Customer Story
190,000 messages and a 13% CTR: The Athlete’s Foot’s mobile engagement story
Overview
Challenge: Deliver personalized loyalty vouchers more reliably and cost-effectively, while overcoming incomplete customer contact data and the limits of standard SMS and direct mail.
Solution: Use personalized mobile landing pages linked from SMS to deliver richer voucher content, track engagement, support redemption online or in-store, and make customer details easier to update.
Results: Higher engagement and redemption, with a 13% CTR, a 13% average voucher redemption rate, and unreachable customers reduced from 19% to less than 5% when channels were combined.
“We’re always looking to improve our customer experience, so we jumped at the opportunity to try mobile landing pages. It’s providing a richer experience for our customer and solving two key business challenges for us – the high cost of direct mail and reliable deliverability.“
The Athlete’s Foot runs a large loyalty program across more than 135 stores in Australia and New Zealand, rewarding customers with a $30 voucher for every 300 points earned. But delivering those vouchers effectively had become a growing challenge. Around 19% of vouchers were going undelivered because customer post or email details were inaccurate, and while direct mail allowed for personalisation, it was expensive and difficult to measure. Standard SMS was not enough either, since each voucher also needed supporting terms and conditions that would not fit within a 160-character message.
Solving voucher delivery and personalization challenges
To improve the experience, The Athlete’s Foot turned to Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) mobile landing pages. Instead of sending a basic text message, the business could send each customer a short, trackable link that opened a personalised mobile page with their name, relevant images, a unique barcode, and one-tap buttons to shop online or find a store. That gave the brand a more engaging and measurable way to distribute loyalty vouchers while keeping the experience simple for customers. Over 190,000 messages were sent across five campaigns, including voucher sends, expiry reminders, and a win-back campaign for customers who had not engaged with the brand for an extended period.
The richer format also addressed several practical issues at once. It gave The Athlete’s Foot room to include important voucher terms and conditions, avoided the cost and limitations of direct mail, and allowed the team to test different message approaches more easily. Because each mobile landing page was unique to the individual customer, the brand could also track engagement and redemption more accurately, whether the voucher was used in-store or online.
Higher engagement, better redemption and cleaner customer data
The results were strong. The Athlete’s Foot reported a 13% click-through rate, compared with an average email CTR of around 2%. Across five campaigns over six weeks, the average voucher redemption rate was also 13%. The brand found that customers stayed engaged with mobile landing pages for longer than with standard email or SMS, with some customers reopening messages and redeeming offers even a week later.
The campaigns also helped improve customer data quality and reach. In one trial, customers were taken to personalised, prepopulated update forms instead of being sent to a generic login page. That made it easier for people to confirm or update their details and helped expand the pool of customers the business could contact. When The Athlete’s Foot combined email, direct mail and SMS, the proportion of customers it could not reach dropped from 19% to less than 5%. For the brand, that meant fewer missed vouchers, better visibility into campaign performance, and a more convenient experience for customers who could simply pull their voucher up on their phone when they were ready to shop.
