Re-engaging Users with Canvas Flow

Finding ways to re-engage lapsing customers is essential for any business, but finding ways to cut through the noisy deluge of messages that customers receive can be a big challenge. For one thing, it requires marketers to engage customers on the most relevant channels for them with timely, contextual messaging around their purchase history.

Getting here required a shift in how the KFC Philippines team operationalized their customer engagement. Cross-functional collaboration is critical to unlocking the most value out of Braze; for KFC Philippines, this means working in collaboration with their marketing, IT, and other teams. In less than a year using Braze, they’ve created a cross-functional team that syncs daily to ensure everything runs on time and to identify any potential operational gaps. They’ve also worked together to seamlessly connect Braze to their tech stack, and now run the campaigns they need to meet their goals.

KFC Philippines has more subscribers opted into email than any of their other touchpoints. They’ve come to rely on Canvas Flow, our customer journey orchestration tool, for its ability to automate and send personalized communications at the right moment based on user behavior. This makes it possible for vouchers for exclusive deals to be strategically deployed toward the end of campaigns as a final push for conversions. Last but not least, they use a blend of first-party data like purchase events and zero-party data like subscriber status for each channel to make their personalized communications sing.

With the new capabilities that Braze offered, the KFC Philippines team outlined two strategic goals that they could now experiment and optimize towards: First, close the gap on abandoned carts; and second, re-engage users who have been inactive for 45 days. Using Canvas Flow, they created their first two campaigns and broke them out into a series of clear user journey paths.

Abandoned Cart Campaign

1. In Canvas Flow, the KFC Philippines team sets up the abandoned cart decision path by breaking the journey down into steps.

2. First, a customer placed an item in their cart: For instance, let’s say they add a Party Bucket for 3 to their cart, but do not place an order.

3. This particular cart activity triggers a reminder message that’s sent 30 minutes later.

4. Based on their channel-specific opt-in status, the customer receives either an email or push notification nudging them to complete their purchase.

5. If two days go by and the customer still hasn’t placed an order, KFC sends them a voucher for free delivery that the user can automatically apply to their order.

Inactive User Campaign

1. In order to enter the journey, Canvas Flow automatically identifies any customer who has not been active for 45 days.

2. This lack of activity triggers a friendly re-engagement message to check out the KFC menu and explore a given deal on their website.

3. Based on their opt-in status, the customer receives either a push notification or email nudging them to engage.

4. If 15 days go by and the customer still hasn’t placed an order, the campaign automatically takes things to the next level. KFC sends these customers a voucher for free delivery they can apply to their next order.

Embracing an Experimentation Mindset

With these two campaigns up and running, the real test began: What could they learn about their customers based on their activity and engagement? Turns out, quite a lot.

It’s common for brands to take a “say and spray” approach to messaging, where a company sends an announcement about the newest flavors and products to everyone who’s opted in to hear from them and then cross their fingers that everyone will buy them. KFC Philippines took a more methodical tack here to investigate how they should structure their announcements.

1. First, they set up an A/B test for a Chicken Bucket promotion to prove which was most effective.

2. To support the test, they deployed the “say and pray” methodology in connection with a control group, sending the message to every single person in that segment regardless of their purchase history.

3. Next, on the variant side of the audience, they created a segment in Canvas Flow for those who had already purchased KFC Chicken Buckets in the past.

4. Overall, using audience behavior for targeted recommendations drove higher conversion rate compared to broad targeting, with 4% higher conversion rate. This is especially useful for re-engaging with customers after the broader launch using push reminders.

Driving Down Costs With Braze Audience Sync

With email, push, and in-app messages up and running, the team pushed forward on their next major goal: Driving down their overall cost per acquisition. Using the Braze platform’s Audience Sync feature, KFC was able to unite all of their paid channels, a common area of inefficiency and bloated spend for most brands. Audience Sync enables marketers to activate all of their channels, owned or paid, from the same centralized, intuitive interface. For KFC, this meant greater reach, increased campaign effectiveness, and decreased costs.

Additionally, with so much zero- and first-party data centralized in Braze, Audience Sync made it quite easy for the brand to activate their data and serve privacy-centric ads across Google and Facebook to the users they want to re-engage. These ads can be dynamically triggered and suppressed in real-time based on customer conversions (like a purchase), behaviors (like logging in), or other cross-channel interactions. By engaging users in their Abandoned Cart and Inactive User cohorts using Audience Sync, KFC Philippines was able to carry out more cohesive and impactful retargeting, supporting better customer relationships and helping them reach their business goals.

KFC Results: Higher Revenue, Lower Budget

Uniting their owned and paid channels has helped to significantly uplevel KFC Philippines' customer engagement efforts. The Abandoned Cart campaign saw 26% email open rates, which is higher than the industry average, and convinced 25% of their diners to treat themselves to something tasty. Conversely, the inactive user campaign successfully converted 50% of inactive users, without a single message—that’s right, 0%—going to spam filters.

But the biggest impact arguably came from Audience Sync’s effect on the company’s advertising efforts. Given the current macro environment, finding ways to successfully reduce CPA is a major win for any brand. For KFC Philippines, using Braze to link zero- and first-party data to key AdTech partners like Facebook and Google has helped the team thrive while consolidating their tech stack. As a result, they’ve driven a 50% reduction in their cost per acquisition and increased their revenue share from paid channels by 4X. Additionally, because they were able to achieve these outcomes with a 30% lower spend, they were able to test new campaigns, ad networks, and formats to keep driving toward higher business value. The result? Operational efficiency at its finest.

Key Takeaways

1. Being cost-effective is not mutually exclusive from delivering the experiences customers crave. With the right blend of strategies, ingenuity and technology, there’s no reason you can’t cut costs while continuing to deliver highly personalized messages,

2. Go beyond batch-and-blast messaging strategies. Tailor each message to the appropriate channel, get granular with your customer journeys. A few strategic events and steps can make all the difference when it comes to your conversion rates.

3. Embrace a culture of experimentation. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s why testing is so critical. With the right platform, you can test and optimize your campaigns in real time. Create a strong hypothesis and leverage segmentation to get a read on what works and what could be improved.