The 160-location premium pizza brand had a high guest score but no way to tell which guests came back. Here's how the team connected its dine-in and digital data, and what changed in the messages that followed.
Mellow Mushroom has been serving pizza for more than 50 years, growing from a hole-in-the-wall in Atlanta to more than 160 restaurants, each designed for its own community. What it did not have was a single view of the guest sitting in any of those dining rooms.
Roughly 65% of the brand's business happens inside four walls, where guests pay with a card and leave without ever touching a digital channel. Everything the marketing team could see was digital behavior, which describes a different guest on a different occasion.
We recently hosted a webinar with Bikky, Mellow Mushroom’s CDP partner, where Ahsan Jiva, executive vice president of strategy and transformation at Mellow Mushroom, walked through how his team closed that gap. He was joined by Bikky co-founder and CEO Abhinav Kapur.
“There was no unified view of who our guest was, what their behaviors were, what their preferences were,” Jiva said. “A lot of other brands find themselves in this position. Unless those folks are transacting 100% digitally, you have no visibility.”
Jiva spent three years looking for a customer data platform.
Mellow Mushroom now activates that data from Bikky through Attentive across email and SMS, and in the first year the program produced nearly $1 million in attributed revenue from automated journeys and over $1 million from email campaigns.
The more interesting part is what the connected data told them first.
A 4.6 guest score with a blind spot behind it
Mellow Mushroom is a dine-in brand first, so the team closely tracks guest satisfaction. The score came back at 4.6 out of 5, which Jiva describes as an A+ against the brand's benchmark set. Every signal said to keep doing what they were doing.
Then they looked at return behavior for the first time with dine-in and digital data side by side.
“We thought the dining experience was so great that people would want to come back more often,” Jiva said. “It was the opposite. We had a lower return rate within the 90 days after someone visited in-store than we did for our digital channels.”
That gap is widening across the category, according to Kapur.
“We used to have this stat that 80% of guests don't come back after the first visit, and that number is creeping up. Depending on the concept, it's 82% to 85%,” Kapur said. “Across almost all age and income cohorts, trips per brand per year have gone from four in 2024 to 2.2 in 2025.”
Two more findings came out of the same exercise:
- Mellow Mushroom grew up in college markets, and store-level demographic data showed which of those markets were softening.
- The brand had also been aiming most of its marketing at a trend-forward 24-to-30 audience while modernizing a 52-year-old brand. Its largest cohort turned out to be families with two or more kids in the household.
“We were focused around one audience that we want to get, and we were kind of leaving our current audience on the side table,” Jiva said.
One question before any campaign goes out
The operational change was small to describe, hard to install.
“The number one thing we ask now before any marketing campaign goes out is, who are we talking to?” Jiva said. “That one simple question illuminates whether the marketing team or the analytics team have done their due diligence. If we're going to have a campaign, we need a segment built in Bikky that we can activate through Attentive.”
That question also inverts the usual instinct about list size.
Instead of sending an email to 300,000 people, I'd rather send it to 50,000 people and have it be highly relevant to what they actually want to see. How many emails do we get a day from thousands of brands, and how many do you actually end up reading?
– Ahsan Jiva, executive vice president of strategy and transformation at Mellow Mushroom
The date night test
February gave them a clean test. Valentine's Day is a reliable sales spike for the brand, and Mellow Mushroom had run date night promotions before with mixed results, mostly because the message went to everybody. A date night offer is irrelevant to a family of four.
This time the team built the segment first: a younger age range, plus a lower check average as a signal the guest comes in with one other person rather than a crowd. They packaged existing menu favorites rather than adding kitchen complexity, then built a control group from the same filters and sent it a general message.
Against that control, the segmented date night campaign delivered:
- 30% higher engagement across email and SMS;
- 2x the email open rate and 2x the email click-through rate;
- 2x the SMS conversion rate;
- 2x the overall conversion rate; and
- 3x “timely” conversions, meaning visits within four days of the send.
The creative moved with the segment. The non-segmented version showed the package by itself, while the segmented version put two people in the shot so the guest receiving it could picture themselves in the scene.
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Guests who had ordered on Super Bowl Sunday any time in the previous three years got a different message and offer than everyone else, and again saw double the conversions. In softening college markets, the team leaned into group dining, packages, and value positioning for those markets alone, which matters for a premium brand that deliberately avoids discounting.
“We believe in the product and the experience so much that we don't want to undermine it by consistently being known as a discount brand,” Jiva said. The family cohort finding became a kids eat free Tuesday program built around parents, with touches like free plush dolls for the kids at the table.
Starting with the plan, then asking the data to support it
Jiva is direct about getting this backwards at first.
“We tried to start with the data and end up with the plan,” he said. “But every organization has years and decades of knowledge about how to execute marketing programs. So we flipped it. We started with the plan and asked how the data is going to support that.”
Date night came from seasonality the team already understood. The data made the audience precise, shaped the package, and built the control group. It did not supply the idea.
Kapur sees that order of operations as the throughline in how Mellow Mushroom runs.
“You're leading with the insights around the guest and what the business needs first, then backing into the data and the tactics,” he said. “It's a very good intuitive understanding of how people in the real world operate.”
Giving each channel a specific job
Email carries continuous engagement: what the brand is up to and what a guest can look forward to. SMS has a narrower job.
“With SMS we think about whether it's going to make someone do something different right now,” Jiva said. “It has to have an offer, or it has to be something that requires action within a limited amount of time.”
Automated journeys are where the two channels work together. In under a year, those journeys have produced nearly $1 million in attributed revenue at a 10% click-through rate and a 32% conversion rate, both well ahead of our food and beverage benchmarks. Email campaigns have generated over $1 million in less than a year at a 3.5% conversion rate, which is high for email for any category.
The first journey they built was a birthday journey, orchestrated across email and SMS. In two months it has driven roughly $40,000 in attributed revenue at a conversion rate above 10%.
“I don't care how old you are, it feels nice when someone wishes you a happy birthday,” Jiva said. “And if you're going to wish me a happy birthday and give me a free pizza on top of that, now you have my attention.”
Attentive pro-tip: Start with the journey that is easiest to defend internally. A birthday journey needs one data point, works in both channels, and gives you a number to bring to the next planning conversation.
Three specialists instead of one platform
Mellow Mushroom came from an all-in-one system, which shapes how Jiva evaluates software now.
“Even though it's claimed as all-in-one, it doesn't necessarily mean all the components talk together,” he said. “Demos can look really great. When you unpack it, does the system actually function the way it's being demoed?”
How the three platforms divide the work
Jiva describes the current setup as three legs of one stool:
- Bikky identifies who to talk to.
- Sparkfly manages the promotions and couponing attached to the message.
- Attentive handles how and where it sends.
All three run open ecosystems, so his team built integrations a single suite would not have allowed.
“When someone says loyalty platform, for me it's not one platform,” Jiva said. “It's using the best of breed in all three of those things combined together.”
Choosing tools the team will actually use
Going from one system to three was a change management project, and Jiva points at team fit as the deciding factor rather than the feature list.
“You have to understand who's actually going to be using it day in and day out, because the way I think is not the same way someone else on the marketing team thinks,” Jiva said.
His test is whether an average tech-savvy marketer can run the platform without the most technical person in the room. It is also why the journey program grew in stages: this much data under one umbrella can overwhelm a lean team, so each addition had to be executable before the next arrived.
What Mellow Mushroom is building next
Mellow Mushroom is expanding its Attentive program to include push as it prepares to launch a loyalty program. Catering is next, and it follows the same backward-from-the-guest pattern. Most catering customers are B2B: medical device reps, law offices, dental practices. The person placing the order cares about looking good to their own colleagues.
So the team is building journeys around that calendar. Quarter-end brings QBRs and team meetings. Dental insurance expires in December, which fills dentist offices from October onward and sends more reps in at the same time. The team is also using check average to spot guests who already order like catering customers.
We have to fit into our guests' lives, not the other way around. We have to find ways to make sure our brand shows up at the right place at the right time.
– Ahsan Jiva, executive vice president of strategy and transformation at Mellow Mushroom
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