Subway Restaurants' Online Marketing Database System
Subway Restaurants is the world's largest submarine sandwich chain, with over 27,000 franchises in 86 countries.
The Challenge
Subway was spending millions of dollars a year on marketing that was driving tremendous traffic to their wide-ranging network of campaign-specific websites. However, the customer data they collected from each website was not standardized and/or consolidated with the others, causing frustration amongst Subway's marketing department.
The Execution
To resolve this, we developed a single Subway Marketing Database (SMD). The SMD is designed as a web-based customer contact collection system, with the specific purpose of consolidating all user information for remarketing purposes.
Marketing initiatives can be integrated into the SMD by way of an XML interface engine, that allows for near infinite flexibility with regard to the information retained. Communication with the SMD can happen in a real-time fashion, giving the Marketing Team immediate feedback on their campaign initiatives.
The system is cumulative in nature, building a complete customer profile over time, as each marketing initiative gathers its own unique data.
The SMD is also equipped with an API that allows Subway to integrate the SMD data directly with a number of applications. This is primarily used to synchronize email subscriber data with their Email Marketing application, ExactTarget.
The Results
This web-based contact management application currently includes well over 2 million contacts and has drastically improved the quality of customer information available to Subway on a real-time basis.
The SMD has provided them with the ability to retrieve selective contacts based on specific demographics and desired criteria in a matter of minutes. This data is continuously at their fingertips and allows their Marketing Team to enjoy a quick turn-around while leveraging their highly-targeted marketing source.
* The Subway Marketing Database application is a private tool used by the corporate marketing department, and is not accessible to the public.
