How Culver’s Served Up a 35% Increase in Digital Orders

Insight/Action/Outcome: Lacking visibility into guest behavior, Culver’s previously made digital decisions based on instinct. By adopting the full Amplitude stack to track, test, and guide behavior in real time, the company achieved a 35% year-over-year increase in digital orders and transitioned to a high-precision, data-driven strategy.

There’s a special kind of comfort at Culver’s. The sizzle of a ButterBurger hitting the grill, a spoonful of fresh frozen custard, and the genuine smile from our True Blue Crew have all contributed to establishing roots as a storied family brand.

As Senior Director of Digital Experience, I know that honoring our heritage doesn’t mean standing still. We’ve grown to more than 1,050 locations across 26 states, and evolution means making life more convenient for our guests. That mindset sparked our digital transformation, eventually leading to a 35% surge in year-over-year orders.

Growing a storied brand in a digital world

While our core business was thriving, our digital presence was lagging. As we began expanding our digital touchpoints with a new website, apps, and a loyalty program, we realized we didn’t have a mechanism in place to capture customer details.

We knew how many ButterBurgers we were selling, but we also knew that wasn’t enough. We needed a data-driven strategy to better understand and serve our guests.

A few details told us we were on the right track. Sales were up and traffic was fine, but the guest experience was a black box. With Google Analytics, we couldn’t see where guests were getting stuck, why certain experiences weren’t working, and where guests dropped off entirely. Without that context, we often overreacted with one-size-fits-all fixes that potentially missed the mark for user segments important to our business.

We needed to build a central nervous system for our digital experiences—something that could explain the “why” behind guest behavior and help us modernize without losing the soul of the brand. Our search led us to Amplitude.

Handcrafting a data-driven guest experience

Having worked with major enterprise platforms from Adobe to Google, I knew we needed a single system rather than a stitched-together stack. Several former colleagues recommended Amplitude, and we immediately recognized its value.

Amplitude offered a multi-layered platform where our data could live in one place and we could build audiences, trigger surveys, and guide guests in real time. Rather than assembling multiple tools, we suddenly had a complete suite of solutions to solve specific business problems.

Analytics is our foundation. We use it to track conversion funnels and leading indicators, such as signed-in user frequency, across our mobile apps and website. It gives us instant visibility into guest behavior, like where they hesitate, drop off, or move forward. This information tells us whether we’re on the right track. 

One of the best examples was our Account Center redesign. We relied heavily on Analytics to determine which features engaged users most, so we didn’t accidentally remove or bury important functionality.

Feature Experimentation and feature flags let us release updates safely. For the new website and major app features, we used feature flags to gradually roll them out and test with specific groups before committing to broad go-lives. Doing so decreases the risk of making wrong decisions and allows us to learn quickly.

Guides and Surveys were gamechangers during our loyalty program launch. Loyalty programs have so many moving parts, and early signals showed guests were struggling to sign up and participate. We used Guides and Surveys to create prompts that guided guests through exactly what to do, and display them at the right moment based on behavior. We also launched an in-app survey at checkout to gather immediate feedback about the digital experience—something we’d never had before.

With Audiences, we create behavioral cohorts and build groups based on what guests do, not just who they are. We syndicate those audiences to downstream platforms for more personalized engagement, such as targeted messaging, special offers, and more. To keep our digital ordering experience as dependable as our restaurants, we are using Amplitude’s automated anomaly detection and alerting to surface behavioral outliers, helping us quickly resolve guest friction and proactively identify growth opportunities.

While we are still early in our AI maturity, we see it as a critical force multiplier for our lean team. As a franchisor with a growing digital business, we don’t always have the resources to manually monitor every data point. Amplitude’s capabilities act as an extension of our team, identifying anomalies and surfacing why guest behaviors are changing before we even know where to look. By having AI passively scout for opportunities and measure impact, we can move faster from insight to action, scaling our digital presence without growing our headcount exponentially.

Fresh insights drive 35% order growth

Amplitude provided transparency into our online guest experience, and these insights now inform every part of our digital strategy.

In our first year using Amplitude, our “buy online, pick up in store” sales channel grew 35%, outpacing traditional channels like drive-thru, which continue to grow at a more modest, industry standard rate. The reason is simple: we’re finally giving guests the convenience they’ve been asking for.

Even better, we can repeat those outcomes with precision. Teams now set their KPIs almost exclusively around Amplitude events and properties, knowing all their work ladders up to the higher-level figures.

Amplitude offers data-driven clarity that has changed how we make decisions. We make better bets because they’re grounded in real data and backed by confidence that makes tough decisions much easier to stand behind.

A dependable recipe for future growth

Amplitude has exceeded our expectations. We continue to build a loop where Amplitude identifies opportunities, flags behaviors we want to change, suggests where to intervene, and measures impact. We can predict, act, and validate everything within a single platform.

With data deeply integrated into our digital product and software development lifecycle, we’ve moved away from making instinctive calls and have a repeatable recipe for success. By operating this way, we’re keeping Culver’s—a brand people love and trust—as fresh and reliable as the food that made us famous.