Short answer: a professional holiday text comes down to three things: the company name spelled out (otherwise the message makes no sense to the recipient), a greeting with no sales pitch, and nothing else. Send it between 20 December and 5 January, during permitted hours, only to contacts who have agreed to be reached by SMS, and include an opt-out notice as soon as it contains an offer.
It's the message small businesses send most in December, and the one that most often backfires. A garage, a physiotherapy practice, a bakery or an estate agency wishing its customer list "a wonderful year" starts from good intentions — but it is sending an unsolicited message to a personal phone, sometimes on a Sunday morning, sometimes without an identifiable signature, sometimes with "20% off until 15 January" tacked on at the end. The first three problems can be fixed in five minutes. The fourth changes the legal nature of the message: it's no longer a greeting, it's marketing.
So this article covers both sides: the rules that apply to professional sending in France, then 26 ready-to-adapt templates, sorted by recipient.
Is a holiday text to your customers considered marketing?
It depends entirely on its content. A pure greeting remains a courtesy message; as soon as it contains an offer, a promo code, a sale date or a link to a shop, it becomes commercial marketing and falls under the prior consent regime.
The CNIL (French data protection authority) points out that SMS marketing to private individuals requires prior, freely given and specific consent (opt-in), with two caveats: products or services similar to those the customer has already bought may be offered without fresh consent, and the recipient must be able to object at any time, simply and free of charge. For business contacts (B2B), the regime is more flexible if the message relates to the role of the person contacted.
In practice, for a small business, this boils down to a simple rule:
| SMS content | Status | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| "Happy New Year, the team at Garage Martin" | Courtesy | A fairly collected contact, visible company name |
| Greetings + closing hours | Service information | Same |
| Greetings + "20% off in January" | Marketing | Prior consent + STOP notice |
| Greetings + link to the online shop | Marketing | Prior consent + STOP notice |
The channel matters too: a number given to receive an appointment reminder was not given to receive an offer. Reusing it for other purposes is exactly what the CNIL calls repurposing data beyond its stated purpose.
When should you send a professional holiday text?
Between 20 December and 5 January, on a weekday, during daytime hours. Sending at 11.50 pm on 31 December is a bad idea: it lands in the middle of the noise, and it intrudes.
For telephone marketing, the time slots set by the décret du 13 octobre 2022 (decree of 13 October 2022) — Monday to Friday, 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 8 pm, excluding weekends and public holidays — apply to calls, not texts. But they set a standard of courtesy that any serious professional applies to their own sending: nothing before 10 am, nothing after 8 pm, nothing on Sundays or on 25 December and 1 January. On the morning of 25 December, your message lands between two family messages — it reads as an intrusion.
The most effective window for a shop or a practice is around 22–23 December: customers are still in holiday logistics mode, closing hours genuinely interest them, and the flood of greetings hasn't saturated yet.
And since these messages are prepared in advance, you may as well write them once and then fire them off at the right moment: that is precisely the point of scheduling a text from your PC or Mac rather than improvising between two customers on the evening of the 23rd.
How do you write a professional greeting that doesn't ring false?
Three sentences maximum, one concrete subject, an identifiable signature. The trap isn't length, it's emptiness: "The whole team wishes you a wonderful year full of success and happiness" says nothing about anyone.
What saves a professional greeting is grounding it in the reality of the relationship: the year just gone, a job completed, an opening, a change of team, this week's opening hours. A plumber who writes "thank you for your trust this year, including those February emergencies" is saying something true. A practice that specifies "we reopen on Monday 5 January at 8 am" is providing a service.
What sinks a professional holiday text is fairly easy to spot:
| Avoid | Why |
|---|---|
| "Best wishes!" with no signature | The customer doesn't know who's writing, and deletes it |
| Greetings + a promo in the same message | Turns goodwill into a sales operation |
| "We wish you health, happiness and prosperity" | Greeting-card boilerplate, interchangeable |
| Emoji strings (🎄🎅✨🎁🥳) | Switches the message to UCS-2, so to several texts |
| Sending on 25 December at 8 am | Intrusion into a family moment |
The encoding detail is no footnote when you're sending to 400 people. A text in the GSM-7 alphabet holds 160 characters; as soon as a single emoji appears, the message switches to UCS-2 and caps out at 70 characters, then gets split into 67-character segments. Three decorative emojis can therefore triple the cost of a campaign. The SMS character counter lets you check before sending, and our article on 160 characters: writing an effective text explains the mechanics.
For professionals who send from a computer all year round, a quiet mechanical keyboard genuinely improves writing comfort at a reception desk or in a waiting room — you proofread better when your typing isn't noisy.
26 professional holiday SMS templates
To adapt: replace the bracketed parts, and always keep the business name. Lengths are calibrated to fit into one or two GSM-7 texts, with no emoji.
Customers of a shop or a tradesperson
- "The whole team at [business name] wishes you a wonderful holiday season. Thank you for your loyalty this year. We'll see you again on [date] at our usual hours."
- "Season's greetings from [business name]. Closed from [date] to [date], reopening on [date] at [time]."
- "Thank you for your trust in [year]. The whole team at [business name] wishes you a great [year+1]."
- "[First name], Happy New Year from [business name]. We look forward to seeing you again in [year+1]."
- "Happy holidays to you and yours. The team at [business name] remains open on [days] from [time] to [time]."
- "2026 is drawing to a close — thank you for walking through our door. Have a great year. [business name]"
Patients of a medical or paramedical practice
- "The [speciality] practice wishes you a wonderful holiday season. On-call cover on [date], reopening on [date]. Dr [name]."
- "Happy [year+1] to you. In an emergency over the holidays, call 15. [name] practice."
- "[First name], the practice wishes you a healthy [year+1]. Your next appointment remains set for [date] at [time]."
- "Season's greetings from the whole team. Reception is available from [date] to [date], [time] to [time]. [name] practice."
- "Happy New Year and good health. Remember to book your follow-up appointment in January. [name] practice."
For a practice, the holiday message is often where a note about continuity of care gets slipped in. That's legitimate: it isn't an offer, it's a service. The sending rules remain those set out in our appointment reminder SMS templates.
Suppliers and partners
- "Thank you for a year of working together. The whole team at [company] wishes you a wonderful holiday season."
- "Have a great end of year, you and your teams. Looking forward to continuing in [year+1]. [first name last name], [company]"
- "Happy [year+1]. Our offices are closed from [date] to [date]; [first name] remains reachable for emergencies. [company]"
- "Thank you for hitting the deadlines even in November. Happy holidays. [first name], [company]"
- "Season's greetings. Let's reconnect in the first week of January about [project]. [first name last name]"
Staff, team, volunteers
- "Thank you for this year. You held firm through [difficult period]. Get some rest — see you on [date]. [first name]"
- "Happy holidays to the whole team. We close at [time] on [date] and start back on [date] at [time]."
- "Happy New Year to every one of you. 2026 hasn't been easy; [year+1] starts with you. Thank you."
- "Thank you for all the help this year, including the kind nobody sees. Happy holidays. [organisation]"
- "Season's greetings. The January rota goes out on [date] — nothing to do until then. [first name]"
Lapsed or new customers
- "[First name], the team at [business name] wishes you a great [year+1]. You visited us in [month] — we'd love to see you again."
- "Welcome as one of our customers, and have a great [year+1]. From everyone at [business name]."
- "Happy New Year from [business name]. Our January hours: [days], [time]–[time]."
- "Season's greetings. New address from [date]: [address]. [business name]"
- "Happy [year+1]. We've changed number: please save [number]. [business name]"
Do you need to include the STOP notice?
Yes, as soon as the message contains an offer, a commercial link or a prompt to buy. No for a pure greeting with no promotion, though offering a way out is still common sense.
The reference service in France is 36179 for opting out of marketing texts, run within the ecosystem overseen by the AF2M; 33700, on the other hand, is for reporting unwanted or fraudulent texts and calls (see the SMS spam 33700 service). The two are not interchangeable: one is an unsubscribe, the other a report.
Wording matters. « STOP au 36179 » ("Text STOP to 36179") is a standardised notice that works on campaigns run through a professional platform. A shopkeeper sending from their own phone or from a web interface doesn't have that number available: in that case, best practice is to write « Répondez STOP pour ne plus recevoir nos messages » ("Reply STOP to stop receiving our messages") — and, above all, to keep a list of the STOP replies and then honour it. An ignored opt-out request is the classic starting point for a CNIL complaint.
Three things to remember:
- opting out must be free and simple (no form, no account to create);
- it must be actioned quickly, not "at the next export of the file";
- it applies to every campaign, not just the one it was exercised on.
Sending to 300 customers: which tool?
Not from your phone's messaging app using blind copy. Beyond a few dozen recipients, professional sending is done from a computer, with a contact file, an identifiable sender and a record of what was sent.
The methods sort out fairly clearly:
| Method | Reasonable volume | Sender name | Record / history |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone messaging app, one by one | < 30 | Your number | In each contact's thread |
| Google Messages for web / Phone Link | < 50 | Your number | On the phone |
| Online sending website | Varies | Short or generic number | Limited |
| SMS gateway or API | Unlimited | Company name possible | Detailed delivery reports |
Moving to a gateway makes sense once three conditions come together: more than 200 recipients, the need for a recognisable sender name, and an obligation to prove what was sent and to whom. The useful concepts are gathered in the glossary and our comparisons. For one-off mid-sized sends, our guide to group texting from a PC covers the practical steps, including handling replies.
Two practical details, often discovered too late. First, a badly configured group send exposes recipients' numbers to one another: that's a data breach, not a slip-up. Second, replies come in — "thanks", "are you open on Saturday?", "STOP". Someone has to read them, otherwise the greeting produces the opposite of the intended effect. An adjustable desk phone stand already helps you avoid missing responses during the day, and a USB headset makes callbacks bearable when a campaign generates questions.
How long should you keep the contact file?
As long as the commercial relationship requires, and no longer. For marketing data, the CNIL uses a benchmark of three years from the last contact with the customer or prospect, after which the data must be deleted or anonymised.
In concrete terms, a shopkeeper who digs out a 2019 file in December to send New Year greetings is messaging people whose numbers they no longer have a legal basis to hold. The exercise looks harmless; it is exactly what the CNIL penalises. An annual clean-up of the file, before the holiday campaign, solves the problem: remove contacts with no interaction for three years, remove the STOPs, check for duplicates.
On the data protection side, this site's privacy policy and our article Free SMS and GDPR explain what a sending service keeps on its end. A document storage binder is still useful for filing paper consent records collected in store, when the register isn't digital.
Frequently asked questions
Can you send holiday texts to your customers without their consent?
A courtesy greeting with no commercial offer, sent to a customer whose number was fairly collected as part of the relationship (an order, an appointment, a quote), is acceptable. As soon as a promotion or a shopping link is added, prior consent becomes necessary for private individuals.
What's the best day to send professional holiday texts?
Between 20 and 23 December for messages containing closing hours, and between 2 and 5 January for New Year greetings. Avoid 24, 25 and 31 December and 1 January, when the message gets lost or intrudes.
Do emojis really make a bulk text cost more?
Yes. A single emoji moves the message from the GSM-7 alphabet (160 characters) to UCS-2 encoding (70 characters per segment), which multiplies the number of texts billed on a mass send.
Should you include "Text STOP to 36179" in a holiday text?
Only if the message is commercial and goes through a professional platform connected to that service. Otherwise, an explicit line such as "Reply STOP to stop receiving our messages", followed by actually processing the replies, is enough.
How many characters should a professional holiday text be?
Aim for 140 to 155 characters, signature included. That leaves the margin needed for the message to fit into a single text even after the company name is added.
Updated 4 November 2026. SMS marketing rules and data retention periods change: check the CNIL's reference pages before running a campaign.
