New year marketing campaigns: SMS ideas and templates

The best new year marketing campaigns by text are four short sends spread over about five weeks: a thank-you between Christmas and New Year's Eve, a January promo in the first week, a resolution-themed offer mid-month, and a reactivation text to opted-in contacts who went quiet. Keep each one to a single segment, send in local daytime hours, and make sure your 10DLC registration covers marketing before you start.

This post covers the order of those sends, the templates, and what four weeks of new year texting costs on a list of 5,000. We use Ready campaigns as the worked example because we make Ready, but the timing and copy work on any registered platform.

Why the new year works for texting (and where it goes wrong)

January is a reset month for your customers. Gyms, salons, meal-prep services, accountants, software tools and online stores all sell "a fresh start," and people are open to hearing about it. The inbox is also quieter than it was in November and December, when every brand ran Black Friday and holiday promos. If you ran those, our Black Friday SMS campaign ideas post covers that side of the calendar.

New year campaigns usually go wrong in three ways:

• Sending at midnight on December 31. It feels festive, but it texts people at a time when nobody wants a business text. On Ready, quiet-hours enforcement holds sends outside permitted local hours based on the recipient's area, so a midnight "Happy New Year" would go out the next morning anyway. Schedule it for daytime instead. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.
• Five promos in two weeks. Opt-outs climb fast after the holidays, because many people are already cleaning up their inbox.
• Texting people who never opted in. A January win-back campaign is not a reason to text an old spreadsheet. Cold contact belongs on the phone and in the mail. SMS goes to people who consented or have replied to you before.

The five-week new year campaign calendar

Here is the order we recommend. Dates assume a US audience. Adjust for your own business days.

Skip January 1. Mid-morning to early afternoon on a weekday is a sensible default for most consumer businesses, and our best time to send SMS marketing guide breaks it down by industry.

New year campaign ideas and templates

Each template below fits in one GSM-7 segment (160 characters or fewer) with a short business name and a short link. Swap in your own name, offer and link, then recount, because a long business name or URL can push a text into a second segment.

1. The year-in-review thank-you (no offer)

This is the easiest text to send and the one people object to least. You aren't asking for anything, and it makes your January promo feel less abrupt.

Oak Salon: Thank you for a great year. Whether you came in once or every week, we noticed. See you in January! Reply STOP to opt out

For software companies and other businesses with usage data, a personal recap does better than a generic thank-you:

Ledgerly: Your year in numbers: {invoices_sent} invoices sent, {hours_saved} hours saved. See your full recap: [link] Reply STOP to opt out

2. The January promo

Give it a clear deadline and one action. "New year, new you" with no date gives people nothing to act on.

Oak Salon: New year, new look. 20% off any color service booked Jan 2-15. Book: [link] Reply STOP to opt out

For an ecommerce store:

Field & Co: Your January reset kit is here. Free shipping on orders over $40 through Jan 12. Shop: [link] Reply STOP to opt out

3. The resolution-themed offer

Send this only to contacts who didn't book or buy from the first promo. Use a new angle, not the same discount repeated.

Northside Fitness: Resolution check-in. Join by Jan 16 and skip the sign-up fee. Your first class is on us. Claim it: [link] Reply STOP to opt out

A service business can frame the resolution around a chore:

Bright Home Cleaning: Starting the year organized? Book a January deep clean by Jan 20 and get the fridge and oven done free. [link] Reply STOP to opt out

4. Reactivating quiet contacts

This goes only to people who opted in and haven't bought or replied in a while. Ask for a reply instead of sending a link, so the people who still want to hear from you identify themselves.

Oak Salon: It's been a while, and we'd love to see you again. Reply YES and we'll text you our open January times. Reply STOP to opt out

The people who reply YES are your warmest leads of the month. Answer them by hand from the inbox, not with another campaign.

Writing your own

If you write variations, Draft with AI can write them, and a Spam check in Ask AI flags wording carriers tend to block, such as all-caps urgency, too many dollar signs and link shorteners. Our AI text message generator post covers how to use AI drafting without getting filtered.

What a new year campaign costs: the segment math

Texts are billed by segment, not by message. On Ready Standard, every segment, sent or received, costs $0.0075 plus a $0.0045 carrier fee. There is one flat rate and no plan to pick.

Worked example, with these assumptions: 5,000 opted-in contacts, every template kept to one segment, the resolution offer going to 3,500 people who didn't act on the promo, and reactivation going to 1,500 quiet contacts.

Three things change that total:

• Emojis. One emoji drops the segment limit from 160 to 70 characters (67 per part once a message splits). A 175-character promo with a 🎉 becomes 3 unicode segments, so the January promo send alone goes from 5,000 segments to 15,000, which adds $75 at the Ready rate plus 10,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees. Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so those never change the count. Emojis do.
• Replies. Inbound replies are billed like sent texts. If 300 people answer the reactivation text with YES, that's 300 more segments ($2 plus 300 × $0.0045), and your replies to them are billed the same way. These are the best dollars you'll spend all month.
• Compliance switches. The figures above don't include the compliance surcharge. If you turn on scrubbing or landline validation for your account, each adds $0.003 per segment. Both are off by default. Opt-outs, numbers on your Ban list and known landlines are refused before sending and not charged.

Before you send: registration, throughput and list hygiene

Make sure your registration covers marketing

Carriers filter unregistered traffic, and they also look at whether your messages match the use case you registered. If your 10DLC campaign was registered for appointment reminders or customer care, a 20%-off promo isn't covered by it. Our post on matching your use case to what you send explains why this leads to throttling.

On Ready, registration happens in the app with no setup fee. You pay $25 at submit (the first month), then $25/mo for registration + $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days, so submit by mid-December if you want the thank-you send to go out on time.

Plan for throughput

A fresh standard campaign with no vetting typically sends about 1 to 4 segments per second. At an assumed 3 segments per second, the 5,000-segment promo takes roughly 28 minutes, which is fine for a morning send.

The daily cap matters more. T-Mobile caps brands by trust score, and the lowest tier is roughly 2,000 messages per day. If a large share of your 5,000 contacts are on T-Mobile and your brand sits in that tier, the send can stretch across days. Brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise your trust score. It only moves the daily cap if your score crosses into a higher tier, and it doesn't change the per-second rate. Our brand vetting breakdown covers when it pays off. Most senders at this volume don't need it.

Clean the reactivation list

Contacts who have been quiet for a year are the riskiest people to text: numbers get reassigned, and some recipients forget they opted in. Ready's standalone TCPA & DNC Litigator Scrub checks each number against known TCPA-litigator and DNC-complainer lists for $0.005 per contact and flags matches before you send. Statutory TCPA damages run $500 to $1,500 per text, so a scrub on a 1,500-contact reactivation list ($7.50) is cheap insurance. It reduces risk. It doesn't make you lawsuit-proof, and consent is still your responsibility. Ready records your opt-in attestation for each bulk send. Your own store or signup form keeps the per-contact consent record.

For platforms sending on behalf of customers

If you run a CRM or vertical SaaS product and your customers want new year campaigns, the same sends go through the API. POST /v1/messages/bulk takes up to 100 recipients per call with consent_attested: true, so split a 5,000-contact list into 50 batches. Send an Idempotency-Key header with each call so a retried batch never goes out twice. Quiet hours are enforced on API sends too: an API text is held only if the recipient's window opens within 6 hours, so a late-night send is refused rather than held. A refused text isn't charged. Each batch still answers 200, so read data.failed and each results[].error_code, and resend the quiet_hours refusals in the recipient's daytime. Each of your customers sends from its own sub-account with its own numbers and registration. See the bulk messages docs for request details.

The practical takeaway

Four sends, one segment each, in daytime hours, only to people who opted in. Thank customers before you sell to them, give the January promo a real deadline, use a new angle for the people who didn't act, and use reactivation to find out who still wants to hear from you. Answer the replies yourself.

If you want to try this on Ready, sign up, register a marketing campaign early in December, and use your first 20 free texts on one-to-one sends before you register (campaigns are paid from the first text, and a card on file is required to send). Pricing details are at tryready.com/pricing.

FAQ

What are good new year campaign ideas for SMS?

A thank-you text with no offer, a dated January promo, a resolution-themed offer for people who didn't act on the promo, and a reply-based reactivation text for quiet but opted-in contacts. Four sends over about five weeks is enough for most businesses.

When should I send a new year text campaign?

Send the thank-you between December 27 and 30, skip January 1, and start promos on January 2 or later. Send in local daytime hours. Ready holds texts that fall outside permitted local hours and sends them later. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.

How much does a new year SMS campaign cost on Ready?

Each segment costs $0.0075 plus a $0.0045 carrier fee, sent or received. A one-segment text to 5,000 contacts is $38 plus 5,000 × $0.0045, not counting the optional compliance surcharge of $0.003 per segment each for scrubbing or landline validation.

Can I text my old customer list a new year win-back offer?

Only contacts who opted in to texts from you. Contacts who never consented should be reached by phone or mail instead. For long-quiet opted-in contacts, a scrub against litigator and DNC lists before you send is cheap risk reduction.

Do new year digital campaigns by text need 10DLC registration?

Yes. Marketing texts from a 10-digit number need a registered brand and a campaign whose use case covers marketing, and carriers filter unregistered traffic. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days, so register in early December.