Shift Into High Gear: How Zwift Reaches 100% of Users, 85% Faster

Zwift is the world’s #1 indoor cycling app, a subscription-based fitness platform that brings the outdoor cycling, running, and triathlon experience indoors. By gamifying training, Zwift transforms a solitary workout into a social, global experience where real-world effort powers an in-game avatar.

The company’s customer lifecycle efforts are led by Rachel Kamel, Director of CRM, who oversees the strategy for connecting with millions of “Zwifters” throughout their unique fitness journeys. Under her leadership, Zwift has evolved from a single-channel program into a sophisticated, cross-channel system designed to fulfill the brand’s core mission: to get more people, more active, more often.

Reach Constraints and Siloed Data

When Rachel joined Zwift, their CRM program relied entirely on email, and less than 50% of active Zwifters were opted in to receive promotional messages. That meant half the active user base was unreachable. Beyond reach, email alone couldn’t support every use case. For example, Zwift’s ambassador athletes might decide on short notice to host a celebration ride after a race win, and they needed a way to quickly communicate these events across their user base. With email production timelines and resource constraints, the team simply couldn’t turn those around fast enough. 

Further complicating execution was the lack of real-time data activation. Legacy systems couldn’t adapt to live customer behavior, meaning messaging often missed the “moment of intent” because data remained trapped in silos. Data ingestion was a massive hurdle; getting any piece of user information into Iterable required opening tickets and waiting for engineering and data teams to manually build pipelines or custom integrations.

Architecting a Cross-Channel Adaptive CRM System

Zwift moved beyond static email outreach to build a unified data foundation powered by real-time orchestration. Here is how they bridged the reach gap to engage 100% of their active users through intelligent, cross-channel conversations.

1. Unlocking and activating data with Smart Ingest

By using Smart Ingest to connect their data warehouse (Databricks) directly to Itearble, Zwift bypassed the traditional engineering bottleneck to activate real-time behavioral data, such as a user hitting their 100th mile or upgrading a subscription. This allows them to strategically trigger 1:1 personalized moments, ensuring they engage riders exactly when their motivation is highest. 

2. Increasing reach by 28% by adding Push and In-App

With a unified data foundation, Zwift expanded into Push Notifications and In-App Messaging to capture users unreachable via email.

• Push for Velocity: Used for time-sensitive “Ambassador Rides,” Push allowed the team to turn around campaigns in less than 24 hours with a one-click CTA that adds rides directly to a user’s schedule.
• In-App for Guidance: Strategic pop-ups now guide new users through device pairing and their first ride, ensuring they hit their “Aha! moment” before they disengage.

Rachel noted, “We are 85% faster executing on campaigns like ambassador rides because a push notification needs less creative and fewer resources to create than an email, and now we are able to scale the number of messages we can do. We weren’t even able to support those ambassador rides before because email was just too heavy a lift for that kind of timeline. We’ve also seen a 2x increase in event registrations overnight with our first major push message, proving that push allowed us to send the right message at the right time on the right channel.”

Adding push notifications and in-app messages through the Zwift companion app extended reach to roughly 78% of active users, but a gap remained: users who never opened the companion app at all.

3. Reaching 100% of active users by adding Embedded Messaging

The remaining 22% reach gap closed when Zwift implemented Iterable’s Embedded Messaging, both in the companion app via Iterable’s SDK and directly in the game itself through a custom server-to-server integration. Rachel said, “Embedded Messaging expanded our reach to 100% of active Zwifters. Now, if we want to say something on the game’s home screen, we can add a poster card that links to different parts of the game to help the user ride immediately. Historically, all of this would have been manually managed and coded, involving up to 10 people per update, with lead times of 8 to 12 weeks because localization was tied to game releases. Now we are using 60% fewer resources.” 

4. Adapting to individual user preferences with AI

With every active user now reachable across at least one channel, Zwift can orchestrate messaging that adapts to individual behavior. Rachel has also begun using Iterable’s Nova Decisioning, including Send Time Decisioning. As Rachel put it, “Every customer can have different preferences on which channels they engage with and what time they engage with them. We can be so individually personalized and have one-to-one relationships with our customers with tools like this.”

Architecting the Future of Fitness Engagement

With the power to unlock and activate data across channels, Zwift transforms every rider interaction into a personalized growth opportunity through seamlessly orchestrated touchpoints. The result is a lifecycle program that can meet each user where they are, whether in the game, the companion app, or their inbox. Rachel added, “What was once just an email can now be a series of complementary sequential cross-channel messages, automated and optimized for each user’s channel preferences at the most critical time. That’s how we win.”

“With Iterable, we’re not only solving for the cross-channel visibility of being able to orchestrate all of our channels together, but we’re also solving for a lot of operational issues that have plagued the business. This has given us an opportunity to revamp our internal operations while also giving us all of the benefits of the cross-channel marketing that we’ve been wanting.” – Rachel Kamel, Director of CRM, Zwift

These gains have arrived at a critical moment for the team. Rachel reflected, “We are a smaller team than we were three years ago. Even with a smaller team, we’re still able to do more. Having the ability to activate all of our data and have these quicker-turn channels has allowed us to serve more of our customers, even with a lean team.” Rather than cutting programs, Zwift has expanded its messaging capabilities, proof that the right tools can multiply a lean team’s output.

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Ready to Dive Deeper?

See the strategy in action by catching the full replay of Rachel’s Activate Summit 2026 session: From Fragmented to Fluid: How Brands Power Consistent Moments Across Every Channel. 

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