How GNC Mexico uses Raidar.io and Customer.io to drive in-store sales 

90% of GNC Mexico's revenue comes from their 500+ physical stores, but their marketing is 100% digital, primarily email-based. When they sent an abandoned cart reminder, customers would often complete the purchase in a store, not online. The conversion was real, and the revenue was real, but from a marketing perspective, it was invisible.

They measured success through high-level engagement metrics, leaving 90%+ of offline and cross-channel purchasing behavior unaccounted for.

The core challenge wasn't a lack of data—vital information existed within the loyalty platform, POS, and legacy CRM systems—but rather the lack of a unified architecture. This fragmentation made it increasingly difficult to process and act on data in a way that clearly identified which specific touchpoints were driving purchases.

GNC needed three things: infrastructure, activation, and strategic execution.

Most companies try to build this in-house. They hire data engineers to wrangle their CDP, lifecycle marketers to run campaigns, and strategists to figure out what to do with all that data. It's expensive, time-consuming, and actioning feels like constantly playing catch-up.

GNC took a different approach. They partnered with RAIDAR, which handles both the infrastructure complexity and the ongoing strategy, and Customer.io, which provides the activation platform that makes it all work.

"We see ourselves as an extension of GNC's team," says Marcelo Martinez, Founder & CEO at RAIDAR. "We're their lifecycle marketing department and their data engineering team rolled into one."

RAIDAR operates differently than most consultants or implementation partners. They built a composable CDP on a Snowflake foundation first, handling all the infrastructure complexity. Then they selected Customer.io as the activation platform after extensive benchmarking. But they didn't just implement and leave. RAIDAR manages ongoing optimization and strategy, which means GNC can focus on business outcomes while RAIDAR handles the technical complexity.

The partnership works because what RAIDAR builds in Snowflake, Customer.io can activate immediately. What Customer.io captures about customer behavior, RAIDAR feeds back into analytics. Neither platform constrains the other.

RAIDAR processes millions of rows in Snowflake and syncs to Customer.io every few hours. Custom attributes flow from Snowflake to Customer.io. Engagement data flows from Customer.io back to Snowflake, creating a closed loop. They use Customer.io's events feature creatively, embedding JSONs so the same campaign delivers different content, timing, and products to each customer.

"We have a very capable data engineering team and a very capable platform that allows us to do that whenever we need it," says Ramiro Gonzalez, Head of Strategy at RAIDAR.

GNC Mexico has a unique advantage through their loyalty program. They maintain a best in class "link ticket" rate, which means nearly every purchase, whether online or in-store, is connected to a specific customer. The industry average is 30-50%. The data was there, and RAIDAR and Customer.io made it actionable.

Here's how it works now: Physical purchases are fed back into Customer.io as conversion events. The marketing team sees attribution without requiring help from the data team. Then, email campaigns are optimized based on actual revenue, not just clicks and opens.

Here's what that looks like in practice: A customer adds multivitamins to their online cart but doesn't complete the purchase. A few hours later, a multi-step abandoned cart automation triggers, and the customer receives an email. Then the customer walks into a physical store and purchases the same product. GNC now tracks and attributes all of it.

This has allowed GNC to measure 10x more conversion events directly linked to marketing campaigns, providing clear visibility into how digital engagement translates into offline revenue. Additionally, it has enabled the team to identify critical pre-purchase behaviors, including product discovery, high-intent searches, and price comparison activity leading up to purchase.

Other personalized campaigns that highlight the online/offline attribution include:

• Automated replenishment journeys, achieving 4–5% conversion rates, triggered based on each customer’s previous purchases and the expected repurchase cycle of specific products.
• Personalized seasonal campaigns, where personalization goes beyond product recommendations to include dynamic subject lines, messaging, and email structure, depending on the customer’s fitness goals or product preferences, increasing engagement and interaction.
• All of this is powered by an extended data infrastructure that enables advanced customer understanding and real-time activation across channels.

"We haven't met a single large retailer in Mexico that is actually capable of having this information right on their screen for the marketing person doing the campaigns, without requiring any participation from the data team," Gonzalez says.

This three-way partnership works because each player focuses on what they do best. RAIDAR handles infrastructure complexity and ongoing strategy. Customer.io provides a reliable, flexible activation platform. GNC gets sophisticated lifecycle marketing without building a massive internal team.

"GNC is our crown jewel because their tech stack is actually very straight forward," Martinez says. "A POS that works, a mature loyalty program, e-commerce catalog enhanced by an omnichannel order management system, and a reliable payment infrastructure. Everything else is done with RAIDAR's CDP and Customer.io. You don't need a modern, complicated tech stack. You need the right partners working together."

Want to see how RAIDAR and Customer.io can work together for your business? Learn more about RAIDAR or book a demo of Customer.io here.