The rise of smartphones and other mobile devices in recent years has upended the status quo of marketing, making it possible for brands to better understand and reach their customers—but only if they have the right technology ecosystem in place. Customer engagement platforms are especially important for marketing teams; most senior marketers already have or are planning to acquire a customer engagement vendor. But these technologies work best as part of a cohesive tech stack built on a foundation of streaming data.

When deciding on what new technology to adopt as part of their stack, marketers should keep in mind the trend of increased budget allocations dedicated to martech. After all, if martech makes up an increasingly large chunk of your overall marketing budget, you want to make sure the tech you acquire won’t go unused—and that it can help you meet your larger business goals. To that end, more and more brands are leveraging customer engagement solutions in conjunction with customer data platforms (CDPs) and analytics tools in order to optimize and make the most of their customer engagement efforts.

For brands already leveraging Braze, Segment and Amplitude are two Braze partner solutions that—when used in conjunction with the Braze platform—enable marketing teams to collect consumer engagement data and optimize campaigns based on insights. Let’s take a look at what these partnerships make possible.

How Segment and Amplitude Work With Braze

“Segment provides customer data infrastructure,” explains Tom Pinckney, Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Segment. “We collect customer engagement data where it’s created and we route it to a downstream destination, such as Braze.” With Segment, you’re able to collect and unify first-party consumer data across all channels, capturing all of a consumer’s touch points.

Together, Segment and Braze can support efficient customer engagement. “Segment collects customer engagement data where it’s created,” Pinckney says, noting that Segment “routes that data to Braze so that those customers can be re-engaged via the multiple channels that Braze has got. Whether that’s push, or in-app notification, or email, or other channels.” This powerful partnership enables Braze to then send data back to Segment, where it can be seamlessly shared with other layers of your customer engagement stack.

Once that first-party data is organized and ready to be put to use, Braze’s partnership with Amplitude can come into play. Josh Clifford, Amplitude’s East Sales Director of Strategic Accounts, classifies Amplitude as a leader in product intelligence. Amplitude customers have access to analytics that enable marketers to better understand any group of users and their full digital experience. With an integrated, full self-service solution, teams can explore opportunities to target users based on behaviors and desired outcomes.

Clifford lists behavioral targeting, personalization, and engagement measurement as the three ways that the Braze and Amplitude platforms work together. "With Amplitude, product and marketing teams can apply insights from in-depth behavioral data and send cohorts of users directly to customer engagement platforms like Braze," Clifford explains. This, in turn, allows for the creation of more personalized messaging campaigns on the Braze platform. The results of these campaigns—such as impact on engagement, conversion, and lifetime value—can then be measured back in Amplitude.

The Partnership Boost: How Leveraging Braze With Segment and Amplitude Can Drive Better Results

The partnerships between Braze and both Segment and Amplitude aren’t just exciting in the abstract—they’ve already led to concrete results for brands using them in concert.

Rappi is an on-demand delivery service that is popular across Latin America. “Rappi leveraged both Braze and Amplitude to personalize their messaging to all first time users,” Clifford explains. This campaign resulted in a 10% increase in purchases and a 30% decrease in client acquisition cost. Similarly, Flipp, an online couponing platform, used Braze and Amplitude to increase their personalization in campaigns by over 60%, resulting in a 20% increase in click-through rate.

Braze, Segment and Amplitude are all integrated into accounts of varying sizes—including businesses as large as IBM. “Segment provides the customer data infrastructure to collect all of that usage information,” Pinckney says. “Within Amplitude, IBM is able to understand the user behavior and who's using their products and who may be at risk of falling off. And then with Braze, they're able to directly engage those customers to make sure they're nudged along so that adoption remains high.” One campaign enabled IBM to increase their conversions by 5x and another enabled them to acquire a ROI of over $800,000.

The Foundational Martech You Need

Being able to capture and own first-party consumer data is essential to being able to accurately assess your consumers’ touchpoints. Braze CEO Bill Magnuson touched on the importance of first-party data at CES 2020, noting that in order to deliver “high quality customer experience[s],” brands need their “whole technology ecosystem to be working together and they need to be able to act on insights interactively.”

Braze as a standalone product is a powerful customer engagement platform that provides robust campaign building capabilities. But when you add our technology partners to the mix, your martech stack can become even more efficient.

To learn more about how brands can use Braze effectively in concert with more than 50 different technology partners, visit braze.com/alloys.