As we approach the end of another challenging, unpredictable year for brands and consumers alike, it’s increasingly clear that the pre-pandemic status quo is no longer enough for marketers looking to provide exceptional experiences to their audiences. To get the most out of their marketing programs, brands need to ensure that they’re building their customer engagement efforts on a foundation of reliable, real-time data. Thankfully, the new and improved features included in the Braze Fall 2021 product launch make it possible to lay that foundation and future-proof your customer engagement efforts so you can handle whatever is thrown your company’s way.

Future-Proof Your Tech Stack

With the holiday season and the beginning of 2022 only months away, now is the time for brands to take steps to ensure that they’re able to effectively manage, understand, and act on the first-party customer data at their disposal. One potential complication? A renewed focus on data privacy driven in part by significant updates made by Apple to its various operating systems, including iOS 15. However, Braze is on the case, responding to this shifting landscape while also implementing technical updates that make it easier for brands to collect a wider range of first-party data.

• Respect Customers’ Preferences With Support for iOS Push Priority Settings. Braze support for nuanced push notification prioritization features included in the latest iOS release lets marketers designate the urgency and relevancy of each push notification they send. That allows users to receive relevant notifications at the right time, while giving them the ability to more fully customize the messaging experience they want to receive from your brand.

• Build a Deeper Data Foundation With New Currents Partners. Braze continues to build on the power of our Currents high-volume data export feature with the introduction of four new global Currents partners: Amazon EventBridge, Rudderstack, Treasure Data, and Tealium. Brands can use these real-time data integrations to resolve customer identities at scale, build comprehensive customer profiles, and power more personalized, customer-centric engagement across the user lifecycle.

• Expand your Tech Stack with Custom Currents Connectors. At Braze, supporting true data agility for our customers and their technology stacks has always been a key priority. That's why we're making it possible for Braze customers to build themselves a direct Currents integration via custom connector. For brands with proficient technical teams, this new functionality allows them to use a custom connector to send Braze data to bespoke tech destinations, such as an in-house customer data platform (CDP) or data storage location.

New Tools to Fuel Customer Engagement Growth

Sustainable growth doesn’t just happen—today’s brands need the ability to test, assess, and optimize their marketing programs and the ability to take action to ensure exceptional, personalized experiences on the channels that matter most to their customers. To that end, Braze continues to simplify and enhance marketing workflows with updates to Canvas, our best-in-class customer journey management feature, as well as to our email capabilities. With these key advances, marketers can make their experiment autonomously with more personalized, responsive messaging, and do it without any added complexity.

• Provide a Cohesive Brand Experience With Braze Global Email Style Settings. With marketers all over the world taking advantage of the Braze drag and drop email editor to more easily build effective email marketing campaigns, the time seemed right to build on that success. So to help add more value to this tool, we’re adding a new Global Email Style Settings feature, allowing you to select and store default colors, fonts, and more for any emails composed in both our drag and drop and HTML email editors. This new feature makes it possible for marketers to easily define and maintain a consistent brand style within their email editor, resulting in a better customer experience.

• Serve Up More Responsive Journeys With Canvas Action Paths. Today’s consumers expect individually relevant, meaningful experiences from the brands they engage with. To help brands make that vision a reality, Braze is proud to introduce Canvas Action Paths. This new Canvas component makes it possible for marketers to sort their users into different journey paths based on the specific actions they take (or don’t take) during a given timeframe, supporting more relevant, impactful messaging step by step and experience by experience. For instance, a payments app could use action steps to build a single onboarding journey that provides custom responses depending on whether a given user completed their app registration, activated their debit card, added funds to their account, or did nothing at all, supporting a more personalized experience without adding complexity.

• Create MMS Contact Cards in Minutes With Our New Creator Tool. With this new functionality, brands can now build a Contact Card in Braze in minutes that can be deployed in their MMS campaigns. Contact Cards are a smart way to increase brand recognition, since they send contact information directly to users, allowing recipients to quickly save a brand's number to their contact list and ensure they always know who's texting them.

• Get Marketers Up to Speed Faster With In-Dashboard Walkthroughs. To help you get comfortable with our dashboard more quickly and efficiently, we’re launching new Braze in-dashboard walkthroughts across various areas of the platform. These intuitive, in-dashboard prompts guide users as they learn how to carry out key steps, driving a swifter, deeper understanding of how to make the most of Braze. (Want to try one out? Just quick on the question mark prompt when starting a new drag and drop email campaign to see our first walkthrough!)

Final Thoughts

Carrying out a truly personalized customer engagement strategy requires a rock-solid foundation. To get there, brands have to make sure they have the data and technologies they need to truly understand and build relationships with their audiences effectively even in today’s challenging marketing landscape.

To learn more about these product updates and how they can help you build upon a strong data foundation for your customer engagement efforts, check out the Braze Fall Customer Webinar. Join our team as we explore the ins-and-outs of all the tools and features contained in the fall launch in a single informative session.