Drummond Golf drives store traffic with faster SMS campaigns

For Drummond Golf, timing is everything. A promotional SMS that lands hours late can miss the sales window entirely, especially during short retail campaigns where customers need to know about deals right away.

As Australia’s largest off-course golf retailer, Drummond Golf supports 50 owner-operated stores nationwide through a lean Melbourne-based head office team. Driving customers into stores is a core part of that role, and SMS has long been an important channel for helping franchisees increase sales during key promotional periods. But previous providers created deliverability problems. Some messages arrived four to 48 hours late, making it harder to turn campaigns into store visits when timing mattered most.

When the business adopted HubSpot as its CRM, it also chose Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) as its SMS partner. The decision came down to three priorities: fast delivery, a strong HubSpot integration and dependable customer support. That combination gave the team a more reliable setup for national and local SMS campaigns alike.

Drummond Golf now uses SMS to support its biggest sales and promotional periods, from national campaigns to location-specific store messages. Some campaigns are sent across the national database and staggered by state and time zone, helping spread website traffic and ensure customers receive promotions at the most relevant time in their day. Others are tailored by store location and customer purchase history, making messages more targeted and useful.

The impact was obvious early on. Jordan Blick recalls sending one of the team’s first bulk SMS campaigns through Sinch Engage and seeing a spike in website visitors within 15 minutes. For a retailer with busy sales events like Black Friday and the holiday season, that kind of speed gave the marketing team far more confidence that campaigns were landing when they were supposed to.

With Sinch Engage integrated into HubSpot, Drummond Golf says it now achieves a 100% delivery rate on its SMS campaigns. More importantly, Jordan tracks store foot traffic and consistently sees a strong lift when SMS is included in a campaign compared with campaigns that do not use it. According to him, the difference is significant enough that some stores call to check whether a message has gone out.

The new setup has also made campaign execution more efficient. Instead of spending an entire day managing sends and checking that everything was working, Jordan says the platform now saves him a full day of work. Automated workflows based on time zone have removed much of the manual effort while improving the customer experience at the same time.