Win new work. Win back old customers. Chase every quote.

• Consent first, and the proof is on you. The Spam Act does not say “get consent”. Section 16 prohibits sending a commercial electronic message outright, then provides consent as an exception, and section 16(5) puts the evidential burden on whoever relies on it.1
• Two kinds of consent. Express consent is a form, a tickbox, a phone call, or a conversation face to face. Inferred consent comes two ways: an ongoing relationship with somebody who gave you their address, or a work address conspicuously published with its owner’s agreement and no “no marketing” note beside it, for messages relevant to that person’s work only (Schedule 2 clause 4).1
• A purchase is not consent. ACMA is explicit that inferred consent “does not cover sending messages after someone has just bought something from your business”. Its own worked example: a bank telling an existing customer about another savings account is fine, and the same bank emailing them about insurance is not.2
• Unsubscribe has to just work. Spam Regulations 2021 regulation 7(6): using the unsubscribe address must not require any personal information beyond the address the message went to, or a login, or a new account.2 Withdrawal takes effect within five business days under Schedule 2 clause 6, and your own contact details must stay valid for 30 days under section 17(1)(d).1
• Texts and chat apps are covered. Section 5(1)(b)(iii) catches any message sent to “a telephone account”, which is how text messages fall under the Spam Act, and (b)(ii) catches instant messages, which is how ACMA reached WhatsApp in a 2024 case. Section 5(5) expressly excludes voice calls, which sit under a different Act.1
• No cold calls to past customers. The Do Not Call Register Act 2006 exempts government bodies, charities, political parties and educational institutions, and that is the whole list; a customer relationship counts only through consent. Where express consent is given without a stated period, Schedule 2 clause 3 treats it as withdrawn three months later.2
• Your sender ID must be registered. The SMS Sender ID Register became mandatory on 1 July 2026, and ACMA’s own words are that unregistered sender IDs are replaced with “Unverified” and “People will likely treat unverified messages as scams.”3 Registering against your ABN needs a current contact on the Australian Business Register, and it is part of every text-back set-up.

• Cold email or texts to a bought list. No amount of warming up makes bought addresses consented ones.
• A list scraped from websites. Part 3 of the Spam Act bars address-harvesting software and harvested lists outright.1
• A message that asks for permission to message. That message is itself the breach.
• An unsubscribe that makes somebody log in. The regulation names it directly.
• Anything that texts a number lifted from a directory rather than given to you by the person who owns it.

• AU$3.96 million. Latitude Finance, April 2026, after more than 2.3 million marketing messages without accurate contact information.4
• AU$2.76 million. TAB, July 2026, across a telemarketing notice and a spam notice.
• AU$702,900. Lululemon Athletica Australia, March 2026.
• Up to AU$364,000. The cap on a single day’s infringement notice under the Spam Act.

Totals across many notices and many days, all of them against large corporates. The conduct penalised, a text you cannot reply STOP to, is what an off-the-shelf tool does out of the box.

One call in eleven to a trade is never answered, on the only Australian dataset anybody publishes.5 The “62%” figure you will have seen is American, and its page is gone.6

The “21 times more likely” claim is a vendor study of six companies from 2007.7 Nobody has measured how fast you must reply to keep the job in this country, so here are your own numbers instead.8

Arithmetic on figures you supplied: not a benchmark, not a forecast, not a promise.