Can I text or email my past customers in Australia?
Who publishes this: OfficeStaff.ai helps Australian local businesses get found on Google, trusted through reviews and booked through their website and past customers.
The short answer
Usually yes, if they gave you their details as part of doing business with you, the message relates to what they bought, you say who you are, and every message has a working unsubscribe.
That is inferred consent under the Spam Act 2003, and it is narrower than most people assume. One purchase a long time ago, or a message about something unrelated, does not qualify.
This is general information, not legal advice.
The three rules, in plain English
The Spam Act covers commercial emails, SMS and instant messages sent to or from Australia. Three things have to be true.
You have consent. Either express, where they ticked a box or told you they wanted to hear from you, or inferred, where they gave you their details directly in the course of doing business and would reasonably expect to hear from you about that business.
You identify yourself. Your name or business name and correct contact details, and those details have to stay accurate for at least 30 days after you send.
There is a way out. A working unsubscribe on every message, honoured within five working days, and it has to keep working for at least 30 days after the message goes out.
Past customers are the shortest path to a booking. Want to see how new ones find you right now? Get your Free Growth Audit.
The bigger point, which is not legal at all
Most small businesses are not in trouble for messaging their past customers. They are in trouble for never doing it.
This is the thing that used to frustrate me most watching trades and service businesses. They would spend real money chasing new customers, month after month, while sitting on a list of hundreds of people who already knew them, already trusted them, and would have come back if anyone had asked.
The rule of thumb in business is that winning a new customer costs somewhere around five times what it costs to keep an existing one. Whether it is exactly five does not matter. The gap is enormous and almost nobody acts on it.
People do not leave. They forget.
The customer who has not been back is usually not angry and has not gone elsewhere. They meant to ring. Life got busy. The thing they were going to book seemed like it could wait, and then it dropped off the list entirely.
Think about a vet clinic. A dog needs vaccinations, a check and whatever else comes up, several times a year, for a decade. The owner is not ignoring it on purpose. They just did not think about it this month. That is hundreds of dollars a year, per pet, sitting there, and the only thing standing between the clinic and it is somebody remembering to get in touch.
The same is true for a mechanic, a dentist, an electrician who did your switchboard, a mortgage broker whose client is now three years into a fixed rate.
The salesman who sent 13,000 cards a month
Joe Girard sold 13,001 cars out of a Chevrolet dealership in Michigan between 1963 and 1978. He holds the Guinness record for the most cars sold by a salesman in a year, with 1,425 in 1973.
What he is known for in sales circles is the mail. Every month he sent cards to his entire customer list. Birthdays, Christmas, whatever the month offered. No offer, no pitch. Just a card.
He was selling something people buy every few years at best. It still worked, because when those people or their families or their neighbours finally needed a car, there was only one name in their head.
Almost no small business does a version of this, and the ones that do rarely have to buy leads.
The uncomfortable version
Here is something worth being honest about, even though it is not a nice thought.
A business that does fairly average work but stays in touch will often beat a business that does excellent work and disappears. The customer remembers the one who rang. They will even describe them warmly.
That is not an argument for being average. It is an argument that being good at the job is only half of it, and the other half is that people have to keep hearing from you. Do both and you are very hard to compete with.
What to actually do
Get your customer list out of wherever it is hiding and into one place. For most businesses it is bigger than they expect.
Take out anyone who has told you to stop, and in some industries take out the contacts where a message would land badly. In a vet clinic, that means removing deceased pets before anything goes out, every single time.
Send something useful rather than a discount. A reminder that something is due beats ten percent off.
Put your business name and a working unsubscribe on every message, and honour it fast.
Start with email. It costs almost nothing and it is where people are most forgiving. Keep text for the things that are genuinely time sensitive.
Where this fits
Finding you and trusting you both lead to the same place, which is somebody actually booking. Your past customers are the shortest path there, because the finding and the trusting have already happened.
What all of it costs is the next question. What should a small business pay for local marketing in Australia?
About the author
Greg Hamlyn
Greg Hamlyn has been in business since 1981, and has spent more than twenty years coaching other business owners, most of them trades and service businesses around Australia. He started OfficeStaff after watching the same thing happen over and over. Good operators paying for marketing that never once showed them where they actually turned up, sitting on customer lists they never used. He will tell you if you are not a fit. Based on the Gold Coast.
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