600 verified contacts outperform 11,000: a fashion retail case study with 2way

The brand is a European fashion retailer with physical stores and an online shop. It had been building its SMS database for some time and had reached 11,000 contacts. The messages were going out. The question was whether the right people were receiving them.

Learn how this brand used 2way Grow to prove that collection method determines campaign performance.

Challenge

The brand wanted to grow its SMS audience through its physical stores and find out whether contacts collected differently would also respond differently. After the first month of collecting new contacts, the brand decided to put both bases to the test.

Solution

2way Grow NFC and QR stickers were placed across 16 of the brand's store locations. Each sticker carries NFC and QR on the same surface. The customer taps or scans, whichever is more convenient, and lands on a dedicated sign-up page. They enter their phone number, confirm consent, and receive a 6-digit verification code by SMS from the brand's sender ID. Once confirmed, a discount code is delivered to the same message thread. That first interaction establishes the context: every future campaign SMS from the brand arrives from the same recognized sender, in the same conversation the customer already knows.

In the first month, the brand collected 600 new verified contacts through the stickers across the 16 locations. All contact data was available in the brand's database in real time.

After that month, the brand ran a head-to-head comparison through 2way Send. The same message content and the same discount value were sent to both groups: the original 11,000-contact base and the 600 contacts collected through 2way Grow.

Results

The original base produced a 4% CTR. The 2way base produced a 12% CTR.

A database the brand had spent a long time building was outperformed by a base 18x smaller, collected in a single month across 16 stores. The difference wasn't in the message. The message was identical. The difference was in how the contacts got on the list.

The 2way contacts were collected at a physical point of interaction. The customer was already in the store, already engaged with the brand's products. They chose to sign up by tapping or scanning a sticker at the counter or fitting room. They entered their number on a dedicated landing page and confirmed it with a verification code. That verification step means the database contains only real, active phone numbers, with no typos, no fakes, and no duplicates.

The first SMS the customer received came from the brand's sender ID, with a discount code they'd asked for. When the campaign arrived weeks later, it appeared in the same message thread, from the same sender the customer already recognized. That continuity between the first interaction and every message that follows is what produced a 12% CTR from 600 contacts while 11,000 contacts from the existing base delivered 4%.

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