How Just Ice Tea turned receipt-verified rebates into a retail growth lever

n late October-November 2025, Just Ice Tea ran a pilot campaign with Crafted that contributed to ~10% average month-over-month lift in top campaign markets. Accounting for repeat behavior, the campaign delivered 3x return — proving that tightly scoped, attribution-focused activation can drive measurable retail velocity even during Q4's historically soft period for iced tea.

The Challenge

Just Ice Tea is a nationally distributed iced tea brand with new placement at Target in 2025 and an existing mix of digital and shopper tactics in-market. Growth brought a new challenge:  building retail velocity at new partners. Not due to lack of demand, but lack of clarity around which tactics were actually influencing purchase behavior at shelf.

“Influencers are posting, we're getting some white noise and I'm sure some conversions… but we're looking to reach new audiences and have better attribution given that we are pushing to a retail partner.” 

— Allison Moss, Head of Marketing, Just Ice Tea

With budgets tightening and Q4 approaching — a seasonally challenging period for iced tea — the question became more pointed: Can we efficiently convert social discovery into verified retail sales, and prove where it's working?

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The Approach

With year-end budget constraints, Just Ice Tea and Crafted designed a fast, low-risk pilot to generate clear signal without disrupting existing partners or promotions. The goals:

• Reach new shoppers outside existing rebate ecosystems
• Tie social activity directly to in-store trial
• Produce defensible attribution data, even on a small budget
• Work nationally while allowing for regional learning

Just Ice Tea chose a receipt-verified rebate model that unified creator content, paid amplification, purchase incentives, and first-party data capture — without requiring a dedicated app or long setup cycle.

Rather than optimizing for reach or impressions, the team used the rebate as both a conversion lever and measurement tool, capturing verified purchases and identifying which regions and audiences were actually responding.

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The Pilot

The five-week campaign ran with:

• Limited media budget focused on Meta paid amplification
• Three UGC videos produced with vetted creators
• Receipt verification requirement for all rebate claims, including full basket data
• Receipt verification requirement for all rebate claims, including full basket data

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The Results

Despite running during Q4, Crafted contributed to ~10% average month-over-month lift in units per store per week from October to November in top campaign markets, with 9 of 10 high-investment states showing positive growth despite Q4 being historically soft for iced tea. 

Top-performing markets like New York (+29%), Florida (+18%), and Pennsylvania (+17%) significantly outperformed seasonal expectations.

"We would have expected Nov and Dec to both be soft due to seasonality, so seeing Nov growing vs October does indicate impact from the Meta campaign." 

— Allison Moss, Head of Marketing, Just Ice Tea

The campaign also delivered strong acquisition efficiency and conversion metrics:

Acquisition & Conversion:

• 2,253 verified NTB shoppers acquired with receipt-verified purchases
• 44% click-to-email conversion from paid media to rebate opt-in
• 20% email-to-receipt conversion from claim initiation to verified purchase‍
• 20% email-to-receipt conversion from claim initiation to verified purchase

Revenue Impact:

• Average basket size: ~$15
• Total cost per customer (media + rebate): ~$15
• Day-one ROAS: 1.0x (break-even on first purchase)
• Day-one ROAS: 1.0x (break-even on first purchase)

Why Breaking Even Matters

In retail, breaking even on first purchase while acquiring a new-to-brand shopper is a strong outcome. It establishes a predictable cost to acquire a verified retail customer — something many CPG brands struggle to quantify.

More importantly, this wasn't a one-and-done transaction. Just Ice Tea applied its internal repeat purchase data to model customer lifetime value over a 12-month window. 

Why This Pilot Worked

With a four-week campaign, a constrained budget, and only three creative assets, Just Ice Tea validated that:

• Receipt-verified rebates convert social discovery into measurable retail trial when paired with strong creative and targeted media
• Receipt uploads enable smarter regional optimization, allowing brands to get more return from their Meta dollars
• Tightly scoped pilots can deliver material revenue impact when attribution is rigorous and dollars are allocated strategically

The team now has a repeatable framework for testing retail-driving digital campaigns, clear benchmarks for cost per verified shopper, and confidence to scale investment based on performance rather than assumptions.

Next Steps

Building on the pilot's success, Just Ice Tea is planning to expand work with Crafted focusing on:

• Increasing creative volume to test additional formats, hooks, and product messaging
• Testing new offer structures to improve margin efficiency
• Boosting spend to further increase sales regionally and nationally
• Boosting spend to further increase sales regionally and nationally

What began as a conservative Q4 test has become a scalable retail growth lever that Just Ice Tea can deploy with measurable confidence.

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