SMS marketing for Australian small business: where to start

SMS gets read. That is the whole reason it works and the whole reason it can go wrong. A text lands on the lock screen and gets opened within minutes, where an email waits in a folder the customer may never open. That reach is powerful when you use it sparingly and honestly, and it is a fast way to lose customers when you do not. This is a starting guide for Australian small businesses who want to use SMS marketing without wasting money or annoying people.

Start with why SMS, and why not

SMS is worth using when the message is timely, relevant and short. A booking that is about to lapse, a genuine offer with a deadline, a heads-up that stock has landed. It is the wrong channel for a newsletter, a long story, or anything the customer did not really need to know today.

The mental test before every campaign: would the customer be glad this interrupted their day? If the honest answer is no, do not send it. SMS is an interruption by design. That is its strength and its cost, and the businesses that respect it keep the channel working for years.

What it costs to run

SMS marketing is cheap per message but the cost is real at volume, so it pays to be deliberate. Work out what a customer action is worth to you before you send. If a text costs a few cents and a returning customer spends $80, you do not need a high response rate to come out ahead. On prepaid billing with no lock-in you only pay for what you send, which suits a small business testing the water. You can see the per-message rate on the pricing page and run it against your own average sale.

Get consent before you get clever

Before a single campaign, the consent question has to be settled, because the Spam Act 2003 governs commercial SMS in Australia and the fines are not small. In plain terms you need three things: consent to message the person, clear identification of who you are, and a working way to opt out of every message.

Consent can be express, where the customer actively agreed, for example by ticking a box or texting a keyword to join. It can also be inferred in narrow cases from an existing business relationship, but inferred consent is easy to overestimate. Buying a list, scraping numbers, or messaging everyone who ever walked past is not consent, and it is the fastest way to get complaints. Build your own list properly and you never have to worry about this. Our guide on building an SMS subscriber list the right way walks through how.

The opt-out is not optional and it must actually work. SMS365 handles STOP and START automatically and keeps a consent record for each contact, so an opt-out takes effect immediately and you have proof of consent if it is ever questioned. If you want the full picture of the law without the legalese, read our Spam Act 2003 explainer.

Write a message people act on

A good marketing SMS does four things in under 160 characters: says who it is from, gives one clear offer, gives one clear action, and includes the opt-out. That is a tight space, so every word earns its place.

Kirra Cafe: our new winter menu is on from Monday. Show this text before 15 Oct for a free coffee with any breakfast. Reply STOP to opt out.

Notice what it does not do. It does not open with "Hi valued customer". It does not stack three offers. It does not send the reader to a wall of terms. One offer, one deadline, one action, done.

The three rules of a message that works

• One offer per message. A text with three deals gets none of them acted on. Pick the strongest and lead with it.
• Give a reason it is now. "Before 15 Oct", "this weekend", "first 20 people". A deadline is what turns a nice message into an action.
• Say who you are up front. A text from an unknown number reads as spam. The business name in the first few words fixes that.

Make replies useful, not a dead end

Most SMS marketing is one-way, which wastes the best thing about the channel. A customer who reads your offer and has a question, "is that valid Sunday?", has nowhere to go, so they do nothing. On a dedicated Australian number, SMS365 keeps replies as a real conversation, and the AI assistant can answer the common questions, so an interested customer is not left hanging. That is the difference between a broadcast and a channel. Our piece on why two-way SMS matters covers this in depth.

Segment so the message fits

The blunt approach is to send every message to everyone. It works for a while and then people opt out, because half your messages are not relevant to half your list. Segmenting fixes that. Send the coffee offer to your regulars, the win-back to people who have not visited in three months, the new-arrival heads-up to the customers who buy that category. A smaller, better-targeted send almost always beats a large scattergun one, and it protects your list. Dynamic segments update themselves as customer behaviour changes, so you are not rebuilding lists by hand.

A first campaign you can run this month

1. Build consent. Add a keyword sign-up and a hosted opt-in form so customers join a list they chose. Do not import a bought list.
2. Pick one offer with a real deadline and a clear action.
3. Send to a segment, not the whole list, and time it for business hours.
4. Watch replies and let the assistant handle the routine questions.
5. Measure redemptions against the message cost, and use link tracking if you sent a link.

SMS marketing rewards restraint. Message people who asked to hear from you, send something genuinely worth the interruption, make it easy to act and easy to leave, and the channel keeps earning. Treat it as a megaphone and it burns out fast. Start small, measure honestly, and grow the list the right way, and SMS becomes one of the most reliable tools a small business has.