With recent changes to Australian Privacy Legislation, we have received an increased level of enquiry from our customers seeking guidance in relation to best practice when marketing to customers through SMS and how best to maximise the benefits of SMS marketing. Starting with the legalities - links to the Privacy Act and Anti-Spam Act can be found below as well as a link to a fact sheet which provides a high level of detail on the convergence of the 2 acts.

Privacy Act 1988 (austlii.edu.au)

Spam Act 2003 (austlii.edu.au)

OIAC Fact Sheet - Convergence between Privacy Act 1988 and Spam Act 2003

5 Tips for SMS marketing from your Dealer Management System

1. Time - what time are you sending your marketing SMS messages? Customers generally won’t respond well to marketing SMS messages sent / received outside of business hours. This is especially important with software such as Dealersocket CRM which provides a facility to send SMS messages automatically through the campaign system - it is recommended that SMS messages are always queued and sent during business hours.
2. Avoid the use of shortened / slang words.
3. Use merge tags carefully - carefully consider their position within the SMS message in conjunction with the data that will replace the tag. For example - if the tag <Make> were to be replaced by the data ‘Mercedes-Benz’ there’s a difference of 7 characters between the length of the merge tag and the actual data. This can result in some messages being split into 2 parts, the user is not given any choice where the split occurs so this could result in a poorly formatted message.
4. Your customers should be able to easily identify your business as the sender of the SMS, this is a requirement of the Spam Act.
5. Include an unsubscribe mechanism in every marketing SMS, this can be as simple as “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” - in addition to the provision of the mechanism, unsubscribe requests must be actioned within 10 days of receipt.

For more information about DealerSocket CRM or for more best practice tips, please contact our expert CRM consultants here.