Often brands have the data they need to give customers what they want when they want it—but many struggle to use it effectively. Building personalized messaging across different channels is often resource intensive, especially when campaign data isn’t managed in one dashboard. Data sits unused in complex pipelines, or isn’t tapped until it’s already out of date, causing brands to work off of incomplete views of customers. Thankfully, there’s a better way.

Braze is helping brands unlock deeper data insights with a new set of data capabilities, starting with Braze Cloud Data Ingestion. Launched at FORGE 22, the new solution lets brands quickly and flexibly collect, process, and unlock value from their data with our Braze Alloys technology partner, Snowflake. Let’s dive in.

Activate Data With Braze and Snowflake

With a turnkey integration, our expanded partnership enables brands to directly integrate data from their Snowflake data warehouse into the Braze platform for further segmentation, message triggering, and personalization. How does it work? After setting up the integration, brands can sync data according to a schedule they choose. When a sync runs, Braze will connect to the data instance, pulling all new data and updating the relevant user profiles on the Braze dashboard.

The Braze data model can support arrays and nested attributes so that brands can sync structured and unstructured data from any source without the headaches of building cumbersome data transformations. That means more data is in the hands of marketers to use immediately, allowing them to manage campaigns intuitively and leverage data in personalization tools across channels, platforms, and devices.

This feature is designed to be a data solution for the long term—while we’re launching with Snowflake, we plan to expand the Cloud Data Ingestion integration to other partners as well as add more updates to data types and platform usability in the future.

Data That’s Here for the Long Haul

We have added other features designed to maximize the value of your data with Braze. For example, data stored in Braze can now be used for the lifetime of an account, helping brands better build and maintain an accurate, historical 360-degree view of customers. We’ve also expanded Segment Extensions to allow for the use of up to 25 segment extensions, as well as for the addition of multiple event properties and message interactions events. Customer segments are updated as data changes with purchases, customer updates, customer actions, and more.

To further protect customer data, you can now define which fields in Braze should be treated as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This allows brands, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, to classify more information as PII for greater data privacy and protection.

Engage Global Audiences Through WhatsApp Channel Support

In early 2023, Braze will be launching native channel support for messaging platform WhatsApp. Fast, simple, and convenient messaging options have become increasingly important to customers as messaging becomes the preferred way of communicating with the brands they love. WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular messaging platforms with more than 2 billion users in 180 countries. Through the integration with Braze, marketers will be able to create, orchestrate, and send WhatsApp campaigns directly from the Braze dashboard to strengthen customer relationships with context-rich conversational messaging.

Final Thoughts

As both customer expectations and the regulatory patchwork evolve, Braze works to empower marketers with a unified customer profile, intuitive campaign management, and robust personalization tools across channels, platforms, and devices. Want to learn more about how we do that? Check out FORGE 2022 for a deep dive into the role that data plays in effective customer engagement—and how Braze makes the exceptional possible.