A professional Thanksgiving message is a short, specific thank-you that names your business, mentions what the customer actually did with you this year, and asks for nothing. Send it the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or Thursday morning, keep it apart from any Black Friday offer, and only text people who opted in to hear from you.
The rest of this post gives you templates you can copy, sorted by audience (customers, clients and your own team). It includes text-length versions under 160 characters and longer versions for email or cards. After the templates, we cover timing, the consent rules for a greeting sent to a marketing list, and what the send costs once segments are counted.
Why a Thanksgiving greeting is worth sending at all
Most of what a customer gets from you in November asks for money. A greeting that only says thanks stands out for that reason. It also does practical work. It confirms your number is still one they recognize. It gives quiet customers an easy reason to reply. It also sets up a friendlier context for the offer you send on Friday.
The greeting only works if it reads like a person wrote it. "Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving from all of us!" with no business name and nothing specific reads like a template, because it is one. The templates below are short, but each one names who is sending and why they are grateful.
Professional Thanksgiving message templates (text length)
Each of these is plain GSM-7 text with no emoji and fits in one 160-character SMS segment, including the opt-out line where one is needed. If you add a first name, check the length again. A long name can push a 150-character text into two segments.
For customers on a marketing list
Healthcare or dental practice:
"Harbor Dental: Thank you for trusting us with your care this year. Wishing you and your family a warm Thanksgiving. Reply STOP to opt out." (139 characters)
Retail or ecommerce:
"Ridge Outfitters: No offer today, just thanks. We are grateful you shop with us. Happy Thanksgiving! Reply STOP to opt out." (123 characters)
Home services:
"Thanks for letting Maple Plumbing into your home this year. Happy Thanksgiving from our crew. Reply STOP to opt out." (117 characters)
Thanksgiving wishes to clients (one-to-one)
B2B or professional services:
"Hi Dana, thank you for working with us this year. It has been a pleasure. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Northline Accounting." (131 characters)
Agency or consultant:
"Hi Marcus, grateful to have you as a client this year. Hope the long weekend is a real break. Happy Thanksgiving. - Priya, Brightside"
For a client you already text back and forth with, a personal note sent one at a time fits better than a campaign. Write a different specific line for each client: the project you shipped together, the season they had, the referral they sent.
For your team
- "Team: thank you for all your work this year. Offices close Thursday and Friday. Enjoy the time with your people. Happy Thanksgiving." (132 characters)
Texting staff is still texting. Only send to employees who agreed to get work texts on their personal phones.
Longer versions for email, cards and LinkedIn
Text works best short. Email and handwritten cards give you room to be specific. Three that hold up:
To customers (email):
Thanksgiving is a good moment to say something we don't say often enough: thank you. This year you booked with us, sent friends our way, and told us when we got something wrong. That feedback made us better. We're closed Thursday so our team can be with their families, and we'll be back Friday morning. However you spend the day, we hope it's a good one.
To a long-standing client (email or card):
Dana, thank you for another year of working together. The Q3 filing deadline was tight, and you made it easy by getting us everything early. We don't take clients like you for granted. Happy Thanksgiving to you and the whole team. We're looking forward to next year.
To your team (internal note):
This was a demanding year, and you showed up for customers every week of it. Thank you. The office is closed Thursday and Friday. Please actually log off. Happy Thanksgiving.
Notice that none of these mention a sale. That is deliberate.
When to send, and how to keep it away from the Black Friday offer
Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, and Black Friday is the day after. A good default:
- Wednesday, late morning in your own time zone: the greeting to customers and clients. People are still at work and are winding down, so they read it.
- Thanksgiving Day, between 9 AM and noon: an acceptable alternative. Avoid the afternoon, when your text lands in the middle of dinner.
- Black Friday: the offer, as a separate message.
Keep the two separate. A greeting that ends with "and don't miss 40% off tomorrow!" is an ad, and customers read it as one. It also burns the goodwill the thank-you was supposed to earn. If you want the greeting to set up the sale, let the gap do that work: send thanks on Wednesday and the offer on Friday. Our Black Friday SMS campaign ideas post covers the offer side. For general send windows by industry, see best time to send SMS marketing.
Ready also enforces quiet hours. A text that would land outside permitted hours in the recipient's area is held and sent later, so a list that spans time zones doesn't wake anyone in Honolulu. You are only charged when the held text actually sends. 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.
Consent rules for a greeting sent to a marketing list
A greeting has no offer in it. Carriers and courts still don't treat it as a pass. If you send it in bulk to a list, treat it as marketing. That means:
- Only text people who opted in. A Thanksgiving greeting is not the moment to text old leads, purchased lists or anyone who never agreed to texts. Cold outreach belongs on the phone or in the mail.
- Send it under a registered 10DLC campaign whose use case covers it. If your campaign is registered only for appointment reminders, a holiday greeting to your whole list falls outside that use case. Our use-case picking guide explains why that mismatch gets traffic throttled.
- Name the business and include "Reply STOP to opt out." The templates above already do this.
- Respect earlier opt-outs. On Ready, an inbound STOP is honored automatically, and the opt-out applies across every campaign, so that contact can't be texted again by mistake.
Two more tools reduce your risk, and neither makes you immune. First, Ready can screen known TCPA-litigator and DNC numbers out before the send. Second, every bulk send and every API send that sets consent_attested records your opt-in attestation: who sent it, to how many numbers, and when. That attestation is not a per-contact consent record. The opt-in time, wording and page URL for each person stay with your signup form or store, so keep them. Compliance is ultimately the sender's responsibility.
If you aren't registered yet, start now. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. There is no setup fee. The charge at submit is the first month, $25, and after that it's $25 for registration + $2 per number each month.
What the send costs, with the segment math
Ready charges one Standard rate: $0.0075/segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment. Segments are what get billed, so length and characters matter.
Worked example (assumed numbers): 3,000 opted-in customers get template 1.
- Plain text, 139 characters = 1 segment. 3,000 segments × $0.0075 = $23, plus 3,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees.
- Add a turkey emoji. One emoji switches the whole message to unicode. The single-segment limit drops to 70 characters, and multipart segments hold 67. At about 141 characters, that's 3 segments, or 9,000 segments total. Now it costs 9,000 × $0.0075 = $68, plus 9,000 × $0.0045.
The emoji triples the bill. Apostrophes are not a concern: Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so they never change the count.
Budget for replies too. A Thanksgiving greeting gets a lot of "you too!" responses. Replies are billed like a sent text. If you assume, say, 10% of 3,000 people reply with a one-segment message, that's 300 more segments at the same rate. These figures exclude the compliance surcharge. If scrubbing or landline validation is switched on for your account, each adds $0.003 per segment. Both are off by default.
Plan for the volume, too. On a fresh, unvetted brand, T-Mobile's daily cap can sit around 2,000 messages, and per-second throughput is roughly 1 to 4 segments. A 3,000-contact send may need to go out over Tuesday and Wednesday rather than all at once. If you hit that ceiling regularly, read whether brand vetting is worth $79.
Scheduling the send in Ready
- Build the list from contacts who opted in, and exclude anyone who opted out.
- Save the greeting as a template. You can reuse it next year and edit the specifics. Draft with AI and a Spam check in Ask AI can tighten the wording.
- Create a bulk campaign for Wednesday late morning in your own time zone. Ready sends a campaign at one time for everyone; quiet hours only apply to texts that would arrive before 8 AM or after 9 PM where the contact lives (stricter in FL, OK and CT). If your list spans time zones and you want late morning everywhere, split it by time zone and schedule one campaign per zone.
- Keep the Black Friday offer as its own campaign for Friday.
- Watch the inbox. Replies land in the Inbox, and in GoHighLevel for connected accounts. Answer them by hand, because a personal "thanks, you too" is the point.
If you send from your own product, POST /v1/messages/bulk takes the list, the body and consent_attested: true. Add an Idempotency-Key header so a retried request never sends twice. See the bulk messages docs. Opt-outs and known landlines are refused up front and not charged. The call still answers 200, so check data.failed and each results[].error to see who was refused.
The practical takeaway
Write a greeting that is short, specific and free of any offer. Send it Wednesday or Thursday morning to people who opted in, under a campaign registered for that kind of message, and send the sale separately on Friday. Leave out the emoji unless you're happy paying for 3 segments instead of 1. If you want to try the text-length versions on a few clients first, sign up. Your first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends, so use them on personal client notes before you register and run the full campaign.
FAQ
What should a professional Thanksgiving message include? The business name, a specific reason you're grateful, a warm close, and no offer. If it goes to a marketing list, add "Reply STOP to opt out."
Is it okay to put a Black Friday promo in the Thanksgiving text? You can, but it turns the greeting into an ad. Send thanks Wednesday or Thursday and the offer Friday as a separate campaign.
Do I need consent to text customers a Thanksgiving greeting? Yes. Treat a greeting sent to a list as marketing. Only text contacts who opted in, send under a registered campaign whose use case covers it, and honor opt-outs.
What's the best time to send Thanksgiving wishes to clients? Wednesday late morning, or Thursday before noon. Avoid Thursday afternoon. Ready sends a campaign at one time for everyone, so if your list spans time zones, split it by zone and schedule one campaign per zone.
Will adding a turkey emoji cost more? Usually, yes. One emoji switches the message to unicode, so a 141-character greeting goes from 1 segment to 3, and every segment is billed.