In our fast-paced, mobile-first age, there’s no single marketing channel that can communicate effectively to every consumer. And while everything from TV ads to marketing emails can be effective tools for highlighting your brand’s value, truly effective engagement today depends upon your ability to speak to customers where they are. To succeed, brands need to embrace a cross-channel approach that supports coordinated campaigns across email, push notifications, and other key outreach channels.

But doing that successfully can be easier said than done. Running an effective cross-channel marketing campaign requires a lot of thought and care. You need to measure how users interact with you on each platform and ensure that you’re creating and maintaining a consistent experience no matter where a customer chooses to engage. To execute successfully, you need a customer engagement platform like Braze that’s built for cross-channel and has the right mix of optimization tools.

So let’s take a look at three key technologies within the Braze platform that are designed to help brands more easily optimize their cross-channel marketing efforts.

1. Personalization in the Moment with Braze Connected Content

Sending the same message to every member of your audience isn’t a winning strategy these days. Why? Because mass-messaging can’t be relevant to all the people receiving it...and today’s consumer expects relevant experiences from the brands they patronize. But with Braze Connected Content, you can leverage real-time personalization to send more relevant, more impactful outreach.

How does it work? Imagine that your brand sells sports apparel—with Connected Content, you can pull in the names, logos, and even the most recent game results for the local or favorite team of every user on an individual basis...and do it in real time. You can also create real-time marketing personalization related to the weather (e.g., promote different products when it’s raining) or to the outcome of a given game.

Achieving this level of real-time marketing personalization manually would require a small army of marketing staff to work 24/7. With Braze Connected Content, you can do it automatically. Even better? Using Connected Content has been shown to lead to a 1.3x boost in push notification open rates and a 1.7x increase in email click rates, supporting stronger engagement with the messages you send.

2. Automated Optimization with the Braze Intelligence Suite

Marketers have long used A/B testing to send more effective messages, increase conversions, and achieve their business goals. It’s a powerful tool for optimization, but for brands that are sending a large number of highly segmented campaigns to an audience of millions of users, the amount of work involved can be overwhelming at times. But with the Braze Intelligence Suite, it’s easier than ever for brands to seamlessly optimize their cross-channel campaigns. The suite contains multiple features that can help you send more effective campaigns, including:

• Intelligent Selection — This tool makes it possible for marketers to test multiple campaign or journey variants to see which performs best...and then automatically recalibrate the campaign on a continuous basis to ensure that the top-performing variant is sent out to most users.
• Intelligent Channel — This audience filter leverages smart business logic to identify and segment messages based on each user’s current preferred messaging channel, allowing brands to personalize which channel is used to reach each individual recipient.
• Intelligent Timing — This tool automatically looks at each individual user’s engagement patterns, identifying unique high-engagement windows and ensuring that messages are delivered at the ideal time for each recipient.

3. Simplified Cross-Channel Customer Journeys with Braze Canvas

While the value of running cross-channel campaigns is clear, the actual day-to-day experience of carrying them out can be labor intensive at times. For marketers leveraging customer engagement platforms that struggled with channel silos, they often found themselves juggling multiple windows, applications, and documents, then switching back and forth between them to check that the timing, creative, and overall flow was correct at each step.

Braze Canvas, the Braze platform’s drag-and-drop customer journey management tool, is designed to make things easier by allowing you to launch and optimize your marketing flows all from a single place.

Fiverr, the global freelance services marketplace, leveraged Canvas to optimize their customer journey and more effectively engage new users. With this feature, the company developed and tested four ideas to guide users toward making their first purchase, allowing them to successfully identify a journey variant that saw a:

• 8.8% increase in the number of purchases made within three days
• 10.1% increase in average order value associated with those purchases
• 20.9% increase in revenue connected with that campaign variant

This multi-step variant, which was built, tested, and executed entirely within Braze Canvas, leveraged a sophisticated cross-channel strategy that included mobile push, in-app message, web push, in-browser messages, and email to maximize results.

Final Thoughts

Cross-channel marketing campaigns don’t have to be painful, multi-month projects for the teams executing and optimizing them. With Braze, your team has the tools it needs to simplify the process, providing more relevant, more effective brand experiences for every one of your customers.

To learn more about how cross-channel orchestration can increase engagement by up to 844%, check out the Braze Cross-Channel Data Report.