Christmas and New Year on WhatsApp: a December send plan for Indian D2C and retail

Lavanya Iyer makes scented candles and gift hampers in Bengaluru with a team of seven. December is her second-biggest month after Diwali, and half of it is gifting: hampers for clients, candles for Secret Santa, boxes that must arrive before the 25th. Her Shopify store holds about 21,000 customer records, and 6,200 of those people opted in to offers on WhatsApp. (Lavanya and her figures are invented; the dates, rules and rates are not.)

This is the Christmas WhatsApp marketing plan we’d give her, from now to the first week of January. If you ran our Diwali send plan, the rules are the same: opted-in segments, no blind retries, a “Stop offers” button on every marketing template. What changes in December is the calendar, a billing deadline, and a week in which every brand your customers have bought from is messaging them at once.

The dates that set the plan

The central government’s 2026 holiday list puts Christmas Day on Friday 25 December 2026, with Christmas Eve on Thursday 24 December as a restricted holiday. The 2027 list, issued by the Department of Personnel and Training on 16 July 2026, has New Year’s Day, Friday 1 January 2027, as a restricted holiday.

Date	Day	What it means for sends
15 December	Tuesday	Last day we’d send a Christmas-delivery offer
24 December	Thursday	Christmas Eve; order updates only
25 December	Friday	Christmas Day; nothing promotional
31 December	Thursday	Meta’s INR billing deadline
1 January 2027	Friday	New Year’s Day; non-INR accounts stop delivering; a new pricing quarter starts

Work your own cut-off back from your courier’s actual last pick-up date for delivery before the 25th, not a guess. A message that promises Christmas delivery and misses it costs you more than the sale.

Before anything else: move to rupee billing

Meta’s pricing page says eligible customers, those whose Billing Hub Sold-To country is India, “must ensure all Messaging accounts in their business portfolio are migrated to INR by December 31, 2026”, because “as of January 1, 2027 Meta will no longer deliver the messages of non-INR Messaging accounts”.

Do it in November. If an account is still in dollars on 1 January, the first thing to fail is your New Year message, then the order updates for everything bought in the year-end sale. Check every messaging account, including the test one a developer set up, and if your provider pays Meta for you, get their date in writing. Our INR billing guide has the steps.

1 January is also a quarter start, one of the four days Meta may change rates, with at least a month’s notice for a rate update. As of 18 October, Meta’s pricing page announces no India change for January. Check again in early December before you budget the year-end sale.

Why December week two is harder than Diwali week

Two limits bite in a crowded season.

The per-person marketing cap. WhatsApp may limit how many marketing templates a person receives “from any business”, based on “a dynamic view of an individual’s recent marketing message read rate and how many messages they currently have in their inbox”. Meta publishes no number. A held-back message fails with error 131049; wait at least 24 hours before trying that person again, and switch off automatic retries, because repeated retries can make that person unreachable for up to a day. Our 131049 guide covers it.

One exception helps: marketing templates delivered inside an open 24-hour window, after the customer has messaged you, don’t count towards the cap. A customer who replies “do you have the lavender one?” can get the gifting catalogue that evening without it counting.

The messaging limit. This is how many different people you can message outside an open window in a rolling 24 hours, shared by every number in your business portfolio. Order confirmations and shipping updates count against it too. If Lavanya sits at 2,000, her main offer to 4,400 people runs over three days, and in the busiest week her order updates compete with it. Our messaging limits guide explains how to move up, and the glossary defines the terms.

Build the segments

Only people who opted in to offers on WhatsApp get a marketing message. For Lavanya that cuts 21,000 records to 6,200, which she splits three ways:

Segment	Count	Treatment
A: bought in December last year	1,800	Early look on 1 December
B: bought in the last 12 months, not in December	2,600	Main offer
C: opted in, never bought	1,800	Main offer, then only if they read it
Corporate buyers (tagged, inside A and B)	400	Bulk gifting message in November

We’d hold every person to three marketing messages in December, the same ceiling as our 90-day plan. That’s our rule, not Meta’s. The schedule below keeps to it: segment A gets the early look, the last-order message and the year-end sale; B and C get the main offer and, if they engaged, the other two.

The plan, week by week

Week of 23 November. Submit every template in this plan now; review takes up to 24 hours, and new templates can be paced on their first sends while Meta waits for feedback. Send the corporate gifting message (1) to the 400 tagged buyers, who need three weeks to collect names and approve a budget.

Week of 30 November. Tuesday 1 December: early look (2) to segment A, the people most likely to buy again. Watch the read rate; if it’s well below your Diwali sends, rewrite before the main offer.

Week of 7 December. Main offer (3) to B and C, Tuesday 8 to Thursday 10 December, a segment per day. Replies land in your inbox; answer inside the window.

Week of 14 December. Monday 14 December: last-order message (4), only to people who read or tapped an earlier send and haven’t ordered, about 2,000. Then stop selling Christmas delivery.

Week of 21 December. No marketing. Order confirmations (5) and, where couriers slip, delay notices (6). On the 24th and 25th, only order updates.

Week of 28 December. Monday 28 December: year-end sale (7) to the 2,500 who read something in December but didn’t buy. Confirm on the 28th that every account is in rupees.

1 January onwards. A New Year message (8) to December buyers only, not before the afternoon. Then measure.

Eight messages, with category and price

Prices are Meta’s India rates per delivered message, before GST, on the rate card effective 1 October 2026: ₹0.8631 for marketing, ₹0.115 for utility. Meta decides the category from the content.

1. Corporate gifting, marketing, ₹0.8631

Hi {{1}}, planning Christmas or New Year gifts for your team? Hampers for {{2}} or more people close on {{3}}, with a printed note for each.
[Get a quote] [Stop offers]

2. Early look for last year’s buyers, marketing, ₹0.8631

Hi {{1}}, you bought from our Christmas range last year, so here's this year's before anyone else. Delivery before the 25th on orders by {{2}}.
[See the range] [Stop offers]

3. Main Christmas offer, marketing, ₹0.8631

Christmas gifting at {{1}}: candle boxes from ₹{{2}}, gift-wrapped with your message. Order by {{3}} for delivery before 25 December.
[Shop gift boxes] [Stop offers]

The URL button can end in a campaign code variable so your store sees which send brought the order; our template personalisation guide shows how.

4. Last order date, marketing, ₹0.8631

Hi {{1}}, orders placed by {{2}} reach {{3}} before Christmas. After that we can't promise it. Need help choosing? Reply here.
[Order now] [Stop offers]

5. Order confirmed with delivery estimate, utility, ₹0.115

Hi {{1}}, your order {{2}} is confirmed and should reach {{3}} by {{4}}. We'll message you when it ships.

6. Delivery delay, utility, ₹0.115

Hi {{1}}, your order {{2}} is delayed with the courier and is now expected on {{3}}. Reply here if you'd like a printable gift note to hand over in the meantime.

Keep offers out of messages 5 and 6. Meta treats an order update with a promotion in it as marketing.

7. Year-end sale, marketing, ₹0.8631

Year-end at {{1}}: the last {{2}} pieces of this season's candles at {{3}} off, until 3 January or until they're gone.
[See what's left] [Stop offers]

8. New Year message, marketing, ₹0.8631

Hi {{1}}, thank you for ordering from us in December. A tip for the new year: trim the wick to 5 mm before each lighting and your candle burns longer. Your reorder code for January is {{2}}.
[Reorder] [Stop offers]

A New Year greeting is marketing even with no offer in it. Meta’s category guide lists an end-of-year thank-you to “a valued customer” as a marketing example. So make it earn its 86 paise with something useful, and send it only to people who bought recently. Skip the midnight greeting; on New Year’s morning it lands with dozens of others and gets muted.

What the plan costs

Lavanya’s volumes, illustrative. Put your own in.

Line	Messages	Rate	Meta charge
Corporate gifting (November)	400	₹0.8631	₹345
Early look, segment A	1,800	₹0.8631	₹1,554
Main offer, B and C	4,400	₹0.8631	₹3,798
Last-order message	2,000	₹0.8631	₹1,726
Year-end sale	2,500	₹0.8631	₹2,158
New Year message	1,100	₹0.8631	₹949
Order confirmations and updates (1,300 orders, three each)	3,900	₹0.115	₹449
Replies: 2,400 in December, the first 1,000 free	1,400	₹0.115	₹161
Total			about ₹11,140

All before GST. One message to all 21,000 records would cost about ₹18,125 on its own, break Meta’s opt-in rule for most of them, and bring the blocks that pause templates.

Then measure

In the first week of January, line up delivered, read, button taps and orders for each send, and Meta’s charge divided by orders. Two numbers decide February: which segment paid for its messages, and how many people tapped “Stop offers”. If segment C bought almost nothing, it gets one message in the next season, not three.

Do the billing check this week. Everything else in the plan can wait until 23 November; that can’t.