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For retail marketers, text-message marketing yielded breakthrough results in 2025. According to Listrak’s 2025 Cross-Channel Benchmark Report, as mobile continued to drive more site traffic year-over-year (YOY), the adoption of the SMS channel for marketing messages also increased. Retailers’ SMS messaging volume surged by an astounding 93% YOY, driven by brands' focus on re-engaging dormant subscribers and organic list growth.
Listrak’s Mobile Messaging capabilities, which encompasses SMS, MMS, and RCS, empowers brands to engage customers in real time, driving conversions through timely hyper-personalized communication. Powerful, personalized, and compliant by design, Listrak helps enterprise marketers send smarter messages, reaching consumers exactly when they have the greatest impact.
Most importantly, SMS drove results. In 2025, Listrak clients saw a 16.7% increase in revenue YOY, with even more dramatic results on Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), delivering a 21.0% increase in BFCM SMS revenue YOY.
For Listrak clients, 2025 was a year of SMS marketing milestones, with key highlights from the past year including:
Deploying the latest in AI technology, Listrak’s SMS Tone Generator allows marketers to extend their brand’s unique voice, with AI-level speed.
The SMS Tone Generator acts as marketers’ AI assistant, crafting scroll-stopping, conversion-ready texts in seconds. Powered by Listrak Intelligence, it blends the brand’s tone and distinctive POV with AI-driven precision. The SMS Tone Generator features multiple tone options to match the moment, allowing marketers to customize SMS messages for everything from hyping a product drop to launching a flash sale to sending a perfectly timed promo, always with authentic, high–preference copy, delivered on demand and at scale.
Last year, Listrak was the first U.S. platform to launch RCS marketing campaigns, enabling branded, interactive, app-like messaging experiences delivered natively to mobile devices. Throughout the year, Listrak continued testing RCS for clients, gaining valuable insights on driving results and consumer engagement with the channel.
With RCS, marketers can send creatively dynamic messages featuring carousels, high-resolution images, videos, and interactive buttons, while enabling quick replies and in-message engagement, and enhancing trust with verified sender information and brand styling.
Recent campaigns for Listrak clients included results that found RCS:
As SMS emerged as one of the most powerful channels in retail marketing, compliance with associated regulations is paramount to success, and 2025 was another year in which Listrak continued to guide its clients to stay on top of SMS compliance, empowering marketers and their legal and compliance colleagues to be set up for success.
This year, Listrak continued to:
Listrak’s Quiet Hours feature allows marketers to configure alerts and rules that are intended to prevent messages from being sent during restricted hours. Quiet Hours settings within the platform are customizable, allowing brands to define sending windows. Listrak also provides dynamic recommendations, suggesting alternative send times if a message is scheduled outside of compliant hours, providing built-in safeguards to help ensure campaigns remain both respectful and compliant.
Throughout the year, Listrak kept marketers informed on regulatory changes related to the TCPA, as well as on state adoption of privacy and consumer protection laws.
Listrak has many compliance safeguards in place to help clients manage consumer opt-outs and continually optimize and enhance solutions, leveraging a Natural Language Processing (NLP) API to identify and process additional implied opt-out requests. In addition to the standard keywords and phrases, even when emojis are sent.
Listrak’s Frequency Cap settings allow marketers to confirm that contacts are not sent more marketing messages a day than what compliance rules allow, and this year, Listrak continued to enhance its tools that empower marketers to configure appropriate capping, optimized for both performance and compliance.
Today’s marketers understand that multichannel orchestration is essential, and 85% of new clients are leveraging Listrak across channels. Mobile is now at the heart of the customer experience, and Listrak helps clients win at SMS – while also orchestrating alongside email, push, and web, meeting each customer in their moment, contextually, predictively, and personally.
