SMS, WhatsApp and Email: Swiss Consent Rules 2026

Under the Swiss Unfair Competition Act (UWG, SR 241 - the official English translation calls it the Unfair Competition Act, UCA), any person who wilfully competes unfairly is liable on complaint to a custodial sentence not exceeding three years or a monetary penalty (Art. 23 para. 1, status as of 1 December 2022). Sending mass advertising without the recipient's prior consent is one of the listed ways of competing unfairly. Separately, the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP, SR 235.1), in force since 1 September 2023, provides for a fine not exceeding 250,000 francs against a private person who wilfully fails to give people the information the Act requires (Art. 60).

Those two numbers are why a lot of Swiss owners quietly avoid SMS and WhatsApp altogether. That is the wrong conclusion. The law does not stop you messaging your customers. It draws two lines: one between people you already have a relationship with and people you do not, and one between a message that serves a transaction and a message that sells something. Almost every owner we talk to has both lines in the wrong place, usually in the direction that costs them revenue rather than the direction that gets them reported.

The AETHER Digital team built this guide from the current text of the UWG and the FADP on Fedlex, from the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner's own advertising and marketing guidance, from SECO's unfair-competition pages and from the WhatsApp Business Platform's published rules, all read in August 2026. It tells you what you may send, to whom, on which channel, what it costs to run, and what you need to be able to show if someone complains.

Swiss law does not regulate messages. It regulates a combination: who is on the other end, why you are writing, which channel carries it, and where that person is sitting. There is no universal answer to may I text my customers, and anyone who gives you one without asking these four questions is guessing.

1. What is your relationship with the recipient? This is the hinge. Someone whose contact details you took while selling them goods or services is treated differently under the UWG from someone who filled in your enquiry form, and both differently again from a name on a bought list. Most owners assume all three are the same. Knowing which is which is the single most valuable thing on this page.

2. Is the message transactional or promotional? A booking confirmation, an appointment reminder and a reply to a quote request perform a contract that is already in motion. A campaign sells. The UWG provision everybody worries about is aimed at mass advertising, not at running your business, and conflating the two is what stops owners automating the reminders that would make them money.

3. Which channel carries it? The consent rule in the UWG is written around advertising sent by telecommunication, which is where SMS, WhatsApp and email all live. Advertising by post and by telephone sit under different provisions with different triggers, including the asterisk entry in the telephone directory.

4. Where is the recipient? A customer in Konstanz is not the same legal problem as a customer in Kreuzlingen. If you are messaging people in the EU, EU rules attach on top of the Swiss ones.

The rest of this guide is those four questions worked out in the order an owner needs them.

The provision is Art. 3 para. 1 let. o UWG. As Fedlex has it, a person acts unfairly who sends or arranges to be sent mass advertising without direct connection with any requested content by telecommunication and in doing so fails to obtain the prior consent of the customer, or to indicate the correct sender or a simple and free of charge option of refusal.

Read that as three separate duties, because it is three separate duties and a campaign fails if it misses any one of them:

• Prior consent. Obtained before the first message, not assumed from silence and not bought in with a list.
• Correct sender. The recipient must be able to see who is actually writing. A shortcode with no business name fails this.
• A simple and free option of refusal. Free means free. A premium-rate opt-out number is not an option of refusal.

Then comes the sentence that changes the economics for an established Swiss business. The same provision continues: 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.

Four conditions are packed into that exception and all four must hold: the details were received when selling goods, works or services; the refusal option was indicated at that moment; the advertising is for your own goods, works or services; and those are similar to what the customer bought. A garage that took a mobile number at a service booking may text that customer about servicing. The same garage may not text them about a partner's insurance product, and may not text a name it bought from a list about anything.

Two neighbouring letters matter as much and are almost never mentioned in marketing advice. Art. 3 para. 1 let. u makes it unfair to ignore a note in the telephone directory that a customer does not want advertising from businesses they have no relationship with, and it expressly treats customers without a directory entry the same as customers with the entry and the note. Art. 3 para. 1 let. v makes it unfair to place advertising calls without displaying a directory number you are entitled to use. The FDPIC's advertising and marketing guidance describes the same mechanism from the citizen's side: an address and telephone number can be blocked at Swisscom Directories AG, after which the directory entry is marked with an asterisk.

Enforcement does not depend on an annoyed recipient hiring a lawyer. SECO can bring a civil action or file a criminal complaint against businesses in Switzerland that disregard the UWG, limited to cases where collective interests are harmed or endangered, and it bundles complaints about advertising calls made despite an asterisk entry rather than making each recipient report separately.

This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own setup with a Swiss lawyer or with the FDPIC before you launch a campaign.

The UWG provision is about mass advertising. A message that performs a contract the customer already asked for is not advertising, and treating it as if it were is the most expensive mistake in this whole article, because it is the mistake that stops a business automating the messages that pay for themselves.

Messages that serve a transaction the customer initiated:

• A confirmation of a booking they just made.
• A reminder before the appointment they booked.
• A reply to an enquiry, including a quote and one follow-up asking whether the quote is still relevant.
• A notice that their order shipped, their job is finished, or the technician is running late.

Messages that are advertising, whatever you call them internally:

• A seasonal offer to your whole list.
• A reactivation message to customers who have not been back in a year.
• Anything with a discount code in it.

The grey zone is real and it is where owners get into trouble. A reminder with a discount code stapled to the bottom is a promotional message that happens to also remind. A review request after a completed job sits closer to the transaction than to advertising, but attach an offer to it and you have moved it across the line. The safe operating rule is mechanical: one purpose per message, and never staple an offer to a reminder. Keep transactional templates and campaign templates in separate places so nobody merges them on a busy Friday.

This matters commercially because reminders and fast replies are where the money is. If you are working out how quickly you have to answer an enquiry before it goes cold, that is a separate question and we cover it in the guide to lead response time for Swiss SMEs. If your problem is people not turning up to the slot they booked, the reminder mechanics live in our guide to online booking and no-shows in Switzerland. Both of those send readers back here for the consent question, and this section is the answer: a reminder for an appointment the customer booked is not a campaign.

This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own setup with a Swiss lawyer or with the FDPIC before you launch a campaign.

The UWG tells you whether you may send. The FADP governs what you may do with the phone number and the email address in the meantime, and it applies even when the UWG exception means you needed no consent at all. The two are cumulative, and this is where email marketing consent in Switzerland is usually mishandled.

Four duties from the current text on Fedlex do the work.

Art. 6, principles. Personal data may only be collected for a specific purpose the data subject can recognise, and may only be further processed in a manner compatible with that purpose. Collecting a mobile number to confirm a delivery and then adding it to a campaign list is the pattern this provision is written about. Art. 6 para. 6 also sets the standard for consent: valid only if given voluntarily, for one or more specific instances of processing, based on appropriate information.

Art. 19, the duty to inform. When you collect personal data you must inform the person appropriately, giving as a minimum the controller's identity and contact details, the purpose, and where applicable the recipients or categories of recipients. If the data is disclosed abroad you must also name the state it goes to. In practice that is a privacy notice listing your messaging channels and where the data ends up.

Art. 30, breach of personality rights. Processing contrary to the principles of Art. 6, or contrary to the express wishes of the data subject, is a breach of personality rights. That is the legal hook behind honouring an opt-out immediately.

Art. 31, grounds for justification. A breach is unlawful unless justified by consent, by law, or by an overriding private or public interest, and the Act names as one such case the controller processing data relating to a contracting party in direct connection with the conclusion or performance of a contract. That is the FADP counterpart of the transactional message: performing the contract is a recognised interest, and running a campaign is not on the list.

The penalties attach to the duties, not to the marketing. Art. 60 provides for a fine not exceeding 250,000 francs, on complaint, against private persons who wilfully fail to give the information Art. 19 requires; Art. 61 sets the same maximum for wilfully disclosing personal data abroad without meeting the Act's requirements. These are fines against individuals, which is the detail Swiss owners consistently miss.

We deliberately do not re-derive the whole of the revised FADP here. For the general picture, read our guide to AI and data protection in Switzerland and come back for the messaging specifics.

This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own setup with a Swiss lawyer or with the FDPIC before you launch a campaign.

WhatsApp is the channel Swiss customers actually read, and it is also the channel with the most rules stacked on it, because two rulebooks apply at once: Swiss law, and the channel's own policy. Meeting one does not satisfy the other.

Getting access

There are two products behind the same logo. The free WhatsApp Business app is a phone app for one person answering by hand. Anything automated, including templates sent from your booking system, runs on the WhatsApp Business Platform, which is an API. You do not sign up for it in an app store: you need a verified business, a Meta business account, a phone number not already attached to a personal WhatsApp, and a technical integration, either built by your own developers or set up and operated for you. That second route is what we do, as part of a system we build and run, so the owner never touches an API console.

Opt-in, in the channel's own words

Meta's developer documentation on getting opt-in states that before messaging people on WhatsApp, businesses must obtain opt-in permission, that the opt-in must clearly state that the person is opting in to receive communication from the business and clearly state the business's name, and that businesses must comply with applicable law. Note what that last clause means for you: the channel explicitly does not certify that its own rules make you lawful in Switzerland. Meta's opt-in is a platform requirement. Art. 3 para. 1 let. o UWG is the Swiss one. WhatsApp Business automation needs both.

Template categories drive approval and cost together

Messages sent outside an open conversation must use a pre-approved template, and every template is classified. Meta's pricing documentation describes marketing, utility and authentication templates plus a service category. Since 1 July 2025 the channel charges per delivered template message rather than per conversation, and you are charged only when a template is delivered. Service messages are free, and utility templates sent inside an open 24-hour customer service window, the window a customer opens by messaging you first, are also free.

That structure lines up almost exactly with the Swiss legal distinction, which is a rare piece of luck. Your appointment reminders and booking confirmations are utility templates, they are cheap or free, and under Swiss law they are transactional. Your campaign is a marketing template, it is the dearest category, and under Swiss law it needs consent unless the UWG existing-customer exception applies. If a template you think of as a reminder keeps getting classified as marketing, that is usually the channel telling you the truth about what you wrote.

The data-residency question a Swiss owner will ask

Message content on the Cloud API is processed by a US company, so the cross-border rules in Art. 16 and Art. 17 FADP apply. The relevant route today is the Federal Council's adequacy recognition of the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework: the FDPIC has published that from 15 September 2024 the framework ensures adequate data protection in the exchange of personal data between Switzerland and certified US companies, and the amendment to the country list in Annex 1 of the Data Protection Ordinance took effect on that date. The transfer therefore has a lawful basis where the recipient is certified, and Art. 19 para. 4 FADP still obliges you to tell people in your privacy notice which state the data goes to.

Meta separately documents a local storage option for the Cloud API: message content is deleted from data centres outside the selected region after a data-in-use period of up to 60 minutes and is then persisted only inside that region, with a maximum message retention of 30 days. Whether your region is available is a question to put in writing to whoever registers your number, before they register it.

What each channel actually costs to run

Costs are per message and driven by four things: the channel, the template category, the country of the recipient's number, and whether you are inside a free window. WhatsApp charges per delivered template, with marketing dearest and service free. SMS marketing in Switzerland is billed per message part by a gateway, is priced by destination country, and has no free window at all, which makes SMS the expensive way to run a campaign and the reliable way to reach someone who uses no messenger. Email has effectively no per-message cost and correspondingly the weakest attention. A phone call costs a person's time, the most expensive unit in the building. Budget the mix against what the message has to achieve, not against the unit price.

This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own setup with a Swiss lawyer or with the FDPIC before you launch a campaign.

Plenty of Swiss businesses have customers in Konstanz, Annecy, Como or Bregenz, and a list that mixes them in is a list with two legal regimes running on it.

The European Commission's own guidance for businesses states the territorial rule plainly: EU data protection law applies to an organisation established outside the EU when it offers goods or services to individuals in the EU, paid or free, or monitors their behaviour. Being a Swiss company does not put you outside it. The Commission also states that a business using communication tools such as email for direct marketing must comply with the rules set out in the ePrivacy Directive (Directive 2002/58/EC), which is the EU instrument governing unsolicited electronic marketing, and that where such lists are processed on grounds of legitimate interests individuals have a right to object.

The practical consequence is short. The two regimes are not identical, and the safe posture on any given point is the stricter of the two rather than an average. Record the country alongside the contact details instead of discovering it later, keep an explicit logged opt-in for anyone in the EU rather than leaning on a Swiss exception that has no EU twin, and keep the two segments separable in whatever holds your list, because one send to a merged list is one send under two rulebooks.

This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own setup with a Swiss lawyer or with the FDPIC before you launch a campaign.

Three things decide whether your position under customer messaging law in Switzerland is sound, and none of them is the wording of your campaign. The first is whether you can state where every contact came from. The second is whether transactional and promotional messages are genuinely kept apart in the way the business works, not just in the way you describe it. The third is whether an objection registered on one channel actually stops all of them. Everything else in this article is downstream of those three.

That is a systems problem before it is a legal one, and the systems half is the part we work on. We build and operate lead response systems for Swiss SMEs: the enquiry is captured with its source attached, the reply goes out fast, the reminder goes out as a transactional message and stays one, and an objection propagates everywhere at once. Two of our own products show the mechanics in a form you can look at rather than take on trust, a voice AI that answers calls and an automated email handling system, and the underlying engineering is what we describe as business process automation.

This is also the right place to say who should not buy anything. If you send a handful of messages a week and know every customer by name, you do not need a system. You need the six items in the checklist above written on one page and stuck to the wall.