A Message Refresh With a Focus on Personalization
Canva’s “Time To Try” is a project flow that surfaces up to 75 unique features across every category in its Visual Suite, a collection of workplace products including tools for creating Docs, Presentations, Whiteboards, Social Media, Video, Print, and Websites. The goal of “Time to Try” is to send users relevant and personalized features in real time, triggered when someone starts a new design in Canva. The challenge, then, was to refresh Canva’s feature adoption communication flows, in order to better surface more than 75 key product features in an efficient and relevant way.
Canva’s Lifecycle marketing team discovered that earlier campaigns designed to encourage users to try new features were outdated and not aligned with recent branding. They found that existing programs had some issues with audience overlap and their evergreen creative wasn't keeping pace with the massive catalog of new features that their product teams were producing. This meant they were missing out on key ways to drive product adoption, which is a big part of long-term retention. This “Time to Try” campaign had to be flexible enough to match Canva’s growth and product innovation.
In order to update the campaign, Canva started by better personalizing messages with images and copy based on the design category each member of the Canva community was experiencing. They also decided to:
Trigger messaging based on a user’s most recent design
Prioritize messages based on content a user has previously received
Serve multiple variations of content that could be personalized to a user’s experience
Make easy and efficient updates to existing live content to keep up with in-product changes
Key components of their strategy included:
Dynamic segmentation based on previous features used and the number of times used
1:1 personalization through triggered messaging and custom events
Automation through Braze Catalogs, Content Blocks, and Canvas
The dynamic content goal led Canva to become an early adopter of Braze Catalogs, which allow marketers to import non-user data into Braze via CSV files and API endpoints, then access this data to enrich messages. With Catalogs, Canva was able to leverage out-of-the-box Braze capabilities to automate many parts of their strategy so they could attain the level of personalization they wanted without needing much manual oversight. The content structure included eight personalized content variations per Canva feature based on user type and their individual journey. When the campaign launched, Canva was able to surface over 400 unique variations of content. It also allows them to remain agile, since they can easily and quickly update content when new features are launched.
The whole campaign was executed using Braze Canvas, our visual development environment which marketers can use as a no-code journey orchestration tool. This allows Canva to easily build, test, and optimize messaging flows on multiple channels and from multiple triggers. Specifically, they leverage Braze Audience Paths to segment the audiences to create specific messages that automatically choose the best feature to recommend to each user based on what they were already using. They also use Braze Decision Splits to check if a message for a new feature has already been received, which can help prevent message duplication or enable message retargeting in the future.