Sixteen Holiday Texts Short Enough to Bill as One Message.

A Black Friday text of 145 characters travels as one SMS segment. Add a gift box emoji and the same message travels as three. One character outside the GSM 7 bit alphabet, the character set the SMS standard was built on, switches the whole message to a 16 bit encoding that holds 70 characters, and 67 per segment once a message has to be split. Twilio bills SMS per segment, so on Twilio the emoji triples what the text costs to send.

Every sample below is written around that arithmetic. There are 16 holiday marketing texts, two for each moment of the season from early access to the week after Christmas, one written for an online or local store and one for a service business. Each fits in a single 160 character segment, opens with the business name, closes with opt out instructions, and is shown with its character count.

They are drafts to rewrite with real offers and real dates, and no list should receive all of them. The email versions are in holiday email subject lines. How many texts to send between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is covered in Black Friday texts: how many to send and when, and the full calendar for the season, email included, is in the holiday email and SMS plan.

What a holiday text has to fit into 160 characters

The 160 character limit comes from 3GPP TS 23.038, the technical specification for SMS alphabets, which says a message coded in the GSM 7 bit default alphabet can carry up to 160 characters. The same specification lists a small extension table, and each character drawn from it takes the space of two: the euro sign, square and curly brackets, the caret, the tilde, the vertical bar and the backslash. A dollar sign, a percent sign, an at sign and a straight apostrophe count once.

Two other pieces go in every text. CTIA, the wireless industry association, publishes the messaging guidance carriers expect business senders to follow. Its Short Code Monitoring Handbook requires short code programs to disclose the program name, often the brand name, or a product description in their service messages, and to give opt out instructions at regular intervals and at least once a month. Its broader Messaging Principles and Best Practices, a voluntary document that covers ordinary 10 digit and toll free numbers too, says senders should state in the message how to opt out and should use the standard STOP wording.

The samples put the business name first and "Reply STOP to opt out" last on every text, because including both every time is simpler than tracking a once a month rule across four texts in eight days. The instruction costs 22 characters with its leading space.

The rest of the space is budgeted the same way in every sample: about 10 characters for the business name and a colon, about 80 for the offer and its deadline, about 20 for a link, and 22 for the opt out. The samples use YOURSHOP (8 characters) and YOURCO (6) as stand ins, so a longer business name comes straight out of the offer. A 28 character business name pushes five of the eight store samples below past one segment.

Links in the samples point to the business's own domain. CTIA's principles say a link shortener, if used, should have a web address dedicated to that one sender, and that a link should not obscure who sent it. Klaviyo senders have a reporting reason to avoid outside shorteners as well: its help center says clicks cannot be tracked properly in Klaviyo when a third party shortener is used, and it recommends Klaviyo's own.

Early access, Black Friday and Cyber Monday text message examples

The holiday email and SMS plan linked above schedules early access for the week of November 16, and these samples assume Friday, November 20, a week before Black Friday. The early access text tells subscribers what they get before the public does.

• Store, 156 characters: YOURSHOP: Early access for text subscribers starts now. 25% off sitewide through Thu 11/26, before the public sale. yourshop.com/early Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 158 characters: YOURCO: Text subscribers get first pick of December appointments. Book by Thu 11/26, before we open the calendar to all. yourco.com/book Reply STOP to opt out

For many service businesses, the scarce thing in December is the calendar rather than a discount, and first pick of dates costs nothing to offer.

Black Friday falls on November 27, 2026. The launch text states the discount, the end date with a time zone, and nothing else.

• Store, 145 characters: YOURSHOP: Black Friday is live. 25% off everything through Mon 11/30 at 11:59pm ET, free shipping over $50. yourshop.com/bf Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 139 characters: YOURCO: Black Friday is here. $40 off a furnace tune up booked by Mon 11/30, for any visit before 1/31. yourco.com/bf Reply STOP to opt out

The service version separates the day the customer books from the day the work happens, so a January visit can still be sold on Black Friday.

Cyber Monday, November 30, is the last day of the weekend sale in these samples, and the final text should leave time to act. Send it in the afternoon rather than the evening. In Klaviyo, a campaign text that lands inside a recipient's quiet hours waits until those hours end by default, so a last call sent late on Monday can arrive on Tuesday morning, after the sale has closed.

• Store, 108 characters: YOURSHOP: Last day. 25% off ends tonight at 11:59pm ET. No extensions. yourshop.com/cm Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 149 characters: YOURCO: Cyber Monday is the last day for $40 off a tune up. Book by 11:59pm ET tonight for any visit before 1/31. yourco.com/bf Reply STOP to opt out

"No extensions" is a promise. If the sale might be extended, cut the phrase.

Shipping cutoffs, gift cards and the last few days

The store sample uses the cutoffs worked out in the guide to emails after Cyber Monday for a store that packs within two business days: Tuesday, December 15, for standard shipping and Wednesday, December 16, for Priority Mail. Each falls two business days before the Postal Service's send by date for that service, December 17 and December 18.

• Store, 156 characters: YOURSHOP: Order by Tue 12/15 and we ship by Thu 12/17, the USPS Christmas cutoff. For Priority, order by Wed 12/16. yourshop.com/gifts Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 140 characters: YOURCO: 6 cleaning openings left the week of 12/14, before holiday guests arrive. Reply BOOK and we'll call you today. Reply STOP to opt out

The store version promises a ship date, which the store controls, rather than a delivery date, which depends on the carrier. The service version asks for a reply instead of a click. Someone has to answer those replies the same day, and the number of openings has to be true when the text goes out.

A digital gift card can still be sold after the last shipping date, which is one reason the guide to holiday marketing ideas for small businesses puts gift cards first.

• Store, 157 characters: YOURSHOP: Someone hard to shop for? Digital gift cards arrive by text or email in minutes, any day through 12/25. yourshop.com/giftcard Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 132 characters: YOURCO: Buy a $100 gift card by 12/24 and get a $20 bonus card for yourself, good 1/2 to 3/31. yourco.com/gift Reply STOP to opt out

The dates in a bonus card text should match the terms printed on the card. How to structure a bonus card alongside a purchased card is covered in the Black Friday guide for service businesses.

In the last few days before Christmas, the texts sell local pickup and anything that can be delivered by text.

• Store, 139 characters: YOURSHOP: Too late to ship? Order online by 2pm and pick up in store today. We're open until 8pm. yourshop.com/pickup Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 119 characters: YOURCO: Out of time? We can text a gift card to anyone in minutes, even on 12/24. yourco.com/gift Reply STOP to opt out

Christmas text messages to customers, and the thank you

Christmas Day 2026 is a Friday. The texts for that week carry hours and service information rather than a new offer, and they are sent before December 24.

• Store, 118 characters: YOURSHOP: Open 12/24 until 3pm, closed 12/25. Anything bought now can be exchanged through 1/31. Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 148 characters: YOURCO holiday hours: office closed 12/24 and 12/25. For a no heat emergency, call 212 555 0100, answered every day this week. Reply STOP to opt out

CTIA's principles say a phone number in a text should not forward to an unpublished number unless the text plainly identifies who owns it, which is one more reason the business name comes first.

The last text of the season goes out after December 26 and sells nothing.

• Store, 149 characters: YOURSHOP: Thanks for shopping with us this year. Exchanges run through 1/31, and your order number works in place of a receipt. Reply STOP to opt out
• Service business, 150 characters: YOURCO: Thanks for having us in your home this year. If anything we fixed isn't right, reply here and a tech will call you back. Reply STOP to opt out

Both say what happens if the gift or the repair is wrong. The exchange window and the callback both have to be real, and the store version only works if the order number lookup does.

Who can receive these texts

Every sample assumes the subscriber gave express written consent to marketing texts from this business, for example by signing a form or checking a box online, which is what CTIA's principles ask before anyone sends promotional texts. The federal and state consent rules are covered in the SMS marketing rules guide, and the signup that collects that consent is described in growing an SMS list before Black Friday.

What one emoji or curly quote costs

The specification says a message in UCS2, the 16 bit encoding phones fall back to, can hold up to 70 characters. Twilio's documentation puts the split message figures at 153 characters per segment for GSM 7 bit and 67 for UCS2, because each part of a long message carries a header that reassembles it on the phone.

Take the Black Friday sample above, 145 characters long, and add a gift box emoji after "live." Telnyx's messaging documentation notes that most emoji count as two of those 16 bit units, and the gift box is one of them. The message becomes 147 units long, and at 67 per segment it needs three segments. A single curly apostrophe, the kind a word processor or a phone keyboard inserts automatically, also forces UCS2. Twilio's documentation names curly quotation marks as one cause, and its optional Smart Encoding setting swaps them for straight ones before sending. Two UCS2 segments hold 134 characters, so the 140 character cleaning sample above, with "we'll" typed on a phone that curls the apostrophe, takes three on a platform that sends the curly mark as typed. The samples use straight apostrophes, which count once.

On a list of 5,000 subscribers, the emoji version is 15,000 segments instead of 5,000. Per segment prices differ by platform and number type; the SMS marketing cost guide has the figures. Before a campaign goes out, type the final text into the platform directly, check the segment count in its preview, and send one test to a staff phone.

Klaviyo's help center says it does not track open rates for SMS and points senders to click rate instead. The useful comparison is a store's own history. Read clicks and opt outs for each holiday text against the same numbers for that list's ordinary sends; the stop rule for a weekend when opt outs jump is in the frequency article linked above.