How Yarn gets 3x ROI from SMS and MMS marketing campaigns

For Yarn, SMS and MMS are not side channels. They are performance channels — used to drive traffic, sales and stronger engagement when email alone is not enough. The brand found that large parts of its audience were not responding quickly to traditional marketing channels, even as paid advertising continued to grow the marketplace. 

Yarn is Australia’s premier marketplace for authentic First Nations collaborations and products, helping Indigenous-owned businesses and artists share their culture and stories with more people. But as the business scaled, it needed better ways to turn audience attention into action. It also saw an opportunity to make conversations with prospective corporate clients feel more personal while shortening a lengthy nurture cycle. 

After trying SMS through Klaviyo and finding it was not the right fit, Yarn moved to Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) through its HubSpot integration. That gave the team a way to add SMS, MMS and conversational messaging into the same multichannel workflows it was already using, while also giving it confidence that time-sensitive campaign messages would land quickly.

For Yarn’s marketing team, SMS and MMS became especially valuable during major retail moments like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and NAIDOC Week. Campaigns can be set up ahead of time, personalised with custom fields and sent in just a few clicks, helping the team move quickly when promotions need to go live. MMS adds another advantage: because Yarn’s products are visual, images help showcase designs more effectively than text alone. 

That mix of speed and visual impact has translated into stronger engagement. According to the case study, Yarn’s SMS campaigns see an average click-through rate of 4.2%, while MMS campaigns reach 11% — more than double the SMS rate. During NAIDOC Week, the company sent more than 175,000 messages and received nearly 1,000 responses per campaign on average, alongside a 100% delivery rate.

Yarn also used conversational messaging to improve the experience for its corporate sales team. Before introducing two-way SMS, the team was spending around 45 days nurturing a lead. By adding more informal, mobile-first conversations into the process, it is now getting that timeline closer to 30 days while creating more personalised engagement with prospective clients. 

This matters because Yarn’s corporate work is often collaborative by nature. A business might come with an existing design, or it may want to explore working with a Yarn artist to create something new. In those cases, conversational SMS helps make the exchange feel more direct and accessible, rather than forcing every interaction through slower, more formal channels.

The commercial results have been strong. Yarn says SMS has helped drive more traffic to its marketplace and generated 2.5–3x ROI, including $150,000 in revenue over a 90-day period that included NAIDOC Week. The business also says messaging helps it reach more customers at the right time and on the channels they prefer.