The Athlete’s Foot is one of the largest specialty athletic and lifestyle footwear retailers, with over 135 locally owned and operated stores in Australia and New Zealand. The Athlete’s Foot stocks over 50 brands, and also sells its own range of branded accessories. The Athlete’s Foot is owned by Accent Group Limited.

The Athlete’s Foot offers a loyalty program that rewards members for their purchases. For every dollar spent, customers receive a point. For every 300 points accumulated, customers earn a $30 voucher, which can be redeemed in-store or online.

Challenges

The business uses various channels to communicate with customers, particularly regarding their rewards vouchers, but faced some challenges:

• Approximately 19 percent of vouchers were undeliverable as The Athlete’s Foot did not have accurate post or email addresses in its customer database.
• Personalised content is an important strategy to engage customers and offer the right voucher. While direct mail can provide this personalization, it was expensive and there was no method of measuring deliverability or customer engagement rates.
• Each voucher includes terms and conditions, but these could not fit into the 160-character limit of an SMS.

Solution

The Athlete’s Foot chose MessageMedia’s mobile landing pages, which extend the functionality of SMS. A short trackable link, which is unique to each customer, opens a customized link preview on supported handsets. Customisation ensures the link preview is as relevant and eye-catching as possible, rather than using a generic image automatically pulled from the phone’s metadata.

Once the customer taps on the link preview, they see a customized mobile landing page with their name and rich content such as images, barcodes and buttons. On The Athlete’s Foot mobile landing page, one-tap buttons display a barcode and directs customers to redeem their unique voucher with ‘Shop now’ or ‘Find a store’ buttons.

• “We issued new vouchers using mobile landing pages to customers who had earned a voucher and sent reminders when the expiry of a voucher was imminent. We also ran a ‘win back’ campaign for customers who had not engaged with our brand for an extended period,” explains Jacinta O’Brien, Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), who is responsible for ensuring loyalty members experience the best customer journey.
• Over 190,000 messages were sent to customers across five campaigns.
• The platform allowed The Athlete’s Foot to test and experiment with varying messages to determine the most effective approach.

Benefits

There are many benefits from using mobile landing pages for the campaigns:

Higher click-through rates, more conversions: “We had a 13 percent click-through rate (CTR) from the mobile landing page, which is much higher than email. Our email CTR varies, but on average it’s around two percent. Across five campaigns over six weeks the voucher redemption rate averaged 13 percent. We’re really pleased with this result,” says O’Brien.

Personalisation: Every mobile landing page is personalized for each customer. The message greets each customer by name, and provides a unique barcode that tracks that customer’s response, whether they buy in-store or online. This provides The Athlete’s Foot with data about how many customers engage with the message, and how many customers make a subsequent purchase.

Longer engagement: The Athlete’s Foot discovered that a mobile landing page engages customers for longer.

We’ve seen that a mobile landing page holds the customers’ engagement for longer. They open (or re-open) and click after the 48-hour mark, which is when they have usually stopped engaging with an email or SMS. Customers are going back and clicking through to the page and still redeeming it even a week later

Jacinta O’Brien, Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), The Athlete’s Foot

Customers were even clicking on previous offers when a new campaign was sent, as they could view earlier offers in the message thread.

Customer convenience: Customers can access their voucher easily as it is stored on their phones in the same way as an SMS. There is no need to remember to bring a paper letter into the store or find an email in a cluttered inbox.

Convenience is why customers are continuing to engage with the mobile landing page for longer. Customers go into the store up to a week later, and they can pull it back up on their phone, which is very convenient. They’ve always got their phone with them

Jacinta O’Brien, Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), The Athlete’s Foot

Database building: One of the trials used personalization to ask customers to update details. Instead of linking to a generic login page where customers had to recall a username and password, the mobile landing page opened a unique page for every customer. This page was prepopulated with their existing contact details, making it very easy for the customer to update. This increased completion rates.

“Using unique mobile landing pages prepopulated with each customer’s details has opened up the pool of people we can communicate with and reduced those we can’t reach. Now, when we combine email, direct mail and SMS, the number of customers we can’t contact is cut from 19 percent down to less than five percent. This is a big advantage for us, as it has significantly lowered the number of customers who never receive their voucher. This is just the start of the journey of exploring what else we can do with mobile landing pages,” adds O’Brien.

Tracking: Each mobile landing page contains a link unique to each recipient. Businesses can now track not only every page visit from their messages but also every interaction on the mobile landing page itself to better understand customer engagement with different call-to-action (CTA) buttons. This helps measure SMS conversion rates and provides valuable campaign analytics that can inform future campaigns.

The Athlete’s Foot can now track messages that have actually been delivered to their customers, further improving accuracy of engagement rates.

No need for development: With mobile landing pages there is no need for development work, as is often the case with traditional website landing pages. Unique URLs are automatically generated as messages are processed via MessageMedia’s gateway, and pre-built templates mean uploaded images and content are automatically rendered into a mobile-friendly format. All technical elements are handled by MessageMedia, including international distribution and barcode generation.

Richer content and more text: Mobile landing pages use rich images and content that is more visually engaging and encourages customer interaction. In addition, as more text space is available, important terms and conditions can be provided with the voucher.

Return on investment: The Athlete’s Foot describes the ROI of mobile landing pages as promising, with higher redemption rates and average transaction values well in excess of AUD $100 each.

High capacity: As all content is hosted by MessageMedia, there is no need for The Athlete’s Foot to stagger sends.

Exceptional support: “We found it really easy to work with MessageMedia on the mobile landing pages campaigns. The team was really responsive, and it feels like we’re all working towards a better result by providing a richer product and a more personalized experience for our customers. It’s a nice partnership.”

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.

Mark Teperson, Chief Digital Officer, Accent Group Limited

Find out how you can increase customer engagement with mobile landing pages or contact us for a demo.