This case study is part of IFA’s ongoing effort to showcase how franchisors are identifying challenges, seizing opportunities, and building scalable solutions that benefit franchisees, customers, and the communities they serve.

We interviewed Yosra Salen, Vice President of Digital Marketing for Potbelly Sandwich Works, about how the brand built an interconnected digital and loyalty ecosystem to make ordering faster, rewards more intuitive, and every guest interaction more relevant.

What was the challenge or opportunity your innovation addressed?

Salen joined Potbelly about two and a half years ago with a mandate to build a three-year vision for the brand’s digital transformation. As a brand, Potbelly was seeing its digital and loyalty channels grow quickly — digital now accounts for north of 40 percent of sales, and loyalty members are the brand’s most valuable customers, a pattern that holds especially true under economic pressure, when loyal guests remain the most persistent and committed to visiting.

That growth created the opportunity: design an interconnected digital and loyalty ecosystem, built on a frictionless and delightful user experience, and layer personalization on top of it to drive incremental visits and spend.

The vision was never meant to be realized in a single year. Year one was foundational; year two, where the brand is now, is about scaling the tools and platforms already built; year three will focus on getting smarter and more sophisticated with personalization.

What did your brand do — what was the project or initiative?

The initiative had two parts. The first was a complete rebuild of the digital experience across app and web — an end-to-end redesign meant to make ordering faster, more reliable, more intuitive, and, crucially, scalable enough to support personalization down the road. The second was a redesign of the brand’s marketing technology stack, starting with the data layer. Before Potbelly could deliver features that actually moved the needle, Salen wanted the right data in place to measure what was working. The team’s guiding principle was to center innovation on core customer needs rather than the appeal of a flashy feature — a trap she says a lot of digital marketers fall into.

That customer-first lens shaped a long list of specific fixes. Customers used to lose their sandwich customizations when switching sizes; now those choices carry over automatically. Reward redemption became more visual and intuitive, built directly into the menu-browsing experience and then brought into the cart itself. When Potbelly noticed guests were getting confused by qualifiers — not hitting a spend minimum, or missing the right product — the team engineered a guided flow that walks the customer to what they need to add, turning error messages into helpful, actionable prompts. Underlying all of it was a simple design principle: keep each screen single-minded, so customers focus on one task at a time instead of juggling several at once.

How were franchisees and the franchisor involved?

Potbelly made a point of bringing franchisees and operators into the process early — while the project was still in the vision stage. That meant sharing the year’s roadmap, the key focus areas, and the benefits of each initiative well before rollout.

That framing mattered. Rather than pitching franchisees on new mechanics for their own sake, Salen’s team connected each enhancement back to guest experience first and franchisee benefit second — building buy-in for a multi-year transformation before asking operators to adopt any of it.

What were the results?

The full rollout is still relatively new, but early results point to broad improvement across the guest journey. The redesigned ordering experience lifted overall conversion by 12 percent — beating Potbelly’s internal goal — with Add to Cart conversion up 24 percent, product-customization-to-purchase conversion up 12 percent, and checkout completion reaching 95 percent.

On the loyalty side, redemptions on core program rewards climbed as much as 138 percent, and guests who redeemed rewards spent 14 percent more on those transactions. The in-cart guided flow built to walk customers through qualifiers also cut user-error complaints by more than 70 percent on the brand’s busiest promotion days.

The shift from scheduled marketing campaigns to automated, behavior-based customer journeys reduced cart abandonment by 53 percent and produced a threefold increase in browse-to-order conversion, while new personalized merchandising drove upsell attachment on roughly 24 percent of all digital orders. Altogether, Salen says the transformation generated measurable business value that exceeded Potbelly’s goal by 19 percent.

Anything you’d do differently if you could?

Looking back, Salen says she would go in with a clearer understanding that a transformation like this is never “once and done” — it’s an ongoing effort that requires continuously assessing results and making improvements. Knowing that up front, she says she would have structured the work in more deliberate phases from the start, so the team could measure results incrementally, gather feedback, and use it to plan the next stage, rather than treating each release as a finished initiative.

This case study is part of the International Franchise Association’s ongoing effort to showcase how franchisors are identifying challenges, seizing opportunities, and building scalable solutions that benefit franchisees, customers, and the communities they serve.