Ibotta powers contextual messaging with Radar

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 use of Gift cards, shoppers can pay for their entire purchase through the Ibotta app and instantly earn cash back at over 2,000 retailers and restaurants.

The problem

The Ibotta Lifecycle Communications team knew that better user experiences required highly-personalized offers delivered 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 first-party 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. This initial attempt was unsuccessful. The in-house geofencing solution wasn’t optimized for battery efficiency and accuracy, and notifications weren't sent in a timely manner.

The solution

Due to the fact that maintaining an in-house location infrastructure was expensive and time consuming, Ibotta decided to partner with Radar for their location needs. Aside from Radar’s enterprise-level offering and commitment to privacy, Ibotta appreciated Radar’s collaborative approach and options for one-on-one support. With Radar, the Ibotta team was able to prove the value of accurate location data to drive customer engagement through location-aware experiences.

With Radar’s full-stack toolkit, Ibotta could finally power location-based messaging 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 Radar’s Braze platform integration to encourage the shopper to pay with the app.

The results

By using Radar, Ibotta was able to power location-based messaging, compared to previous scheduled, non-contextual messaging. Location-based messaging 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 10x. As a result, 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 location-aware messages 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 experiences.