How ReserveBar Connected Email and SMS—and Generated 31% More Email Journey Revenue in Half the Time With Attentive

When separate systems created extra work

By early 2025, ReserveBar’s messaging program spanned three platforms. Triggered email and on-site acquisition ran separately from campaign and transactional email, while Attentive powered SMS. Purchase and messaging context didn’t travel across those systems, making it difficult to coordinate the next message a customer received.

For the CRM team, that setup meant building and reviewing the same campaign twice, then reconciling separate reports.

“Day to day it meant doing everything twice. One campaign brief, built twice, QA’d twice, reported on separately. Nothing carried over.”

— Ashley McGowan, Senior Manager CRM and Customer Loyalty, ReserveBar

The disconnect also reached customers. A shopper subscribed to both channels could receive an abandonment email and a text for the same cart, or a message about a product they had already purchased.

“We were definitely over-messaging customers, and having to reconcile reports by hand, and we still couldn’t answer it with real confidence. The systems were not communicating or operating in tandem.”

— Kate Zaman, CMO & Head of Partnerships, ReserveBar

The team also wanted a clearer view of on-site acquisition performance. Its reporting made it difficult to distinguish customers recognized by the provider from those already arriving through paid and organic channels.

Bringing email to an established SMS partnership

Attentive already powered the SMS program ReserveBar had spent seven years building. The team chose to move triggered email and on-site acquisition from Wunderkind to Attentive so customer behavior could inform messages across both channels. The move needed to prioritize deliverability and accommodate ReserveBar, Minibar Delivery, and a network of partner storefronts.

A phased migration across brands and storefronts

The rollout began with triggered email and on-site acquisition, followed by partner storefronts and campaign email. During the migration, the team uncovered a transactional routing requirement: journeys needed to branch by order and partner, not only by customer. Attentive rebuilt the logic around order numbers and partner PIM numbers, while Liquid templates separated gifting and non-gifting journeys.

• Phase 1—Triggered email and on-site acquisition. IP warm-up began April 1, 2025, ramping to the full email list over 30 days. Welcome and abandonment journeys launched May 1 across ReserveBar and Minibar Delivery, keeping the existing abandoned-cart cadence so shoppers saw no change in message timing. The previous provider was retired as the new journeys went live.
• Phase 2—Extend to partner storefronts. Transactional and triggered journeys extended across ReserveBar’s partner storefront network in June.
• Phase 3—Bring campaign email onto Attentive. ReserveBar moved campaign email to Attentive Email in September, bringing campaign and triggered email together with SMS.

With the new setup, ReserveBar’s on-site recognition, triggered email, and SMS could use the same customer profile in Attentive. The team retained age-gated sign-up units on ReserveBar and Minibar Delivery for subscribers 21 and older. In July, it launched browse and session abandonment journeys across email and SMS using the same triggers.

After ReserveBar changed sign-up display conditions from the second page view to the first, daily SMS opt-ins more than doubled.

More revenue and a growing audience

31% more email journey revenue in six months

From July through December 2025, marketing email journeys on Attentive generated 31% more revenue than ReserveBar’s previous provider delivered across all of 2024.

27% higher monthly email opt-ins

From May through December 2025, ReserveBar averaged 27% more monthly email opt-ins on Attentive than with its previous provider.

45% growth in SMS opt-ins

SMS opt-ins grew 45% year over year, while net subscriber growth moved from nearly break-even to positive. ReserveBar had a larger SMS audience to reach alongside its email subscribers.

9.2x blended ROI across email and SMS

ReserveBar measured 9.2x blended ROI across email and SMS in 2025 YTD, using 1-day view and 1-day click attribution. With both channels on Attentive, reporting that once required manual reconciliation could be viewed in one place.

Connecting ReserveBar’s AI workflows with Attentive MCP

That same push for self-serve visibility extends into ReserveBar’s AI workflows. ReserveBar already uses Claude and Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections across its marketing stack. Attentive MCP now powers automated weekly reporting.

Every Monday morning, automated reports pull billable spend plus all journey and campaign revenue from Attentive into Ashley McGowan’s weekly KPI tracker. McGowan, Senior Manager CRM and Customer Loyalty, also uses MCP to access customer order data and check journeys.

Reporting is one part of ReserveBar’s broader use of AI. The team uses Claude Code to pull email briefs and execution tasks from Asana, reference Figma files, and build HTML for marketing emails. Images are hosted on Cloudflare. The team still pastes the finished email into Attentive before adding audience segments and send details. Replacing that final handoff with a direct MCP connection remains a goal.

ReserveBar also exports email and segment information into Claude for audience recommendations, then reviews and edits those recommendations before sending. The team uses Google Analytics data in Claude for additional reporting context. Separately, it has connected its website CMS to Claude through MCP to update images, create landing pages, and revise SEO copy.

The same audience discipline informs ReserveBar’s partnership work. The team organizes email audiences by spirit category and engagement tier, then widens eligibility windows when a partner needs more reach. Audience scale and engagement history inform campaign planning and partner proposals.

What ReserveBar is exploring next with Attentive MCP

With weekly reporting already running, ReserveBar is exploring additional MCP workflows. The team has tested campaign creation in Attentive through MCP, but that beta workflow still needs training and refinement.

Its next priorities include:

• Direct email creation: Move from brief and design to an email in Attentive through a direct MCP connection, replacing the final copy-and-paste handoff.
• Reporting refinements: Build on automated weekly reporting with monthly KPI views, reports that exclude transactional sends, and performance breakdowns by device type.
• Monitoring and QA: Expand current journey checks with alerts for journeys that haven’t sent or emails missing their paired SMS, along with daily revenue-attribution checks.
• Journey branching: Test journey branching through MCP as part of the Minibar Delivery consolidation.
• Campaign management: Use campaign calendar data to create, schedule, update, pause, and resume campaigns.

Across these workflows, ReserveBar continues to review AI-generated recommendations and retain control over campaign decisions.