Tatango Partners With Subway for SMS Marketing

I guess the people at group SMS service Tatango are loving the “Five…Five Dollar Footlong” commercial these days. Tatango has been testing a program with a 16-store Subway franchise in upstate New York over the past few months. The company says the program went so well that 300 more Subway stores in Seattle will be testing the SMS marketing option over the coming months.

Tatango provides a group SMS product – basically the idea is that companies can send out SMS messages to mass groups of people who have requested (opt-in) to be part of the group. You can think of group SMS similar to opt-in email marketing except with much shorter messages that are usually very targeted. Check out our video interview with Tatango CEO Derek Johnson to learn more about the company.

While financial terms were not disclosed, Tatango notes, “Over 5,000 customers have signed up, 13,000 messages have been sent, and most importantly – they have experienced a 9% redemption rate of all messages, as opposed to a 1% rate for direct mail.”

Earlier this year Subway partnered with NY-based GoMobo to allow customers to order food before they arrive to save time.

It’s interesting to see Subway testing a variety of new online options for reaching their customers. I can only imagine that Grimace and the King won’t be too far behind.