How McSport grew marketing lists by 60% without discount popups

Sustainable List Growth Without Sacrificing Margins

Email has long been a key revenue driver for McSport's Shopify store, with their newsletter list consistently delivering impressive open rates above 30%. For a while, discounts and giveaways had been the go-to strategies for acquiring new contacts.

But this incentive-driven approach was limiting the team's potential. As Leo Cesario, McSport's Ecommerce Manager, put it, "Even though discount codes don't affect the overall target too much, they do affect our profit margin target, which was very tight."

Beyond the immediate margin impact of constantly offering discounts, they were attracting mainly bargain hunters.

Leo explains, "We put in a lot of effort to grow our list — forms, giveaways, discounts but the results didn't stick. People signed up for the code, then dropped off."

These shop-and-drop subscribers meant McSport had to keep putting time and money into re-acquisition campaigns, consuming valuable resources that could be spent on higher-impact marketing initiatives.

The McSport team understood that true growth meant more than just bigger numbers — a healthy list needs both quantity and quality to drive better conversions, higher retention, and increased lifetime value.

With this in mind, they began looking for a more sustainable solution. The vision was clear: attract engaged subscribers at scale, reduce acquisition costs, and eliminate the need for constant discounts or manual campaigns. Their goal was to replicate the level of engagement of their top-performing Klaviyo segments from the very first touch, with lower internal lift.

After strong recommendations from peers in the industry, the team decided to explore Dataships' dynamic consent at checkout.

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"We knew email was too important to let it stagnate, so we started exploring better ways to grow it. That's when Dataships came into the picture."

Dynamic Consent Creates a Sustainable Customer Acquisition Path

McSport immediately integrated Dataships' dynamic consent widget into their Shopify store. It connected seamlessly with their existing Klaviyo setup and didn't require any changes to the McSport team's workflows.

As Leo put it, "Dataships was incredibly easy to set up — it just fit into our flow."

To measure how it stacked up, Dataships helped McSport set up an A/B test by creating separate Klaviyo lists: one for contacts captured via Dataships at checkout, and another for signups from their discount-based forms.

Within a month, the data was clear: 2,788 net new contacts from Dataships that matched newsletter performance with a 31% open rate, and an average order value of €191.23 compared to €168.21 from traditional newsletter signups. This is all without a meaningful increase in unsubscribes and fewer spam complaints.

Partnering with Dataships validated what the team had been hoping for: they didn't have to rely on incentives to build a high-quality list. They now have more control over margins while maintaining growth, and can reserve discounts exclusively for VIP customers.

Even better, with dynamic consent in place at checkout, there's nothing more to manage. Dataships handles everything in the background — the platform syncs new subscribers to Klaviyo and adjusts the consent language automatically based on each customer's location. McSport no longer worries about privacy laws or spends time managing lists. McSport now generates the same revenue with significantly lower effort.

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"We didn't need to offer a discount or redesign anything, and the new contacts started converting right away. What really impressed us was the quality. Revenue from these subscribers matched what we were seeing from our regular forms. It was a win with almost no effort."

McSport Drove $847k in Incremental LTV Through List Growth

Dataships has become instrumental to McSport's email list growth and retention marketing strategy. With the resources and margin freed up by Dataships' reliable dynamic consent engine, Leo and his team can tackle new, higher-impact initiatives.

The numbers are trending upward:

1. 60% increase in marketable email contacts
2. 2,788 net new contacts per month
3. $847k incremental LTV per year

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"With Dataships, list growth became consistent and nearly effortless. We didn't expect to see this kind of impact without offering anything upfront."