Holiday Season SMS Marketing Guide 2025: Campaign Ideas, Examples, and Compliance Tips
The holiday season is just around the corner, with Halloween just a few days away. This festive season is a crucial opportunity for businesses to drive sales and attract customers.
In fact, the holiday season shopping has already begun, with October 2025 being a key month for consumers for holiday shopping, with a 4% increase in the shopping spree, from 18% in 2024 to 22% in 2025, proving as a prime starting month for festive shopping.
From Black Friday to Christmas, the holiday season peaks excitement within customers to grab the best deals; however, without a proven and strategic marketing campaign, the season can go dry for your business.
To avoid this, we have listed down the best SMS marketing campaign strategies you can use to boost your business sales and drive high conversions this festive season.
Jump to:
Why SMS Marketing Matters For Businesses in Festivities?
9 Best Strategies For Result-driven SMS Marketing This Holiday Season
Types of SMS Marketing Campaigns you can run during the Holiday Season
How Businesses Can Generate Higher ROI with Holiday Season SMS Marketing?
What are the compliance and security considerations for holiday season SMS marketing?
Real-world Case Study of a Successful Holiday Season SMS Campaign
Why Tap Into the Festive Season Market?
While it may be the time for celebration for common people and consumers, holidays give businesses the perfect advantage to tap into the consumers’ buying behavior.
Here are some reasons and statistics why the festive season is a goldmine for businesses and marketers:
Soaring consumer spending on holidays: 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.
Increased digital activity: 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.
Value-conscious shopping: 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.
Emotional connection towards shopping and gifting: 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.
It’s all about noticing customers’ behavior, how and from where they shop, and what they look for, to drive and pave the way for the best marketing strategies.
Why SMS Marketing Matters For Businesses in the Holiday Season?
Holidays are the perfect time for businesses to maximize the potential of SMS marketing.
Customers are already preparing for the season by looking for festive products, be it buying festive decor, gifting close ones, or giving their wardrobe a festive makeover.
SMS marketing bridges the gap between customers browsing and businesses selling what consumers are looking for. Here are a few more reasons why SMS marketing works best in the festive season:
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.
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9 Best Strategies For Result-driven SMS Marketing This Holiday Season
Follow these best SMS marketing strategies to grab customers towards your brand this festive season:
Personalization
Sending generic mass texts and messages is a big no, especially during the holiday season, with so many brands and companies competing with one another.
Personalization turns a simple text into a meaningful customer interaction and experience. In fact, 71% of shoppers want companies to deliver personalized customer interactions.
Personalization elevates the otherwise irrelevant or generic messaging experience, encouraging consumers to make the purchase.
Here’s how you can personalize your SMS marketing campaign:
Address the customer with their name included in the message
Send back-in-stock notifications and cart abandonment, and browse abandonment reminders
Send loyalty points reminders and reminders about products they could likely be running low on
Send personalized festive greetings or wishes to make customers feel connected to your brand.
Here’s an example of a personalized SMS message:
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.
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Be strategic with the message timing
Timing is a key element of an effective SMS marketing strategy. The optimal timing can significantly boost conversions, sales, and engagement for your business. And at the same time, sending messages too early in the festive season can reduce urgency, while sending them too late may lead to increased risks of missing the holiday season.
Here are some timing considerations you must take care of when sending festive messages:
Schedule your campaigns around key holidays like Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s as well as Black Friday sales.
Space out the messages you send to avoid message fatigue and to prevent making customers feel overwhelmed.
Be mindful of time zones and your customer’s mobile behavior. Prefer sending messages when customers are most likely to engage with their phones. The preferred timings and best practices are:
10 AM to 8 PM on weekdays in respective time zones
Late mornings and early evenings are preferable. Avoid early mornings and late nights
Typically, Tuesdays to Thursdays see the best user engagement
Craft clear and strong CTAs
Your SMS marketing texts won’t serve their purpose or have any meaning unless they guide customers on the next steps and actions to take.
Clear CTAs pave the way for customers to take the desired actions and create a sense of urgency to act instantly. It’s important to ensure that the CTAs align with your message or campaign goal to provide clarity to the customers and generate more conversions.
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.
Automate
Your marketing team will likely be overloaded with tons of campaigns and work during the holidays. Automation facilitates their job and provides them a breather while they can focus on strategizing and analyzing.
From businesses to shoppers and consumers, everyone is expected to use AI this holiday season. 56% of marketers say that their company actively implements AI in their marketing campaigns, and 32% of marketing companies have already implemented AI.
At the same time, when it comes to the consumer market, over half, that is, 53% of the U.S. consumers, plan to use AI for online shopping in 2025.
Here’s how businesses can use AI when driving SMS marketing during holidays:
Drip campaigns, like festive countdowns, promotions, or early access offers
Trigger-based SMS/MMS campaigns, such as birthday discounts, cart abandonment reminders, or post-purchase thank you or feedback messages.
Welcome messages to auto-reply to consumers who joined in or chose to opt-in to your campaign
With TXTImpact’s SMS marketing tool, you can schedule your holiday promotions and send mass text messages ahead of key events, and sit back and let AI do its job.
Leverage omnichannel marketing
Customers expect the same brand experience across all channels, be it SMS, WhatsApp, or email. An omnichannel marketing experience provides a consistent, unified, and highly engaging brand experience to customers, leading to more conversions.
In addition, it also allows customers to choose which channel they prefer to engage with your brand, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Here are some tips to build an effective omnichannel marketing strategy:
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.
TXTImpact offers Email + SMS Marketing integration, allowing you to boost your festive sales and conversions by seamlessly integrating Salesforce, Mailchimp, and other email marketing tools with SMS.
Pura Vida, for example, follows an omnichannel marketing strategy to push emails, web notifications, and social media posts to its audience in a personalized and seamless way.
Offer exclusive deals
Apart from other days and seasons, holidays are when you can make your customers feel valued and special. Exclusive deals and early access discounts urge customers to act promptly before the deal expires, driving high engagement and conversions.
For instance, you can offer:
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.
Test different approaches
Every campaign works differently, as well as the audience reacts differently for every campaign. What might work for Halloween and Christmas might not work for New Year’s and would require different strategies and approaches.
It’s important to test different elements, such as message timing, CTAs, visuals and images, message tone, and even offers, to determine what resonates best with your audience and yields the best results.
The best solution is to perform A/B testing and compare different approaches, like SMS, MMS, or email, with varying message content and tonality to refine strategies accordingly.
Consistently track and analyze campaigns
Once you’ve tried and tested everything and your campaign has been out there for a while, it’s crucial to analyze the campaign performance and see how it’s working.
It’s important to track metrics, like
Delivery and open rates
Click-through rates
Conversion rates
Opt-outs rates
Results across different formats and audience segments
Once you have these insights, it becomes easier to tailor the campaign according to the metrics that provide the highest conversion and results. For instance, if MMS images work best over text SMS, use that; if Wednesday mid-mornings provide better results than Monday morning, schedule messages accordingly.
Types of SMS Marketing Campaigns you can run during the Holiday Season
Besides the marketing campaigns discussed above, including exclusive discounts and countdowns, here are some examples of the most effective SMS campaigns businesses can run during this festive season.
Black Friday and early access campaigns, with Black Friday being the busiest shopping season of the year. You can give your loyal customers early access to these sales to help them beat inbox clutter and experience VIP treatment.
You can leverage the Halloween promotion season by promoting your products in themed visuals, spooky wordplay, and limited-time discounts.
Cyber Monday deals are perfect for online-only offers and app downloads that work great for quick clicks and conversions.
Christmas and New Year flash sales with countdown-like messaging build urgency and anticipation, encouraging quick action from customers.
Loyalty and exclusive VIP list to appreciate and retain loyal customers with bonus rewards and exclusive bundles.
Gift guide and recommendations campaign to help customers find the ideal festive gifts for their friends and family.
How Businesses Can Generate Higher ROI with Holiday Season SMS Marketing?
(Best Practices For Festive SMS Marketing)
Here are some key SMS marketing best practices for holidays to ensure a result-driven and successful festive season.
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.
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.
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.
What compliance and security considerations should businesses keep in mind during the holiday season for SMS Campaigns?
Ensuring compliance and ethical security becomes even more important during the festive promotional campaigns. It’s quite common to get carried away with the salesly messages and overwhelming customers, or sending messages without consent, in the holiday season.
Here are some compliance best practices and legal considerations businesses must take care of when driving a holiday season SMS campaign:
Obtain explicit customer consent: Before mailing or sending messages to your customers, it’s important to obtain their consent and opt-in permission to receive messages. Sending promotional and marketing messages to your customers without their consent is against the compliance rules and regulations.
Read: 13 Proven Strategies to Build a Compliant SMS Subscriber List
Ensure easy opt-outs: Besides getting consent, it’s also crucial to honor customers’ opt-outs. With a simple keyword, like ‘STOP’ or ‘STOP SMS,’ customers can unsubscribe from receiving messages. Once they opt out, it’s recommended to immediately remove their data from the subscriber’s list to avoid accidentally sending them messages.
Follow regional and carrier regulations: Ensuring the marketing campaigns follow the regional compliance frameworks, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and CTIA guidelines for the United States, is crucial to avoid legal violations.
Besides these regulations, it’s also important to take care of other crucial considerations, such as
Using pre-approved holiday SMS templates and sender IDs
Being honest and transparent with your offers and discounts
For instance, instead of misleading customers with ‘Get 90% off on all products,’ be accurate with ‘up to 50% off on festive picks’
Maintain proper records of all customer data, including opt-ins, opt-outs, consent forms, message logs, and customer lists
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Real-world Case Study of a Successful Holiday Season SMS Campaign
Fenty Beauty, a popular cosmetics brand, launched its limited-edition holiday product collection with SMS campaigns. The brand built anticipation and excitement amongst customers for weeks and shared the exact launch time of the campaign with their exclusive and VIP customers.
The VIP SMS subscribers got a 15-minute head start before the campaign went live for the consumers.
This works because the campaign focuses on urgency and exclusivity, making subscribed customers feel valued and special, leading to massive sales spikes. At the same time, the limited-time sales ensure the collection sells out quickly.
Conclusion
The holidays are the perfect time for businesses to boost their sales, launch new or exclusive product collections, and even get new customers. By following SMS marketing best practices and considerations, businesses can offer personalized, value-driven experiences to their customers, strengthening the bond and relationship.
TXTImpact makes mass texting and SMS marketing a breeze with powerful features, like email marketing integrations, scheduling, SMS autoresponder, web opt-in form, and more.
At the same time, we’re soon going to launch RCS messaging for businesses, which will allow you to include rich media and interactive features and send branded messages to your customers, driving more engagement and interactions.
If this sounds good and you’re ready to take your business to newer heights, contact us today to get started!
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FAQs
How early should businesses start planning festive SMS marketing campaigns?
Ideally, businesses should start planning the festive campaigns 4-6 weeks before the actual season to craft suitable messages, segment audiences, and plan scheduling of messages to drive maximum impact.
What types of offers work best during the festive season?
Several types of offers, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, flash sales, limited-time discounts, and exclusive VIP lists, work best during the holidays.
What is the ideal frequency for sending festive SMS messages?
Sending announcements, cart reminders, and promotional messages to customers at a higher frequency is common during the holidays. However, it’s not a best practice to overdo it. Ideally, limit the message frequency to 2-3 well-timed messages per week to prevent message fatigue.
Can I send festive promotional messages to customers who opted in last year?
Yes, you can send festive promotional messages via TXTImpact to customers who opted in last year and are present in your subscribers’ list. It’s a best practice to continue messaging those customers throughout the year to build a certain bond and relationship, resulting in better sales during the holidays.
How does integrating SMS with social media and email boost festive results?
Omnichannel integration, such as integrating SMS with email and social media, boosts visibility and ensures consistent message branding, enabling better engagement and interactions.