600 verified phone contacts in one day with 2way

The brand is a European direct-to-consumer meal-plan subscription company. It delivers prepared diet meals to customers who want healthier eating without the planning, shopping, and cooking that normally comes with it. The team was looking for ways to grow its direct messaging audience: a list of customers it could reach without paid media and without platform algorithms deciding who sees what.

A one-day sporting event with roughly 6,000 attendees offered a concentrated opportunity. The brand had a stand inside the venue and offered a meal in exchange for a phone number. The sign-up itself ran through 2way stickers placed on the counter.

Learn how this brand turned a single live event into a verified SMS audience with 2way Grow.

Challenge

The brand wanted to build its SMS audience. Every new verified phone number on the list was a customer the brand could contact directly for the next product drop, promotion, or seasonal campaign.

The event gave the brand access to roughly 6,000 people in one venue for a few hours. The constraint was time. Event visitors engage with a stand only during short breaks in play: the interval between halves, a stoppage in the match, the queue for food. Any sign-up method that requires more than a minute or staff assistance at each interaction loses most of those moments.

Paper forms need a pen and a flat surface. Tablets need staff to manage a queue. A generic QR code tends to send the visitor to an app store or a homepage, already two steps away from the sign-up they came for. The brand needed a way to produce a verified contact in under a minute, with no app install and no extra staff member managing every sign-up.

Solution

2way Grow stickers were placed at the stand. Each sticker carries NFC and QR on the same surface. The visitor taps or scans, whichever is more convenient, and lands on a dedicated sign-up page.

On the landing page, the visitor enters their phone number and confirms consent. A 6-digit verification code arrives by SMS within seconds. The visitor enters the code, and the number is verified. A unique 20% discount code for the brand's subscription lands on the phone, tracked individually to that contact. The visitor collects the meal from the stand, with the discount already waiting in their messages.

Elapsed time from tap to verified discount code: around 30 seconds.

Every contact passes through the verification step, which removes fake entries, mistyped digits, and duplicates before they reach the database. Every discount code is unique, so any future purchase traces back to this event.

Results

The stand captured around 600 verified phone contacts over the course of one day. That represents roughly 10% of all attendees, collected at a single fixed point without roaming promoters or staff-assisted sign-ups.

Each contact is verified, carries a written consent record logged with timestamp, device, language version, and channel selected, and is tagged to the event for attribution. Each one is reachable through SMS, a channel where open rates exceed 90% and 95% of messages are read within three minutes of delivery. Email, by comparison, averages 15-20% open rates.

Six thousand people walked through the gate. By the end of the day, around 600 of them were part of the brand's direct messaging audience, with consent on record and a direct line open through SMS.

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