Recipe: Reactivating users during and after COVID-19 with Regions

The severity of COVID-19 has varied widely across countries, states, and cities, and returning society to normal will be a phased process.

When businesses start to reopen, they face an unprecedented three-part challenge:

• Rapidly changing systems to handle surges of mobile users and transactions
• Complying with regulations that vary for each location
• Quickly reopening and closing locations as the situation changes

Radar can help solve for all three as locations shift between being fully open, pickup-only, or closed.

We previously discussed how Radar can handle the first challenge by rapidly building out a curbside pickup solution.

In this recipe, we go further and explain how you can use Regions to reactivate and engage users based on region.

Messaging users based on region

Radar comes with out-of-the-box admin boundaries for countries, states, DMAs (media markets), and postal codes, making it easy to segment users based on region.

For example, when New York City reopens, we can build a segment of NYC residents:

Segments can be exported from Radar or sent as user attributes to integrations like Braze or Airship to target push notifications.

Unlocking app features based on region

Radar also makes it easy for developers to unlock features based on location.

For example, a QSR app could unlock curbside pickup and show a banner only for users in Florida and Texas. On iOS:

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
  if user?.state?.code == "FL" || user?.state?.code == "TX" {
    // unlock curbside pickup and show banner
  }
}

If you are using geofences to represent stores, you can attach metadata to a geofence indicating whether a store is open, pickup-only, or closed.

Instead of checking state, you could call the geofence search API to check whether a nearby store is open:

Radar.searchGeofences(
  radius: 10000, // meters
  tags: ["store"],
  limit: 10
) { (status, location, geofences) in
  geofences?.forEach { (geofence) in
    if geofence.metadata["status"] == "pickup-only" {
      // unlock curbside pickup and show banner
    }
  }
}

Radar delivers the location features you need to reactivate users as businesses start to reopen, and the flexibility to continue to engage users after the pandemic is behind us.

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