Inside a compliant battery retrofit campaign

You have a CSV of every job you have installed since 2013 and a rebate that makes half of those addresses worth an email. The campaign is straightforward. Getting it wrong is also straightforward, and it usually happens by accident rather than by intent.

“Compliant” here means two things at once. The advertising rules — NETCC clause 3 if you are a signatory, the Australian Consumer Law either way. And the substantiation rule, which is about whether a number in the campaign has working behind it.

Most campaigns that fail, fail on the second one, in the quote, weeks after anybody was thinking about compliance.

As on the other posts in this cluster: everything below with a clause number is NETCC and binds signatories. Everything with a section number, or attributed to the ACCC, reaches you either way. Inside a quoted clause, “we” is the signatory and “you” is the homeowner.

This is the order the work goes in.

Step one: decide who can receive it, before a word is written

Segmentation is usually treated as a targeting job. Half of it is a compliance job.

Three groups come out of the file before writing starts.

Anyone whose record shows a battery already. Only one battery system per premises is eligible for certificates under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, so once a claim has been made against an address, that address cannot claim again.

Two cautions on this one. A battery on your record is not proof a claim was made against it — a system fitted before the program started, or fitted and never claimed, is a real population in a database that goes back to 2013. And your file cannot see a battery somebody else installed at all. Suppress on what you have, expect the list to still contain addresses you cannot identify, and do not treat the row count as the addressable number.

Sending a rebate offer to an address that is already spent puts an offer in front of someone who cannot take it up. We read that as sitting under clause 3(a) — incentive schemes “honestly and accurately represented” — rather than under 3(l), which is about an ad carrying information that has gone out of date rather than about one recipient’s eligibility. That is our reading, not a recorded position of the Administrator. The instruction is the same either way: suppress them.

Anyone who has asked not to be contacted. Unsubscribes, opt-outs, and the ones recorded as a phone note rather than a database field. If your records keep those in three places, this step takes a morning and it is the morning best spent on the whole campaign.

Anyone the campaign would embarrass you with. Open warranty jobs, disputes, addresses that have clearly changed hands. Not a legal category. Still the right call.

What is left is segmented on install date, system size and inverter, because those change what the email can honestly say. A 2013 customer and a 2023 customer are not receiving the same claim. The mechanics of that split are set out in the eight-step battery retrofit campaign process.

Step two: write the ad and the emails to the clause 3 standard

The full checklist is in what NETCC clause 3 actually prohibits. Four items bite hardest on a database campaign.

Currency. Every incentive figure in the campaign has to be the one that applies, and it has to be the one for the installation date, not the sale date. The Clean Energy Regulator: “Rebates are determined by the installation date, not when a contract is signed.”

Urgency, and where it comes from. A step-down date is real, and clause 3(k) allows a prediction that is reasonably based. What makes it reasonably based is your install capacity, not the calendar. If your crews cannot install what the campaign sells before the date, the campaign is promising a rate some of those customers will not receive. The Clean Energy Regulator has already said publicly that “retailers are urged not to rush installations to try and beat the changes.” Build the send schedule around two numbers: installs a month, and how many weeks you are booked out. Then state the date once, and state it accurately.

Disclaimers where they are read. Clause 3(j): disclaimers must be “clearly outlined and not buried in small print”. The clause says nothing about any particular platform, so this is a judgement each time. Worth checking against a Meta ad specifically: a qualification that only appears once the reader expands the post is a qualification most readers never see. In an email, the body rather than the footer next to the address block.

Region. Clause 3(i) requires information specific to the state or region where the promotion runs. One ad set carrying one state’s arrangements to every state is the usual failure.

Step three: identification and consent on every send

Clause 57 is unambiguous about what has to be in each message:

We will not provide you with marketing material unless we also provide a simple, easy way for you to ask not to receive future direct marketing communications and include a clear, prominent opt-out provision in each marketing communication.

Each one. The fifth email in a sequence carries the same obligation as the first.

Consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe are separately governed by the Spam Act and enforced by the ACMA. That is different law with a different regulator, and the answer to “do I have consent for this list” is a question about your records, not about the campaign. Our position on who decides it and when is set out in how consent and the Spam Act are handled before the first send.

Step four: don’t let the quote say more than the ad did

This is the step campaigns miss, because the ad gets the compliance attention and the quote is written later by whoever is on the tools that week.

If a quote tells a customer they are likely to achieve a favourable return, NETCC clause 15 requires the quote to carry the ROI calculation itself, “based on reasonable assumptions and where available from reputable sources”, with the assumptions set out — system design and output, financial incentives, energy prices and usage, financing costs, maintenance costs and end-of-life costs.

Clause 13 adds that the quote must specify “the total value of any discounts, regulatory certificates, incentives or rebates (government and non-government) or government relief schemes and how and when these may or may not apply”.

None of that is an advertising duty. All of it triggers the moment a salesperson types a payback figure into a template. The fix is a quote template that already has the assumption fields in it, so the person filling it in cannot skip them. What has to sit behind each field is in what has to back up a claim before it reaches the quote.

Step five: take people out as they respond

An audience built on Monday is wrong by Friday.

Anyone who enquires, opts out, replies “we already got one” or books a site visit should stop receiving the campaign. Two reasons, and only one of them is compliance.

The spend reason is obvious. You are paying to advertise to somebody already in your pipeline.

The compliance reason is that the message goes stale against what the customer has already told you. Someone who has replied to say they have a battery is now receiving an offer they are not eligible for. Someone mid-quote is receiving a general claim that may not match the specific numbers on their own quote. Clause 3(c) reaches misleading claims about price and value, including through “misleading focus on one or a few aspects only” — applying it to this situation is our reading rather than a recorded position, but the practical answer is not in doubt.

How fast suppression happens is an operational decision, and it should be a stated one. Batching exists for the same reason: a sending domain with no history that fires the whole list at once lands in spam, and a list that all replies in one week hands your phone a day it cannot answer.

Three lines, written two ways

Written the risky way	What has to be true to write it, and how
“Government rebate — $X off your battery.”	The rebate is a discount delivered by assigning certificate rights, not a payment from government. Clause 3(b) prohibits misrepresenting an association with government. State the mechanism, and if a dollar figure is used, state the certificate price it assumes and the capacity it applies to in the same sentence.
“Save 70% on your power bill.”	Clause 3(g) needs it reasonably based; ACL s 4 makes it misleading if no evidence of reasonable grounds is put forward. Either state the assumptions and call it an estimate, or use a claim you can stand behind for the whole segment rather than the best case in it.
“Last chance before the rebate drops.”	Clause 3(k) allows a prediction that is reasonably based. The rate turns on installation date, so the honest version is about how many installs you can complete before it, stated as your own booking position rather than as a warning.

Where to go from here

The underlying advertising rules, clause by clause, are in what NETCC clause 3 actually prohibits. The evidence standard for any number in the campaign is in what has to back up a claim before it reaches the quote.

None of this needs an agency. It needs somebody to own the list of places a figure appears, and a quote template with the assumption fields already in it.