Panera Bread Leverages Braze to Drive Retention and Growth During Historic Menu Transformation

Panera Bread is a leading fast casual restaurant known for its delicious and high-quality soups, salads, sandwiches, and baked goods. With over 2,200 locations across North America, Panera has built its reputation on providing guests with crave-worthy, wholesome food and a welcoming cafe experience. With a goal to serve food people feel good about eating in a warm and welcoming environment, Panera continues to innovate and evolve to meet changing guest needs.

Customer engagement is central to Panera’s strategy for building lasting relationships and enhancing guest satisfaction. Panera aims to deliver seamless, relevant experiences at every touchpoint, whether it’s in their cafés or across digital channels. These efforts drive loyalty, encourage repeat visits, and ensure Panera stays top-of-mind for both new and returning guests, even during transformative periods with major menu changes.

Driving Retention and Loyalty Through Personalization

In April 2024, Panera Bread launched the largest menu transformation in its history, refocusing on innovating and enhancing the core Panera items guests love the most: Soups, salads, sandwiches and mac & cheese. Filled with more than 20 menu updates, including 9 new items, this change required a strategic, customer-focused approach to maintain guest loyalty, re-engage lapsed customers, and encourage excitement around the new menu.

Campaign Goals

• Retain at-risk guests by offering personalized recommendations and incentives to keep them engaged.
• Grow loyalty by rewarding and engaging Panera’s most devoted customers.
• Reactivate lapsed customers by promoting new menu items tailored to their preferences.

Key Components of the Strategy

• Dynamic personalization: Panera created over 4,000 unique combinations of personalized offers and product recommendations, delivered across email, app, and web.
• Seamless cross-channel messaging: Leveraged Braze Canvas to orchestrate a journey complete with email, push notifications, in-app messages, and Braze Content Cards™ for a consistent guest experience.
• Surprise and delight: Created excitement through pre-launch voting campaigns and surprise rewards tied to guest preferences, driving anticipation and loyalty.

Guiding Guests Through Change with Dynamic, Data-Driven Campaigns

To effectively implement their cross-channel campaign, Panera Bread developed a strategic plan to leverage advanced data analysis with dynamic personalization to reach customers with relevant, meaningful content. This meticulous approach allowed Panera to deliver tailored messaging that resonated with individual guests, ensuring a seamless transition during the menu transformation. Here’s how they executed the campaign:

1. Segmenting the Audience: Using AI-powered decisioning, Panera identified guests who may lapse as a result of the menu changes.

2. Customizing In-App Content: Panera launched over 40 tailored Content Cards, showcasing new menu items based on guest behavior or send time. Targeted suggestions included:

• Sandwich lovers: New sandwich products.
• Frequent drink buyers: Invitations to join the Unlimited Sip Club.
• Morning guests: Breakfast promos using dayparting.

The Braze platform’s turnkey setup enabled Panera to quickly create and test a “waterfall” of in-app messaging, personalized emails, and push campaigns, ensuring a smooth campaign launch.

3. Building Pre-Launch Engagement: In the lead up to the menu launch, MyPanera members were invited to vote for their most-anticipated new item. The campaign collected over 400,000 votes, with the Toasted Italiano sandwich emerging as the favorite. The data from this initiative was then used to inform personalized reward offers for participants and nonparticipants, alike, all delivered seamlessly via Braze Canvas.

4. Reactivating Lapsed Guests: Panera identified guests who browsed new menu categories but abandoned their session without making a purchase. Using Custom Events integrated with Braze, Panera triggered follow-up emails and push notifications with rich offers to guests who opted in, encouraging these guests to try the new items and reducing the risk of churn.

By combining AI-driven insights and the power of the Braze platform, Panera delivered a campaign that balanced efficiency with guest engagement, fostering loyalty and excitement during a transformative moment for the brand.

Higher Retention, Engagement, and Operational Efficiency

By leveraging Braze, Panera achieved a 5% retention lift among at-risk guests, 2X loyalty offer redemptions, and 2X purchase conversion rates from abandoned order follow-ups. The campaign delivered millions of personalized messages, fostering engagement and loyalty during a critical brand transformation. Additionally, Panera saved over 50 hours of manual work through automated content creation and streamlined campaign management.

“Using AI, we can streamline operations, better personalize our messaging, and get deeper customer insights, allowing us to efficiently execute complex campaigns while focusing on what truly matters—building lasting relationships with our guests.”

Catherine Thacker

VP of Customer Engagement, Panera

Key Takeaways

1. Engage customers before a big change: Pre-launch engagement campaigns, like Panera’s voting initiative, generated excitement and goodwill ahead of the menu transformation.
2. Dynamic personalization drives loyalty: Tailored messaging—powered by the Braze platform—helps retain at-risk customers and reactivate lapsed guests effectively.
3. Cross-channel strategies deliver impact: Seamless integration of email, app, and push messaging ensures customers receive relevant content wherever they engage.
4. Efficiency enables innovation: The Braze platform allowed Panera to execute a complex campaign quickly, reducing manual work and enabling focus on strategic goals.

FEATURED TOPICS