Ibotta increases open rates by 30% with Radar

With Radar, Ibotta is able to send timely push notifications based on user location, increasing open rates by 30% and directly impacting engagement, conversions, and revenue.

The company

Ibotta delivers the ultimate shopping experience, rewarding users with cash back on everything they buy in-store or online. The company is transforming the way people shop, and is on a mission to make every purchase rewarding.

With the recent launch of Pay with Ibotta, the company is becoming increasingly payments-focused. The feature allows shoppers to pay for their entire purchase through the Ibotta app and instantly earn cash back at over 50 retailers and restaurants. In the coming year, Ibotta plans to further promote this feature and encourage more people to pay with the app.

The challenge

The Ibotta Lifecycle Communications team knew that better user experiences required highly-personalized content sent to the right shopper at the right time and place. They needed a full-stack solution that would allow them to understand when and where their customers were most engaged in the real world. This meant being able to collect and store location data, make sense of it, and send it downstream through their tech stack to make it actionable.

Ibotta first attempted to accomplish this by building an internal solution for geofencing and location-triggered campaigns. Overall, the team found there was a negative impact on the user experience because it wasn’t optimized for battery efficiency and accuracy, and notifications weren't sending in a timely manner.

The solution

For the engineering team at Ibotta, it was important to put an end to the guessing game of how core location services worked. They had to solve cross-platform pain points and seamlessly send location data to their marketing automation stack. The final straw was iOS 12. The team reached a breaking point. They were done paying maintenance costs for every OS update and began searching for a better way.

Ibotta ultimately decided to partner with Radar for their location context needs. Aside from Radar’s enterprise-level offering and commitment to privacy, Ibotta appreciated the openness to communication, collaboration, and the one-on-one support. With Radar, the Ibotta team was able to prove the value of accurate location data and demonstrate how easy it is to integrate Radar’s developer-friendly SDK.

Integrating the Radar SDK was quick and easy and has proven to be a robust and reliable location solution for our iOS and Android apps. The Radar team was very helpful throughout the integration and continues to be a very valuable asset to our teams as we refine our location tracking features.

— Scott Lemke, Distinguished Engineer

With Radar’s full-stack toolkit, Ibotta could finally power location-triggered communications that gave them a competitive advantage when engaging with shoppers and retail partners.

For example, Ibotta uses Places to determine when a shopper is near a retailer that supports the Pay with Ibotta feature. Then, they send a targeted push through our Braze integration to encourage the shopper to pay with the app. They also use Insights to determine when a shopper is traveling to trigger timely, relevant email campaigns.

The results

Radar has elevated many of our campaigns and allowed us to create entirely new programming that targets users at the point of purchase and during other critical moments. With these very personalized messages, we’ve been able to positively impact our conversion rates and provide more engaging content.

— Cassie Fernandez, Associate Manager, Marketing Automation

Compared to Ibotta's scheduled, non-contextual push notifications, location-triggered notifications increased open rates 10x. Location-based push was clearly highly effective, so the team decided to double down on campaigns powered by Radar. In a four week period, Ibotta sent over 8 million location-based push notifications, and since integrating Radar, open rates have increased by over 30%. In addition, they saw a 1% increase in conversions, a 1% increase in active users, and a 1.5% increase in app sessions. At that scale, Ibotta has seen a significant uptick in annualized gross profit that directly impacts their bottom line.

Using Radar, marketing teams at Ibotta are now able to deliver timely and contextually-aware experiences without a significant drain on engineering resources. They can now launch location-based campaigns, add value to their loyalty integrations, and increase adoption of new products. Going forward, the Ibotta team is exploring how they can continue to use Radar to power even more location-aware product experiences.

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