SMS Marketing for Online Stores in Switzerland — Consent and Compliance

An SMS campaign is a batch of text messages sent to a group of recipients from one number or sender name — usually through an SMS gateway, not from the shop's own phone. An online store sends two kinds of text message, and Swiss law treats them very differently. A transactional SMS reports on an order the customer has already placed. SMS marketing is any message with an offer, a discount or a nudge to buy — and that is the one that needs the most preparation. This article covers what Swiss law requires before your first campaign, how to work out its cost from a published price list (in Switzerland the price can depend on the recipient's mobile network), and, at the end, email, the other owned channel in the customer lifecycle, with its own requirements from mailbox providers.

Two layers of consent in Switzerland: data protection and the Unfair Competition Act

Switzerland is outside the EU, so neither the GDPR nor the EU's ePrivacy Directive governs a Swiss shop messaging its customers in Switzerland (the GDPR can still reach a Swiss shop that targets customers in the EU). Two separate Swiss laws take their place, and they don't map onto the EU's clean two-gate structure in quite the same way.

The first is the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), in force since 1 September 2023 — Switzerland's general data-protection law. Its Article 6 sets principles for how any personal data — including a phone number collected for marketing — must be processed: lawfully, in good faith, proportionately, and only for a declared purpose. It doesn't list an enumerated set of legal bases the way GDPR Article 6 does; it's a general standard a shop's data-handling practice has to meet, not a single box to tick.

The second, and the one with a specific, binding rule for sending the SMS itself, is the Federal Act against Unfair Competition (UWG), Article 3(1)(o). The provision reads, in the English translation published on Fedlex (for information only — the legally binding versions are German, French and Italian):

> "send or arrange to be sent mass advertising without direct connection with any requested content by telecommunication and in doing so fail to obtain the prior consent of the customer, or to indicate the correct sender or a simple and free of charge option of refusal; any person who receives contact details of a customer when selling goods, works or services, and who indicates the option of refusal when doing so, does not act unfairly if they send that same customer mass advertising for their own similar goods, works or services without the customer's consent"

In practice: sending mass SMS advertising without the customer's prior consent, without correctly identifying the sender, or without a simple, free way to refuse is unfair competition — the consent part falls away only where the soft-opt-in exception in the second half of the article applies. That exception lets a shop message an existing customer about its own similar goods or services without fresh consent, provided the shop offered a free, simple way to opt out when it first collected that customer's contact details. A shop sending to a cold list it bought or scraped doesn't get this exception — it only covers a shop's own, existing customers.

The practical conclusion for a Swiss shop: build your sign-up flow so each SMS sign-up clearly states what the customer is opting into, record when and how they opted in, and give every message — including ones sent under the soft-opt-in exception — a free, simple way to refuse further messages.

Transactional SMS vs. SMS marketing — where the line sits

A transactional SMS reports on something already happening within an order the customer placed: an order confirmation, a shipping-status change, a pickup code for a parcel locker, a pickup-deadline reminder. A message like that isn't advertising in the first place — it's the shop carrying out a transaction the customer already agreed to, so UWG Art. 3(1)(o)'s consent requirement, which is specifically about "mass advertising", doesn't apply to it.

SMS marketing, by contrast, is any message that encourages a purchase or promotes an offer, a discount, a sale or a new product — regardless of whether it goes to an existing customer or to someone who only signed up to a list. This type always needs the consent, or a valid soft-opt-in basis, described above — there's no "it's just a small nudge" exception.

The line gets blurry in one place: a status update that also carries a cross-sell link ("buy the accessory for the product we just shipped") stops being purely transactional for that extra part. If you don't have marketing consent, or a valid soft-opt-in basis, from every recipient of your status SMS, split the two messages instead of combining them.

The mechanism for sending automatic transactional SMS on an order-status change is covered in our sales automation article — it also covers triggers for cart reminders. If you're implementing automatic transactional SMS yourself and need help integrating an SMS gateway with your order system, see our process automation offer. A legitimate SMS marketing campaign, sent under your store's own, correctly identified name to recipients covered by the consent above, is not smishing — regardless of the offer in it.

How much an SMS marketing campaign costs in Switzerland

SMS gateways price per message, and three things move the rate: the volume you buy, the destination network and the type of sender. Swiss gateways do publish prices, so you can work out the cost before you send.

ASPSMS, a gateway run by VADIAN.NET AG in St. Gallen, sells prepaid credits in Swiss francs (aspsms.com/en/prices, read 2026-10-02): 9 centimes (Rp.) per credit for up to 5,000 credits, 8 centimes from 10,000, 7 centimes from 50,000 and 6 centimes from 100,000. A message to a Swiss number costs one credit or 1.75 credits depending on the recipient's network: the page explains that only numbers on Salt or a reseller using Salt's network are charged 1.75 credits, while numbers on Swisscom, for example, cost one. At the 10,000-credit price, that is 8 centimes per SMS to a Swisscom number and 14 centimes to a Salt-network number. (The operator table on the same page lists Sunrise at 1.75 credits, while the explanatory note names Sunrise among the one-credit networks — check this with the provider if a large part of your list is on Sunrise.)

For a campaign to 10,000 recipients bought at the 10,000-credit tier, the bill is CHF 800 if every number is on a one-credit network and CHF 1,400 if every number is on Salt's network; a real list lands somewhere in between, depending on how your customers split across operators. ASPSMS charges no set-up or monthly fee and its credits do not expire. These are one provider's prices on one day, not a market rate — other gateways sell monthly plans with a subscription on top of the per-message rate, which matters more at low volume than at high volume.

Two more factors change the bill. Messages to foreign numbers are priced per destination network as well — at ASPSMS, between one and 3.75 credits per message to EU networks — so check the rate for every country on your list. And messages are billed per segment, not per text: "a long message or some character sets can produce multiple segments, so a single message can incur more than one segment charge" (Bird SMS pricing, read 2026-10-02).

The calculation before you choose a provider: number of recipients × price per message for each network or country × number of segments, plus any subscription. Run it on your actual list rather than on a headline rate.

Consent records and opt-outs

The consent, or soft-opt-in basis, described above is only as good as your ability to show it. Keep a record per phone number of when and how a customer opted in — or, for the soft-opt-in exception, that they are an existing customer and were offered a free opt-out when their details were first collected — rather than relying on an unticked checkbox with no date attached.

UWG Art. 3(1)(o) itself requires a simple and free option of refusal with every message, not just at sign-up. How a recipient opts out (a reply to the sending number, a link in the message) depends on what your gateway supports; check this in its control panel before your first campaign. Once an opt-out comes in, remove that number from your marketing list immediately.

Keep the consent record and the opt-out history in one, easily searchable place — your shop system, your CRM or the SMS gateway itself, whichever one you already run as your main contact register. Spreading this data across a spreadsheet, the gateway's panel and your customer database makes it harder to prove consent in a dispute and increases the risk of messaging someone who has already opted out.

Email in the customer lifecycle

Email works alongside SMS in the customer lifecycle. Newsletter strategy has its own article on email marketing; here there is only one thing you need to know whatever your strategy: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft introduced hard technical requirements for bulk senders in 2024 and 2025, and they apply to a Swiss sender like any other. Without meeting them, your campaigns can land in spam or be rejected outright.

Gmail set requirements from 1 February 2024. Every sender needs SPF or DKIM, correct DNS records (including a reverse record), TLS encryption in transit and RFC 5322-compliant formatting, and a spam rate in Postmaster Tools that stays below 0.3% (Google recommends keeping it under 0.1%). Senders of more than 5,000 messages a day additionally need SPF, DKIM (at least a 1024-bit key, 2048 recommended) and DMARC together, with a "From" domain aligned to the SPF or DKIM domain, and marketing/subscription email must support one-click unsubscribe (the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers) plus a visible unsubscribe link in the body.

Yahoo enforces equivalent requirements from February 2024. Bulk senders need SPF and DKIM, a public DMARC policy (at minimum "p=none"), a "From" domain aligned to the SPF or DKIM domain, a working one-click unsubscribe header (the recommended method is a POST request per RFC 8058; mailto is also acceptable) — opt-outs must be honoured within 2 days — and a spam rate below 0.3%, measured against mail that was actually delivered to the inbox, not against everything sent.

Microsoft added its own requirements from 5 May 2025 for domains sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Outlook.com consumer addresses (hotmail.com, live.com and outlook.com): SPF and DKIM must pass, and DMARC must carry a policy of at least "p=none" aligned with SPF or DKIM. Since that date, non-compliant mail from such senders has been routed to the Junk folder; the announcement's 29 April 2025 update says it will later be rejected outright (Microsoft has not given a date) with the code "550; 5.7.515 Access denied, sending domain [SendingDomain] does not meet the required authentication level." Microsoft lists a functional unsubscribe link and list hygiene as recommendations rather than requirements, and doesn't publish a numeric spam-rate threshold.

The practical conclusion is the same as in the consent section above: technical compliance with a provider's rules (SPF/DKIM/DMARC for email) and legal compliance (consent for SMS and email) are both a condition of sending, not an extra. Without them a campaign either won't reach the recipient or shouldn't go out at all. Abandoned-cart reminders, sent by email or SMS, have their own logic and triggers — covered in our cart-abandonment article.

How to measure an SMS marketing campaign

An SMS itself doesn't report clicks — whether you can count them depends on the link. Some gateways have their own link shorteners, but traffic only arrives in Google Analytics 4 with the right source if the link to your offer carries UTM parameters — add them and shorten the link before you send. A click from the campaign then shows up in GA4 with its own source and medium, like any other campaign traffic; without UTM parameters you can't tell SMS traffic apart from organic or any other channel.

A click, though, is only half the measurement. The other half is whether that click turned into an order. Divide the campaign cost from the section above by the number of orders it actually produced, to get a cost per order for that specific channel — the same metric we cover generally, across all channels, in our e-commerce KPI article. Don't compare an SMS campaign to an email campaign on click-through rate alone — the two channels differ in cost per recipient, so what actually decides which one performs is cost per order, not raw traffic.