Peter Turner
With acquisition budgets being slashed, CMOs now have to justify their top-funnel spend while ensuring that they optimise all the leaky funnels across the entire customer lifecycle. To do this, teams are focusing on 1st-party data and owned-channel strategies in a way they never have before in a bid to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV).
Because of this renewed focus on CLTV, customer engagement platforms such as Braze, it's nearest competitor Iterable, and up-and-coming rival Klaviyo, are poised to take the market by storm in the coming years. These tools offer the integrated workflow and multi-channel capabilities that our friends at Adobe and Salesforce have been promising for years, but just could not seem to deliver in one easy-to-use package.
This article will focus on what I'm seeing in the field as more and more of my clients onboard the emerging leader in these platforms: Braze.
To level-set, let's understand what Braze really is:
Started as a mobile app-focused marketing tool, Braze has morphed into a multi-channel, customer engagement platform capable of real-time interaction management. It leverages profile-based targeting, where a version of your customer record remains persistent and consistently enriched by events and session data from your apps. Using this profile, Braze can drive rich-channel experiences using push notifications, deep links, in-app messages, email, SMS, webhooks, content cards and notification centres.
Recently, Braze has even leaned harder into it's role in product teams by releasing feature flags that can complement or replace tools like Optimizely. Braze also has robust APIs and modern integration patterns for developers.
In other words, Braze is more than just a tool for marketers. Braze is a system for orchestrating highly-effective digital funnels which can interface deeply with your mobile/web apps and customer data.
After nearly 15 years in the space, working with all manner of platforms, I'm blown away at the power provided to product and marketing folks with Braze.
So why, with all this capability, is it that 6-12 months after a Braze implementation, some senior stakeholders are left wondering, "Where is all this amazing value I was promised?"
I have witnessed what is possible when Braze is integrated properly and I've rescued a couple of troubled implementations at this point, so here are my five steps for nailing your Braze onboarding:
1. Use cases, use cases and more use cases
Without the use cases to deliver value, the only thing your high-level stakeholders will see is a really expensive Mailchimp.
I recommend my clients workshop their use cases before they start a Braze onboarding or at least do the work in parallel. I cannot overstate how incredibly important this step is, as it will help you to inform the data, creative, development and staffing requirements needed to fully leverage the platform.
Ideally you should have between 25-50 use cases in a backlog to start, with at least the 10 highest priority use cases detailed before onboarding begins. These could be multi-channel onboarding journeys, workflows that remove or add customers to paid media channels, product workflows such as refer-a-friend, A/B/MV testing strategies, lifecycle journeys, retention journeys, etc. These should be pulled not just from marketing but from every product team in your organisation. I've found that marketing teams will often not have the full picture of what needs to be done or what can be done with this tool.
I've also found that clients often haven't done a thorough assessment of what needs to be migrated from their existing tools. Most likely you'll have candidates for migration as well as existing business-as-usual marketing workflows that need to be included in your backlog of use cases. You may also find yourself running up against a deadline for an existing platform license expiration and this can force you to make trade-offs, which later may come back to bite you. A little bit of planning now can prevent a large mess later.
2. Get your data right before the onboarding
If you skipped step 1, go back! Seriously...go back.
Many a starry-eyed marketer have made assumptions about the data available in their business when they go to buy a shiny new platform. There's a pretty good chance they didn't even consult the data stakeholders or info security. Does this sound like you?
Making sure you understand the data capabilities in your organisation and the data required to deliver your use cases is critical to your success.
There are four types of customer data you'll need to fully leverage Braze:
- Session data - Telemetry about a user's visit provided by integrating the Braze SDK into your website and mobile apps.
- Customer profile data - The persistent data stored for the customer in Braze such as email address or first name.
- Front-end (clickstream) event data - These are events probably already tagged on the front-end of your website or mobile app usually for a tool like Google Analytics or Amplitude.
- Back-end event data - Customer-level events that fire when a someone takes an action that gets recorded in one of your systems or at the end of a process. These events tend to carry more meta data about the action which can be used to personalise and target messages.
The first two components are lower difficulty. Nearly any company in 2023 will have the capability to deliver this provided they have the developers and a unified customer ID. If you already have a data warehouse in Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks or Redshift, you can create a view of your customer data and integrate it directly into Braze. If you don't have this basic level of competency, I would advise taking a pause before you complete your purchase and align with your data and analytics team.
Event data is where things get a little more interesting. It's where the real sausage is made in Braze. Events are real-time signals that help you to trigger, personalise and exit workflows. For example, if your sign up flow has five steps, you can trigger an event for each step. Based on this you can build a workflow that nudges a new user through the sign up process.
If your digital product is built on a micro-services architecture where events are legion and you need to organise and sync them downstream to a variety of platforms, a CDP (customer data platform) is the way to go for integrating events. A CDP such as Segment can be an amazing asset because the integration of those platforms into Braze is often point and click. But trying to take on integrating or retooling an existing CDP while you doing a Braze integration can be expensive and time consuming.
Its also important to dispel the notion that you need a Customer Data Platform (CDP) at all to leverage event data in Braze. Braze allows you to log custom events on the front end of your website and into your mobile apps using the SDK. You can also log custom events programmatically using the API in your product code.
Again, if you completed step 1 properly, you'd already be able to identify all the data you need. This is why the use cases are so important!
3. Align dedicated staff and an integration partner to the onboarding
I find that clients often underestimate the integration effort required for Braze. A full-featured implementation will require:
- A project lead - One person to manage the relationship with Braze and deliver to the timeline.
- iOS/Android/Web developer(s) - To integrate the Braze SDK into your apps and help you test out all the channels.
- Data engineer(s) - To figure out how to connect and backfill the customer profile, do the event tagging, connect your event streaming, build new micro-services, etc.
- Marketing and product staff - To integrate the platform into the teams and run the initial IP warm ups, migrate campaigns and existing workflows.
- A qualified implementation partner - A steady hand to guide you along the way and cast a second set of eyes on your solution architecture and planning.
If possible, you should avoid spreading the work of implementing this platform across a bunch of disparate teams. Make a water-scrum-fall type plan, dedicate the folks listed above and treat it as a special project. You will get a better outcome in a shorter amount of time.
4. Develop a change management plan for how the tool will be integrated into marketing, product and engineering teams
Braze may have outsized impacts on the way your teams work. Each team who interacts with the tool should undergo a change management program including L&D, certifications and cross-functional alignment.
- Marketing - Marketing teams will be the most immediately impacted as they will usually end up being the de-facto platform owners. They will not need just learn a new tool to deliver the marketing they always have, they will need to learn a new way of thinking. Invest well in training. Pay for certifications if you can afford it.
- Product - Product teams will often take to Braze easily, but they will usually require an amount of high-level education so they can understand the capabilities and how it can mesh with their designs. Work will be needed here to distinguish what is the responsibility of this team vs. what belongs to marketing.
- Technology and data - Similar to product teams, tech and data teams will need to have a strong understanding of the technical capabilities of the platform and all of the available integration patterns. I recommend that you keep a Martech focused engineer on staff to help with your backlog. Data teams need to have an good understanding of all the data in and out of Braze, so they can provide governance and good measurement.
5. Fast-follow with automated reporting
The last step of your implementation should be to set up automated measurement of all your ad-hoc and 1:1 marketing. There are several components:
- Enable Braze Currents or Snowflake data sharing. This will flow the customer engagement and conversion events from Braze into your data warehouse so you can include it in reporting.
- Build an attribution model your organisation agrees upon that measures incrementality. As well as a governance strategy that includes campaign naming conventions, tagging, and sizing guidelines for control groups.
- Productionise your model in a dashboard. This dashboard will show you the incremental gains each campaign and journey is creating in Braze, will help you to make investment decisions and optimise over time.
Every organisation is a little different when it comes to integrating Braze. No two clients in my experience will take exactly the same path. Architectures vary widely. But if you observe all of the steps above, you'll end up with a strong program of work and hopefully some great outcomes.