May 2026 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Founders Table’s Alison LaGatta

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Alison LaGatta, Senior Manager of CRM & Loyalty at Founders Table. Founders Table Restaurant Group launched in January 2020 to create, acquire, and cultivate innovative and profitable founder-led restaurant companies. We spoke to Alison about her background,

Tell us about yourself.

I’m the Senior Manager of CRM & Loyalty at Founders Table, where I lead lifecycle strategy and focus on driving acquisition, engagement, and retention for Chopt Creative Salad Co. My background started in broader marketing—social, paid media, and multi-brand strategy—but I naturally gravitated toward owned channels because of how measurable and impactful they are.

Over time, I specialized in lifecycle marketing and customer engagement strategy. That led me into loyalty and CRM ownership roles, where I could connect data, messaging, and customer experience end-to-end.

A big part of how I got here was leaning into opportunities to build, whether that was launching our new SMS strategy, scaling automation, or reimagining our loyalty programs.

What is your favorite part of your job?

The combination of strategy and execution—being able to identify a growth opportunity and then actually build the campaigns and journeys that bring it to life. There’s something really rewarding about seeing a well-designed journey improve retention or frequency in a measurable way.

I love working in the intersection between marketing, technology, and operations. Our Founders Table tech team includes really smart, thoughtful people who help bring our marketing campaigns to life through product innovation. And our restaurant teams make customers happy with delicious food every day, so I love getting to support them with sales-driving initiatives.

What company goals are you focused on?

We look at data about our key customer cohorts - new, low frequency, high frequency & lapsed - and identify trends to help guide our bandwidth and budget. We prioritize opportunities that support our brand goals (like introducing new menu items and promoting limited-time offers) AND have high potential revenue impact.

This year, we’ve focused on acquisition and early lifecycle engagement, making sure we’re converting new users into active, retained customers.

We’re also finding ways to improve the in-store customer experience. We recently launched sign-up for our Chopt Rewards program in-store at checkout, where we can capture customers’ phone numbers. We then use SMS to encourage account completion and expose them to our Chopt Rewards program perks, like redeeming points for rewards in-store or joining frequency-based loyalty challenges. This includes many customers who existed outside of our CRM reach before making this in-store + Braze enhancement.

What has your experience working with the Braze team been like?

It’s been really positive. Events like Forge, local Atlanta meet-ups, and digital webinars have been awesome opportunities to connect with fellow Braze power users and learn from real-life use cases. Our Braze team has been collaborative and solution-oriented, always looking to help us solve problems and meet our goals in creative ways.

What campaign are you most excited to work on this year?

Chopt celebrated our 25th anniversary this February, and we used this milestone to launch a multichannel campaign with Chopt Rewards incentives to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

Our offer for existing customers—visit 5X for 2500 bonus points—saw over 39K customers opt-in, one our most highly engaged loyalty challenges yet, even though we were incentivizing higher visit frequency than usual. Our new customer acquisition offer, earning a $5 reward on your first 5 orders,m resulted in +200% year over year registrations.

And we accomplished this through Braze! Our acquisition campaign was powered by Braze webhooks that hit our CDP to activate rewards and challenges for customers as they placed their first 5 orders. We messaged customers as they earned and burned rewards, or to remind them that they had a reward outstanding. And at the conclusion of the campaign, we sent a message that used Liquid to total the customers’ rewards earned to reinforce the program value, plus offer 250 bonus points to keep the positive onboarding experience going.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.