message content related to the same promotional and festive campaign.

Strategically map the customer journey from one channel to another. For instance, you can use SMS to introduce the campaign or deals teaser, social media or MMS to retarget customers and provide more visual details, and emails to follow up on the campaign with relevant CTAs.

Sync and coordinate your message timing for each channel to avoid overwhelming customers.

Set up automated triggers and follow-ups to send automated follow-up messages to customers across all channels based on their user behavior.

• First purchase discount codes

• Last-minute deals for procrastinators

• Exclusive early access discounts to make customers feel VIPs

• Limited-time flash sales with key taglines as ‘free shipping for the next 1 hour only’

• Holiday gift guides and suggestions

• Exclusive personalized recommendations based on the past purchase history

• Special deals and promotions for loyal customers

An example of an exclusive personalized deal could be:

Early Access Alert for all our loyal customers. Our festive sales start tomorrow, but being loyal to us for more than two years, you get premium access to our shop 24 hrs early. Use code ‘EARLYVIP25’ at checkout [short link]

Rebels Refinery, a premium skincare brand, for instance, sent out SMS messages to its customers with keywords like ‘early drops’ and ‘VIPs’ to make customers feel they’re getting exclusive and special offers before everyone else, leading to higher CTRs and engagement.

1. Use the right messaging tool, as it makes a huge difference when it comes to SMS marketing. Choose a tool, like TXTImpact, that facilitates SMS and MMS marketing with 105 ready templates and seamless integrations to gain high response rates.

2. Ensure short, clear, and crisp messages within 160 characters with strong CTAs to ensure readability and a seamless customer experience. Also, avoid sounding the message too salesy so customers won’t drive off from your messages.

3. Combine SMS + MMS for maximum impact to meet different customer preferences. For instance, while you can use SMS for urgent flash sales or quick message discounts, you can use MMS for special promotions and visual storytelling.

There’s one more crucial best practice: ensuring compliance and security, which we will discuss in more detail.