Can dealerships legally SMS their database? The Spam Act 2003, explained
Yes, you can text your database, but only if you meet the Spam Act's consent rules. Here is what express and inferred consent mean for a dealership, and what ACMA does when you get it wrong.
It is one of the most common questions from a dealer principal: we have thousands of owners in the DMS, can we just text them? The short answer is yes, with conditions. The Spam Act 2003 (Cth) lets you message customers, but only when you have consent and meet two other requirements. This is general information, not legal advice; check your obligations with a qualified adviser.
Express versus inferred consent for your owner base
Express consent means the customer actively opted in: a ticked box on a finance form, a service booking that asked, or a direct “yes, keep me posted”. It is the strongest basis and the simplest to prove. Inferred consent is more limited. It can apply where there is a genuine, current relationship and the message is something the person would reasonably expect, such as a recent buyer hearing from you about their own car or an upcoming service. It does not stretch to a decade-old record, a list from another rooftop, or numbers you bought. If a contact has gone cold or you are unsure how they got on the list, treat them as needing fresh consent.
A name sitting in your DMS is not the same as consent to market to them. The relationship has to be real and current for inferred consent to hold.
Identify yourself, and let people opt out
Two more requirements apply to every message. You must identify the sender clearly, using your correct legal business name or your name and ABN, and the message must include a working unsubscribe that is easy to use and does not require an account or extra details. Once someone opts out, you have five business days to stop messaging them across every list.
What ACMA enforces, and the cost of getting it wrong
ACMA actively enforces the Spam Act, and much of its recent action centres on the five-business-day unsubscribe rule: continuing to message people after they have opted out. Penalties scale with how many breaching messages go out, and ACMA has issued multi-million- dollar penalties to major Australian businesses for failing to honour unsubscribe requests, even where the messages carried opt-out links, because people were not consistently removed from every list.
5 business days
The window to stop messaging someone after they opt out. ACMA enforcement frequently centres on breaches of exactly this rule.
The reassuring part: this is exactly the kind of rule a good system enforces for you. Consent checks before a send, automatic STOP and opt-out processing, and a suppression list honoured across SMS and email mean the compliant path is also the default path. For the full picture, see the Australian dealer's guide to compliant customer messaging.
Sources: ACMA: Avoid sending spam, ACMA: email and SMS unsubscribe rules, Spam Act 2003 (Cth). Figures are industry findings, not Dealerloop results.
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