Catering customers are the most valuable customers in your Subway business. They order in bulk, they tip well, they're predictable, and when they find a store they trust, they come back repeatedly. They're also the customers most operators completely fail to follow up with.
I've been running Subway locations in San Diego for years. When we started auditing our catering customer database, we found something that genuinely surprised us: a huge percentage of our best past catering customers had simply stopped ordering — not because they were unhappy, but because nobody had followed up. They'd placed one or two big orders, had a fine experience, and then quietly drifted to whoever happened to answer their next call.
The average catering order at a Subway is $300–600. Most operators have dozens of these customers sitting dormant in their data — and they're doing nothing about it.
Why catering customers churn quietly
Regular customers come back on their own. They walk past your store, they're hungry, they come in. Catering customers are different. They only order when they have an event — a lunch meeting, a team training, a school event. If you're not in their mind when that moment arrives, they'll search for whoever comes up first, or call wherever they called last time.
This is a retention problem disguised as a new customer problem. Operators spend money on ads trying to find new catering accounts when their existing database is full of people who already trust them. The reactivation opportunity is sitting there unused.
What a reactivation sequence actually looks like
We built our reactivation system in stages. Here's the sequence that works best for us:
Day 15: A short thank-you SMS goes out after the original order. "Hope the lunch was a hit — we'd love a Google review if you have a minute." This builds the relationship and often generates a review while the experience is fresh. (Reviews are their own growth lever — we wrote about turning Google reviews into a growth engine.)
Day 30: If no new order has come in, a reactivation SMS goes out. Personal, specific. "Hey [name] — it's been about a month since your office order. Got another meeting coming up? We can take care of it." No blast, no promo code — just a human-feeling nudge.
Day 45: Maya, our AI voice agent, makes an outbound call. She references the customer's last order, asks about upcoming events, and offers to book on the spot. This is where the real magic happens — a personalized voice call that most operators would never have the bandwidth to make manually.
Day 60: Final email with a light offer — a free cookie tray with the next catering order, or a bundle deal. After this, if there's no response, the customer is marked as churned and removed from the active sequence.
The numbers that changed how we think about this
When we started running this sequence properly, we were surprised by how many customers responded — not because the messages were aggressive, but because they were timely and personal. Office managers are busy. They don't plan catering weeks in advance. When a reminder lands at the right moment, it converts.
If you have a catering customer list and you're not running a reactivation sequence, start with the 30-day SMS. It takes five minutes to set up and the ROI is immediate. The $300 customer is already in your database. You just need to go get them.