The customer data platform built exclusively for multi-unit restaurants.
Founded in Atlanta in 1974, Mellow Mushroom is premium pizza brand known for its locally-designed restaurants, Southern-inspired menu, and loyal following of sports fans and families alike.
Over the past few years, Mellow Mushroom has been focused on gaining a better understanding of their guests. We sat down with Ahsan Jiva, EVP of Strategy and Transformation at Mellow Mushroom, to hear how those insights are informing their approach to guest engagement.
Mellow Mushroom's guest satisfaction scores were averaging 4.6 out of 5 — strong by any measure. The team believed that dine-in was their strongest channel for guest retention, but when they looked at the behavioral data, dine-in guests were actually returning at a lower rate than digital guests.
Satisfaction scores in isolation only tell part of the story. They capture how a guest felt after a visit, but not whether they came back, how often, or how your marketing, menu, and operations impacted their behavior. Behavioral data adds another layer of nuance. Without it, you're forced to guess at where to focus or what to change.
A similar insight emerged on the marketing side. Mellow Mushroom had been building campaigns catered to 24-30 year-old audience, the demographic that they saw as their core guest. But once they partnered with Bikky and had real demographic data to dig into, they found something different: their biggest guest cohort was actually families with two or more kids, a meaningfully different audience with different occasions, preferences, and reasons for visiting.
In both cases, the story the data told was different from the one the team assumed. At 160-plus locations, getting an accurate picture of who's actually walking through the door across every market is difficult without the right data. Having a clearer view of their guests gave Mellow Mushroom a stronger foundation for how they think about their audience and approach their marketing.
At Mellow Mushroom, campaign ideas are driven by the team's creativity and knowledge of their brand and guests. Guest data adds a layer of precision on top, helping refine who they're talking to and make sure the message lands with them.
"The number one thing that we ask for now before any marketing campaign goes out is — who are we talking to?" Ahsan said. "And that one simple question really illuminates whether the marketing team or the analytics team have done their due diligence."
Mellow’s date night campaign is a good example. Knowing Valentine’s day was a strong occasion for the brand, the team tested a date night offer to see if they could engage that audience more often. With Bikky, they built a segment most likely to engage with a date night offer, based on attributes like age and average check. Then they built creative featuring people who matched that audience demographically, and tested it against a broader control group. The result was 30% higher engagement and 2x the conversion rate compared to the broader send.
For Mellow, pairing their team's instincts and creative ideas with data is what helped them go from broad campaigns and offers to tailored marketing that guests really respond to.
When Mellow Mushroom started building out automated journeys, they made a deliberate decision to start simple. Rather than launching with complex behavioral triggers, they began with a simple moment: birthdays.
"What better way to create a reason to reach out to guests than celebrating someone's birthday?" Ahsan said. "I don't care how old you are, it does feel nice when someone wishes you a happy birthday. And if you're gonna wish me a happy birthday and give me a free pizza on top of that, well, now you got my attention."
Their birthday journey is orchestrated across both email and SMS. It has been live for less than two months and has already generated roughly $40,000 in attributed revenue, with a 10% click-through rate and 32% conversion rate, proving that the most obvious touchpoints can sometimes be the most effective ones.
Once they had established the basics, the team layered on from there — adding more campaigns, more segments, and more complexity as they built confidence in the approach. "It seems obvious when you do it, but a lot of times you forget about the obvious things when you try to get into the more complex behavior-driven journeys," Ahsan said. "We said, let's start with the basic stuff and make sure that works correctly."
Like most restaurant brands, Mellow Mushroom's marketing team is lean. Building toward personalization at scale required a tech stack that was practical enough for the whole team to use — not just the most technically sophisticated members.
Ahsan was deliberate about that change. Rather than overhauling everything at once, he focused on making sure the platforms and processes worked for the people actually executing day to day. "You have to understand who's actually going to be using it day in and day out," he said. "The way I think is not the same way that someone else on the marketing team thinks. You want to make sure it's easy enough to execute and you build incrementally."
Ahsan describes their approach as best-of-breed: Bikky for understanding the guest, Attentive for email and SMS execution, and Sparkfly for promotions. Together, the three platforms give the team the ability to build precise segments in Bikky and activate them through Attentive, without needing a large engineering team to keep things running.
The payoff has been measurable. Automated journeys across email and SMS have generated just under a million dollars in attributed revenue in less than a year, with a 10% click-through rate and 32% conversion rate — well above Attentive's benchmarks for food and beverage brands. For Mellow, the results reflect a broader shift in how they think about marketing as they move away from reaching as many people as possible, and toward reaching the right people with something worth engaging with.
"I'd rather send an email to 50,000 people that's highly relevant to what they actually want to see than send to 300,000 people," Ahsan said. "Because think about our own perspectives — how many emails do we get a day from thousands of brands? If you're not going to catch me with something that's really highly relevant to what my behaviors are, it just feels like a marketing blast I'm going to ignore."
Mellow Mushroom's approach to guest data and personalization is still evolving. But the foundation they've built, with a clearer picture of who their guests actually are, a more intentional approach to campaign planning, and a tech stack their team feels confident using, has already changed how they operate across marketing, channel strategy, and guest relationships.
As Ahsan put it: "We have to fit into our guests' lives, not the other way around."
The customer data platform built exclusively for multi-unit restaurants.