Marketing campaign calendar: a 12-month SMS planning template

A marketing campaign calendar for SMS is a month-by-month plan that sets which texts go out, to which segment, and how often. You build it around the holidays and seasonal moments your customers care about, then fill the gaps with value messages so not every text asks for money.

This post gives you a 12-month template, a frequency cap that keeps opted-in lists from burning out, the cost math for a full year of sends, and the logistics that trip people up in November. We make Ready, so the worked examples use Ready campaigns, templates and pricing. The planning logic applies to any platform.

Why texting needs its own campaign calendar

Email calendars don't carry over to SMS. A text lands on a lock screen, and an unwanted one gets a STOP reply, not a quiet archive. Every send costs per segment, so a sloppy plan costs real money. Carriers also cap how fast and how much you can send, which matters most in the weeks you most want to send.

A dedicated SMS marketing plan answers three questions before the year starts:

1. What's the reason to text this month? This could be a holiday, a seasonal need, a restock, or a useful tip.
2. How many texts can a single contact receive before opt-outs climb?
3. What has to be ready in advance? That includes registration, segments, copy, and throughput for peak days.

The 12-month marketing campaign calendar template

Use this as a starting skeleton for retail, ecommerce and local businesses. Swap in your own industry's peaks. A dental office cares about insurance-reset season more than Halloween. The "value send" column covers non-promotional texts that keep the list warm.

That works out to roughly 28 to 32 texts per contact over the year, with most of the weight in Q4. For deeper November planning, see our Black Friday SMS campaign ideas and timing.

Evergreen sends that run all year

A campaign calendar isn't only dated broadcasts. Some texts are better as drip campaigns that trigger off a contact's own timeline:

• Welcome drip campaign: one text at signup and a follow-up a few days later
• Post-purchase check-in: a week after an order or appointment
• Win-back: 60 to 90 days of silence, one offer, then stop
• Birthday or anniversary: if you collected the date with consent

These don't count against your monthly broadcast cap in quite the same way, because each contact gets them once, at a moment that makes sense for them. Still count them when you add up a contact's total texts for the month.

Frequency caps so your list doesn't fatigue

No carrier publishes a "right" number of marketing texts per month, and we don't have a universal stat to give you. Here is the rule of thumb we'd start with for an opted-in list:

• Baseline months: 2 to 4 texts per contact
• Peak months (Nov to Dec): up to 5, with value sends counted
• Hard ceiling: never more than one promo per contact on the same day, even across segments

Mixing promos with value messages

A ratio of roughly one value send for every one or two promos keeps the list from learning that every text is a sales pitch. Value sends include order-by dates, holiday hours, a useful tip, or a "your favorite item is back" restock alert. They tend to get fewer STOP replies because they help the reader.

Watch opt-outs per send, not per year

Track the opt-out count on each campaign. If a send's opt-outs jump well above your usual level, you either sent too often, hit the wrong segment, or wrote a message that read like spam. Pull the next send back a week. On Ready, STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE replies are honored automatically, and the opt-out applies across every campaign. A contact who opted out of your Black Friday text won't get your December one by accident.

Scheduling ahead: what to prepare before each peak

Most calendar failures are logistics, not creative. Work backward from each send date.

Registration (do this months ahead, not days)

Marketing texts on 10DLC numbers need an approved brand and campaign. Unregistered traffic gets carrier-filtered. On Ready, registration happens in-app, and most approvals take 2 to 7 days. The charge at submit is the first month, $25. After that, the monthly cost is $25 for registration + $2 per number. Pick the use case that matches what you actually send. Registering one kind of campaign and sending another is a common cause of throttling, which we cover in matching use case to what you send.

Throughput for peak days

Carriers meter segments per second and, on T-Mobile, per day by brand trust score. Treat these figures as rough approximations. A fresh standard campaign with no vetting often gets about 1 to 4 segments per second. T-Mobile's lowest daily brand cap is around 2,000 messages, with higher tiers at roughly 10,000, 40,000, 100,000 and 200,000.

Worked example: a 5,000-contact Black Friday text, 1 segment each, at an assumed 2 segments per second, takes 2,500 seconds, or about 42 minutes. That's fine. A 30,000-contact list at the same rate takes over four hours. If your trust score sits at the lowest T-Mobile tier, the list also runs into the daily cap. Find this out in October. Brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise the daily cap if it moves you up a tier. It does not change the per-second rate.

Copy, segments and send windows

• Draft every month's texts as reusable templates in advance. Ready's AI message writer and spam-filter check help here, because an approved campaign can still get filtered at the content level (why that happens).
• Build segments before the week of the send: VIPs, recent buyers, lapsed customers.
• Pick send times by industry. Our post on the best time to send SMS marketing breaks this down. Ready's quiet-hours enforcement holds any text that would land outside permitted local hours for the recipient's area and sends it later. That reduces TCPA risk. Still aim for a window like 10 AM to 7 PM local time rather than relying on the hold. 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.

What a year of texts costs: worked example

Assume a 5,000-contact opted-in list and the calendar above: 2 sends a month for 10 months, 5 in November, and 4 in December. That's 29 sends per contact.

• Segments: 29 × 5,000 = 145,000 segments, if every text stays at 1 segment
• Standard rate: 145,000 × $0.0075 = $1,088
• Carrier fee: plus 145,000 × $0.0045 carrier fee, itemized separately
• Registration: $27/mo with one number, so $324 for the year
• Replies: billed like sent texts (the per-segment rate plus the carrier fee), so budget for them
• Compliance surcharge: excluded from the figures above. Scrubbing and landline validation are off by default. If you switch them on, each adds $0.003 per segment. Scrubbing on its own would add 145,000 × $0.003 = $435.

The emoji tax

Segment count matters more than send count. A plain 155-character text is 1 segment. A 175-character text with one emoji is 3 unicode segments, because an emoji drops the limit to 70 characters, or 67 per part on multipart messages. For one 5,000-contact send, that's the difference between 5,000 × $0.0075 = $38 and 15,000 × $0.0075 = $113, before carrier fees. Across 29 sends, it adds up fast. Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain characters before sending, so those don't inflate the count. Emojis still do.

Raw carrier APIs like Twilio, and GoHighLevel's LeadConnector, charge less per segment than our Standard rate. If your calendar is pure volume and you have engineers to build compliance yourself, they're a reasonable choice. What Ready adds is the registration flow, opt-out propagation, quiet hours, scrubbing and an inbox in one place. For GoHighLevel users, it also syncs two-way into each sub-account.

Putting the calendar to work

The practical version is short. Map 12 months of reasons to text, cap baseline months at 2 to 4 sends per contact, and pair promos with value messages. Get registration and throughput sorted well before Q4. Draft templates and segments a month out, keep messages to 1 segment where you can, and watch opt-outs on every send.

If you want to try the calendar on Ready, create an account. The first 20 one-to-one texts are free. Use them to test copy and segment counts before you register.

FAQ

How many marketing texts per month is too many?

There's no official limit. For most opted-in lists, 2 to 4 per contact in normal months and up to about 5 in November or December is a sensible starting cap. Your own opt-out numbers per send are the real signal.

What's the difference between a campaign calendar and a marketing calendar template?

The terms overlap. A marketing calendar template is the reusable grid, like the 12-month table above. A campaign calendar is that grid filled in with specific send dates, segments and copy for this year.

Do I need 10DLC registration before running my SMS marketing plan?

Yes, for ongoing marketing on local numbers. On Ready, an account can send up to 500 texts a month before registering, at its normal per-text rate, and after that it has to register. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days, so register well before your first peak.

Should evergreen texts be campaigns or drip campaigns?

Use drip campaigns for evergreen texts. Welcome, post-purchase and win-back texts work best when they're triggered by each contact's own timeline. Keep dated campaigns for holidays and sales.

How do I keep texts at one segment?

Stay under 160 plain characters and skip emojis. One emoji cuts the limit to 70 characters. Check the segment count on every template before it goes on the calendar.