Personalization is essential. This perspective, once somewhat controversial, has become a widely accepted truth over the past decade, as we’ve watched innovative brands use data and technology to uplevel their customer engagement efforts and provide exceptional brand experiences on an individual level. Plus, the results speak for themselves: A 2019 study by McKinsey found organizations that implemented personalized recommendations and triggered communications as part of their customer engagement strategy saw a 5-15% increase in revenue and a 10-30% rise in marketing spend efficacy.

But while it’s widely accepted today that personalization is central to successful customer engagement programs, many brands find themselves struggling to achieve true personalization at scale. According to Gartner, only 5% of brands have a personalization strategy they feel good about, suggesting that there's a major gap between marketers’ goals and their current realities. To bridge that gap, brands need personalization tools that can support scalable, sustainable customization efforts day after day and year after year.

Thankfully, those tools exist. By leveraging the Braze platform’s personalization features in concert with Amazon Personalize, today’s brands can take advantage of cross-channel campaigns informed by advanced, real-time recommendations.

How Braze and Amazon Personalize Support Individually Tailored Experiences

To understand the personalization impact that comes from leveraging Braze and Amazon Personalize in concert, you first need to get a handle on the customization capabilities that both of these solutions make possible on their own.

1. Braze Personalization

The Braze customer engagement platform, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is designed to support exceptional personalized experiences by allowing brands to integrate modern stream processing and data-driven frameworks into their engagement strategies.

Looking to create up-to-the-moment personalized messages? Braze Connected Content lets you pull information into your messages as they’re sent via API, ensuring that you can take full advantage of the data at your disposal...and making sure that you’re not acting on information that’s already out of date. Braze research has found that using marketing automation tools like Connected Content to support dynamic message personalization results in a 1.3X increase in iOS push notification open rates, a 1.5X increase in Android push notification open rates, and a 1.7X rise in email unique click rates.

2. Amazon Personalize

Amazon Personalize leverages the same machine learning (ML) algorithms Amazon.com uses to help brands create high-quality personalized recommendations that respond to the specific needs, preferences, and changing behaviors of their users, improving engagement and conversion rates. Amazon Personalize easily integrates with existing websites, apps, SMS, and email marketing channels, supporting a unique customer experience across all channels and devices while eliminating high infrastructure and resource costs. Plus, Amazon makes it possible for you to implement a customized, ML-powered recommendation system in just a few clicks, avoiding the resources associated with building, training, and deploying a “do-it-yourself” ML solution.

What’s Possible When Braze and Amazon Personalize Are Used Together

Amazon Personalize combines interaction data with information on customers, items, and content from multiple systems to make more accurate predictions about customer purchase intent and behavior. By using this solution in concert with the Braze customer engagement platform, brands can seamlessly leverage these ML-powered insights to build, execute, and optimize real-time brand experiences across all major messaging channels, supporting exceptional end-to-end interactions across every touchpoint.

Using these technologies together, brands can:

• Deliver unique web and app experiences. Personalize users’ homepage or app home screen with Braze Content Cards’ in-product messaging feeds informed by Amazon Personalize-powered product recommendations that update based on their engagement and shopping history.

• Help customers discover products faster. Make it simple for users to quickly find relevant promotions, deals, and new products by inserting recommendations from Amazon Personalize (and unique coupon codes from the Braze platform’s Promotion Codes feature) into Braze-powered emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and more!

• Send rich, relevant marketing communications. Customize the push notifications and emails you send to customers with individualized product recommendations powered by Amazon Personalize—and take those messages to the next level with visually rich, interactive experiences enabled by the Braze platform’s support for rich push, Push Stories, and AMP for Email.

• Refine product recommendations. Use Amazon Personalize to recommend similar items on product detail pages or in streaming in-app or web content feeds powered by Braze Content Cards to help users easily find what they’re really looking for.

• Surface relevant product rankings. Easily re-rank relevant product or content recommendations and surface them across channels—from in-product messages like Content Cards or in-app messages to out-of-product messages like push or email—to drive tangible business outcomes.

• Boost upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Combine Amazon Personalize with business logic to create high-quality upsell and cross-sell recommendations, then use Braze-powered cross-channel campaigns to effectively nudge customers to convert.

• Drive increased content consumption. Use Amazon Personalize to create highly relevant, individualized content recommendations for videos, music, eBooks, articles and more, then highlighting them within the web/app experience and beyond using Braze-powered cross-channel campaigns.

• Create highly curated content carousels. Use Braze to build content carousels and streaming feeds within your app or website—or in your out-of-product messaging, via Braze Push Stories or AMP for Email—and personalize them for every consumer with Amazon Personalize by leveraging their content consumption history.

• Highlight new content offerings. Help users find fresh content by creating Amazon Personalize-powered content recommendations based on their unique tastes and preferences and highlighting them via Braze support for in-app messages, Content Cards, and Connected TV notifications.

• Enrich and personalize marketing communications. Use Braze and Amazon Personalize to seamlessly personalize push notifications, marketing emails, and other messages with individualized, real-time content recommendations that support stronger engagement and a better customer experience.

• Enhance genre-based content recommendations. Use Amazon Personalize to add individualized, genre- or subcategory-specific content recommendations based on customer interactions—and encourage customers to provide additional context to support future recommendations by highlighting content to respond to in rich Braze-powered in-app message content carousels and lists.

Organizations that use the technologies at their disposal to effectively create personalized experiences see increased engagement, loyalty, and revenue. And with Braze and Amazon Personalize, getting that strategy up and running is quick, easy, and effective.

Final Thoughts

Achieving true personalization at scale can be a challenge. But by leveraging Braze and Amazon Personalize in concert, brands can seamlessly support personalized experiences that reach customers across multiple channels in smart, sustainable ways, allowing them to meet today’s challenges effectively and set themselves up for future success. And because the Braze integration with Amazon Personalize doesn’t require any prior experience with machine learning, the process of making your personalization vision a reality can be simple and painless.

Interested in digging deeper into how Braze and Amazon Personalize work together? Check out this exclusive exploration of the technical side of our integration on the AWS blog.