Employees at JitterGram in Bedford include, clockwise from top left, Ric Pratte, Katie York, Chris Sosa, Ed Mitchell, Matt Pierson and his wife, Michelle, and Karen Grimmett.
: Sunday, April 5, 2009
Businesses use Bedford firm to promote deals by text
By MELANIE PLENDA, Correspondent
BEDFORD – Since e-mail is so 2008, a local company is capitalizing on the public’s new love for all things short, tweet and text with a venture linking businesses directly into customers’ pockets.
Jittergram Inc., a new Bedford-based business, has built a system that allows businesses access to the cell numbers of interested customers. With a list of opt-in customers and number in hand, business owners can send out mass text messages to their customers alerting them to upcoming or last minute, specials and deals.
“Say a restaurant is having a slow night,” said Katie York, Marketing Communications Manager for Just-In-Time Promotions & Notifications. “They can instantly send out a text message to all their customers around dinner time saying, ‘Hey we have a great promotion going tonight’ or a great special.”
The reach their customer base immediately, York said.
“There’s so much spam out there, no one even checks their e-mail anymore,” she said. “But everyone checks every text, so customers are getting these messages and actually reading them.”
The company was founded in September 2008 by New Hampshire entrepreneurs Ric Pratte, Ed Mitchell and Matt Pierson. Since the company officially launched the service in January, York said they have already registered about 25 companies with the service including restaurants, ski resorts and salons.
There are a couple of different ways to access the service, York said.
For customers, they can go to the Jittergram Web site, see which businesses they want sending them updates and sign up for free. They can also go to the participating businesses and sign up through the business.
As for business owners, they sign up through the Web site and pay a fee each time they send out a text to customers.
“The businesses do have to do some promotion themselves,” York said. “They have to make sure they are getting the word out to customers and getting their wait staff to tell people about it.”
But what the owner gets out of it is worth the price of admission, said John Bowen, owner of Foodees in Milford.
“The amount of customers we’ll be reaching is just unbelievable,” Bowen said. “… In these economic times, business could definitely be better. And this is a way to let people know they should come take a look at us, that we might have what they are looking for.”
Bowen, who only recently joined up with Jittergram, said he plans to use the service to recruit new customers, reward existing customers with a free cheese pizza just for signing up for the service and offer promotions such as free tickets to events.
Greg Stevens, owner of Stella Blu in Nashua, said he started using the system about a week ago as well. And while he hasn’t yet taken it for a test run, he too said he’s hopeful about the results.
“The technology to do this has been out there, and we’ve done some things with e-mail lists,” he said. “But with this, we can go about it in a more formal way and show that we are serious about getting this information out to people.”
York said that though Jittergram is not the first texting service, they hope to be the biggest. The company is already looking at branching out beyond the service and entertainment industries. For instance York said the service could be used by nonprofits to alert people of events, school districts to tell parents of a snow day or event at school and even public safety officials to tell people what to do in a weather emergency.
