November 19, 2024
Looking to bring your rewards program to the next level? The Ibotta Performance Network (IPN) allows retailers and publishers to maximize their offer content and influence shopping behaviors utilizing the leading promotions network in the U.S. With our simple integration process and hands-on consultation, leveling up your current rewards program has never been easier.
What is the IPN?
The IPN provides pay-per-sale performance marketing to more than 2,400 CPG brands, distributing their promotions across a massive network of retailers and publishers who rely on the IPN to power their rewards programs. The IPN provides 4X more digital offers than the competition — more than 900 daily. This allows retailers to not only influence what users buy, but where they buy it.
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Why integrate with the IPN?
The Ibotta Performance Network is pioneering rewards as a service. Retailer rewards programs can play a large role in where consumers shop. In fact, our State of Spend report found that promotions influence where 74% of consumers shop and 72% of consumers shop more frequently at retailers offering rewards programs. That makes access to promotions a key driver for retailers looking to boost their reach.
By integrating the IPN into your already existing rewards platform, you get access to more promotions than any other program.
Benefits of IPN integration
What makes partnering with the IPN so special is the ability to easily integrate our rewards-as-a-service platform into the pre-existing rewards program on your app or website. There’s no need for a complete overhaul, new interface, or changes to the look and feel of what you currently have — just more offers and rewards for your customers, all managed through our simple, yet flexible APIs.
Integrating step by step
Once you’ve chosen to partner with the IPN, you can begin integrating. Overall, the process takes about three months, with our team of experts working side by side with you from start to finish. Let’s walk through what that looks like step by step.
Step 1: Discovery and requirements
The first step is for the Ibotta team to understand your needs and requirements for partnership and for you to understand ours. We’ll take the time to learn what you’re looking for from app or website integration, so we can ensure we have the right solution architecture.
Step 2: Ibotta dedicated environment setup
Ibotta creates a set of dedicated environments that keeps your data and API connection completely separate from the rest of our clients. This ensures we can scale our services to your needs and maintain the highest standards of access controls. As a part of this environment, we create a team of experts specific to facilitating our partnership with you. This team includes:
Strategic partnership manager
This person manages our partnership, answers questions, and acts as a liaison between our business team and yours.
Project manager
This person keeps track of every step in the process and ensures we adhere to timelines.
Technical account manager
This person plays a crucial role pre- and post-launch. They’re the technical point of contact for the life of the partnership and can answer most questions to help solve problems.
Solutions Architect
This will be an expert who can help your engineering and development teams get up to speed with Ibotta APIs. They ensure the integration meets the highest standards following industry best practices and have deep technical understanding of the IPN’s internal systems.
UX Designer
With Ibotta’s 13+ years of experience in the rewards ecosystem, we can provide advice about user experience strategies that work best. That way, we can design your UX around what will yield the best results.
Step 3: Timeline creation
This step in the process is when our team and yours come together to determine specific goals and timelines for the rest of the integration, testing, and deployment processes.
Step 4: Development
Now it’s time to create the integration within your website or app. This is the longest portion of the integration process, lasting up to eight weeks. Throughout the development stage, our solutions architect and team of engineers are by your side to answer your questions and ensure the process goes smoothly.
It begins with authorization, familiarization with our APIs, and ingesting our offers into your system, including understanding and developing how offers will be displayed on your platform. Ibotta also provides an easy-to-use API that tells you exactly which offers will be shown to consumers and when.
Step 5: Testing
Once everything is set on the back end, we can test that it all works properly before fully deploying your new rewards program. This typically happens in phases, beginning with employee-only testing and then opening it up to small groups.
Step 6: Launch and phased deployment
Now it’s time to launch. Rollout is an incremental process that releases your new rewards platform to small parts of the public — 5%, 10%, 20%, and so on — before rolling out to 100% of your consumers.
Step 7: Continued partnership
Once you’ve rolled out to all of your consumers, we continue our partnership through monitoring and improvements to ensure things continue progressing smoothly.