Texting rules for car dealerships: the five rules to follow.

Consent means the customer agreed to be texted by your dealership. A buyer who sends a form with a phone number and agrees to be texted is a different case from a number copied off an old list. Keep a record for every number: where it came from, when, and what the person agreed to.

In the United States, the main law is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). In Canada, the anti-spam law known as CASL sets the consent rules, and how long consent from an inquiry lasts can be limited, so ask your advisor how that fits a follow-up plan that runs for months. Getting and recording consent stays your dealership's job, whoever sends the texts. For a lead that went quiet long ago, read how to follow up old car leads.

In the United States, mobile carriers expect business texting from a local number to be registered, a system known as A2P 10DLC. The dealership registers who it is and what it will text about, and texting goes live once the carriers approve it. Registration needs the dealership's legal name and tax ID. Texts sent outside an approved registration risk being blocked. Stay inside what you registered: automated texts answer, book and follow up, they do not quote payments, rates or approvals.

The registration system is a US one. If you text Canadian numbers, ask your provider how the carriers treat them.

Texts your business starts should go out at reasonable hours in the customer's time zone, not at midnight. Some states and provinces set their own hours, so check yours.

Our assistant sends the first text to a new form lead, listing-site lead or missed caller within minutes between 8 AM and 8 PM, in the dealership's time zone and, when we know it, the customer's. A lead who arrives at night gets that first text after 8 AM. Its replies to a buyer who just wrote can go out at any hour; ask your advisor how the rules where you operate treat replies. Frequency counts too: as our own practice, not as a legal limit, a lead never gets more than 3 automated follow-up texts in any 24 hours.

When a customer says stop, the texts stop, right away. STOP is the standard word, and people use others: END, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, QUIT, or a plain sentence like "please stop texting me."

With our assistant, a STOP on text, Messenger, Instagram or web chat is recorded right away and ends automated messages on every channel, apart from one confirmation, until the customer texts START. Other clear requests to stop, in English, Spanish or French, are recorded too. Anything unclear pauses automated messages and goes to your team the same day. Test it yourself: send STOP from your own phone and watch whether every automated text, in every tool you use, goes quiet.

A business that uses an automated assistant should not pretend it is a person. Ours tells a customer plainly that it is the dealership's digital assistant whenever they ask if they are talking to a person, and it never claims to be a person. Some states and provinces have their own rules about telling people when they are talking to AI, so ask your advisor whether to say it up front as well.

Payments, rates, approvals and trade values go to a person, never into an automated text. A car's listed website price is fine. Facebook and Instagram have their own clock: they generally let a business message freely only within 24 hours of the person's last message, with narrow exceptions, so reply fast and ask early for a phone number and permission to continue by text. Looking for words you can use? The 25 follow-up text templates stay inside these rules.

A text to a missed caller is a text too. See what a missed-call text-back does, and the glossary for the terms above.