In 2021, the Braze platform was adopted by the Majid Al Futtaim group—led by the Marketing Technology Team—for all 10+ brands and 100+ communications. The transition to Braze was especially important for the SHARE Rewards Programme, as the team had to move 40+ existing lifecycle campaigns and maintain seamless communication for 3M+ customers.
A successful transition to the new platform was ensured by teams from across Majid Al Futtaim including Marketing Technology, Insights, Technology, and Marketing. The first step involved identifying all existing use cases and requirements for continuity on Braze. After months of collaboration, the backend was built with a clear view of requirements, resulting in the creation of a data dictionary for use by Marketing Teams. Marketers were then trained on features and data attributes, with quarterly refreshes continuing to this day.
Not only did the team successfully migrate the existing 40+ SHARE communications onto Braze with no customer impact, but it also reached 100+ automated campaigns by the end of 2022, executed 1,000+ unique tactical communications in 8+ months, and reached out to ~5.6M recipients monthly with high open/click rates using most of the new features and channels made available through the tool. The key to this success was the seamless collaboration of Marketing, Insights, Technology, and Marketing Technology teams together with the Braze team.
In 2021, the Braze platform was introduced within the Majid Al Futtaim organization. The organization's Marketing Technology Team led the charge in moving all 10+ brands and over 100 existing communications into the new platform.
Particularly for the SHARE Rewards Programme, this move to Braze was a very big step. The team had to seamlessly transition all their existing automated and triggered lifecycle campaigns (40+ in total) while also ensuring minimal disruption in the upcoming pipeline of tactical/automated campaigns. It was essential that the 3+ million customers with the SHARE base would keep receiving all their relevant and personalized communications seamlessly, despite the backend transition.
To ensure a successful and seamless transition to the new platform, teams from across Majid Al Futtaim came together to collaborate on this effort, including Marketing Technology, Insights, Technology, Marketing, and more. The first step was to identify all the existing use cases and outline the requirements needed to ensure their continuity on Braze. This multi-team effort took months of mapping, scoping, exploring, and identifying across the teams. Coupled with existing requirements, the SHARE Marketing Team also had to be brought in to outline future projects and requirements.
With a clear view of requirements in place, the building of the backend commenced. The Marketing Technology, Insights, and Technology teams had to come together to create, clean, and prepare data attributes and events that could be used by Marketing teams to execute. To further enable execution, a data dictionary was created for use within the organization.
Lastly, as a final step to start the execution, extensive training was introduced to marketers—led by a powerful Marketing Technology Team. Marketers were trained on features, functionalities, data attributes, and more. A quarterly training remains ongoing today to ensure constant refreshes, introduce new features, and share inspiring success stories across the teams.
Once the teams across Majid Al Futtaim had set up the new tool, the SHARE Marketers found themselves armed with a new capability and charged with executing their communications strategy on Braze.
First, the SHARE Team started with basics—that is, sticking to the simple campaigns that they had previously used. Over time, they learned how to leverage the platform, tried out different approaches, and eventually came to excel at the design, creation, and implementation of complex, responsive customary journeys using Braze Canvas. Now, detailed segments could be easily pulled and follow-up activities could be predefined in Canvases (e.g. for customers who did/did not take action on an initial message). To further drive the time-to-market for campaigns, an email design system with a modular design approach was put in place that could be used across various areas, levels, and components to add flexibility/life to every campaign.
Coupled with a growth in the number of Canvases that they were using, the SHARE Marketing Team also started testing. In their first eight months on the platform, over 57 A/B tests were executed including subject line, copy, banners, and CTAs. The team also tested out and ended up fully embracing a number of innovative features available from Braze, including Intelligent Channel, Intelligent Timing, Canvas Flow, Audience Paths, Action Paths, Conversion Events, control groups, multiple variants, campaign tagging, Action Buttons, etc.
The team also started to diversify into new channels. Connected Content, the Braze platform’s dynamic content personalization feature, was integrated into the SHARE app tiles to highlight corresponding communication pieces (e.g. personalized offers and content by member). Content Cards were also introduced to support a digital notification center for users and continues to see high engagement rates on the SHARE app. The organization also tested out a new way of engaging members via the “Spin the Wheel” functionality, a gamification approach made possible with the advanced in-app notification feature available on Braze. Lastly, the voice of customers was further brought to the forefront with the use of n-app polls (Simple Surveys) to gather feedback and further personalize communications.
By working together effectively across a variety of different teams (Marketing, Insights, Technology, and Marketing Technology), Majid Al Futtaim was able to seamlessly move all its different brands and communications to a new customer engagement platform with no impact on customers—something that’s particularly challenging with such a large organization. Plus, they were able to accelerate the launch of more than 110 automated campaigns by the end of 2022, execute more than a thousand unique communications on Braze during their first year using the platform, and successfully send communications to more than 5.5 million recipients with strong open and click rates.
Moving to a new communications tool is never easy—but it’s even more challenging for a large multinational organization like Majid Al Futtaim. For SHARE, a seamless transition was essential, since any broken experiences associated with an unsuccessful migration had the potential to negatively impact engagement or drive up churn. Because SHARE is responsible for driving usage across all Majid Al Futtaim brands and partners, with the goal of boosting the lifetime value of each customer, digital communications play an essential role in engaging, retaining, and growing the organization’s audience.
Today’s business landscape is challenging. Consumers are inundated with messages; brands are dealing with new expectations and regulations when it comes to privacy and data management. By moving to Braze, Majid Al Futtaim set their organization up for success in customer engagement by making it easier to support the strong personalization, hyper-automation, and ongoing innovation that makes sustainable engagement possible.
Migration to Braze has to be a cross-functional organization effort. Marketing Technology, Insights, and Technology (among others) have to come together as early as possible.
A migration depends on thoughtfulness when it comes to auditing and outlining requirements related to the project. Make sure all the requirements are captured properly and agreed on by the end users (e.g. execution and marketing teams) before any backend work commences
The Braze platform’s Canvas feature can be a saving grace if Marketers are taught how to use it effectively. Key time and effort should be invested here to get marketing up-to-speed on Canvases and finding ways (e.g. an email design system) to further streamline the work that needs to be done.
There’s always new innovation to embrace and new tools to use. Make sure your teams get the refreshers they need so they can stay up to speed and keep driving increased value.
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