The final days of 2022 are right around the corner! As the holiday season quickly approaches, marketers far and wide are hard at work to hit their mark and set the stage for post-holiday success.

For brands today, the holiday crunch puts the spotlight on marketers and their strategy, making the answers to questions like how frequently to message users or what developing a campaign based on first-party data looks like even more important. While driving success during the winter holiday season is already a tough ask, what a brand does afterward is just as important. Thankfully, the Braze Fall 2022 Product Release is ready to help you reach your year-end goals with insightful reporting and analytics, deeper audience management tools, and new campaign-building features.

Uplevel Campaign Creation and Performance

In our Summer Release, we strengthened our offering of fast and flexible workflow tools in order to set you up for success for the end of the year. This quarter, we’re doubling down on campaign creation and performance by adding new capabilities that are designed to further optimize your creative and analytical processes.

• Easily create and customize in-app messages with the new Drag & Drop In-App Message Editor. Creating truly extraordinary in-app and in-browser messages used to require extensive experience with HTML, but that’s no longer the case—thanks to the new Drag & Drop In-App Message Editor in Braze. Now, you can easily build custom in-app and in-browser messages with drag and drop building blocks and a suite of no-code styling options, including the ability to upload custom fonts.

• Streamline collaboration and iterate on best-in-class user journeys with Canvas Versioning. Capture crucial historical context on how a particular journey has evolved and the collaborators who have contributed these changes. Understand a detailed view of each version, including Canvas composition, step settings, and creative copy. With Canvas Versioning, an intuitive and comprehensive analytics view allows you to analyze and compare the efficacy of each version, optimize user journeys, and drive best-in-class programs moving forward.

• Drag & Drop Dark Email Editor: Dark Mode. Send emails from the Drag & Drop Email Editor with even more confidence by previewing how your emails will appear to users who have Dark Mode turned on.

• Improve campaign conversions with Personalized Variant. A/B testing helps you determine which version of your message produces the best results, but it’s rare that one version of a message is truly the best version for every customer. After all, while most customers prefer Version A, a few might actually prefer Version B. Personalized Variant is a new optimization feature for campaign A/B tests that considers these individual differences and automatically sends each customer the campaign variant with which they’re most likely to engage.

• Optimize the journey with Winning Paths in Canvas Flow. A/B testing isn’t just for campaigns. Did you know that you can A/B test at any point in a Canvas Flow customer journey using Experiment Paths? Experiment Paths are now getting a boost with the addition of a Winning Paths option, which you can switch on to automatically send customers down the path that performs better in the initial experiment.
  
  

• Tailor recommendations with Catalog Selections. Create curated groups of products, services, and more with Catalog Selections. Using existing Catalog data and simple filters, you can build dynamic groups of catalog items that are personalized for each customer when added to a message. For example, let’s say you work at an entertainment brand and want to recommend TV shows to your customers. You might create a Selection of highly-rated shows in the same category as each viewer’s last show watched. Depending on their individual profiles, customers might receive recommendations for “four-star workplace comedies” or “five-star mysteries.” Also new with Catalogs—API endpoints that make it easy to add, edit, and manage your Catalogs via API.

Adapt to Your Audiences

As marketing outreach expands at the end of the year, Braze is improving the ability to send effective, responsive messages to ever-larger audiences. This fresh functionality can help you speed through bigger workloads and larger audiences while maintaining the genuine connection that comes with 1-to-1 engagement.

• Reach Apple users effectively on email with Machine Opens Segmentation. Many marketers are familiar with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature a year after its launch, and have already enhanced their analytics with our Machine Opens feature. To further reduce the pain point of inflated open rates and reduced campaign visibility, Braze is introducing Machine Opens Segmentation—a new way to uniquely segment and target folks that trigger Apple iOS 15's machine open function.

• Uplevel your retention strategy with HTML Preference Center. Audience retention is paramount at the end of the year, and a preference center that matches your brand and caters to your customers’ needs is a key part of any retention strategy. This update opens up the preference center page via a REST API endpoint, which you can use to fully build a flexible, powerful, on-brand preference center.

• Effectively retarget customers with Link Shortening: User-Level Click Tracking. We continue to make exciting updates to our SMS link shortening capabilities. The ‘SMS Clicked’ event, which previously recorded clicks in aggregate, now captures clicks at the user level. Using segment filters, you can leverage this event to retarget customers at a more granular level based on how they engage with links in your SMS messages.

• Gain clarity into user/message interactions with Messaging History. Messaging history uncovers factors that may have prevented message receipt for individuals, such as frequency capping or aborted messages. This inspires confidence in the delivery of your messages, while allowing you to optimize and adjust to ensure messages are received as intended.

New & Improved Reporting and Analytics

Whether you’re already strategizing for 2023 or making tactical shifts over the next month, it’s crucial that reporting and analysis be timely and accurate. To make smart choices, you need access to smart insights to effectively measure the impact of customer engagement. That’s what our new reporting and analytics features are designed to do—make it easier for Braze customers to access and act on their data.

• Clarify clicks with updated Heat Maps. If you’re sending lots of email through Braze, you’re likely familiar with our Heat maps feature. This quarter, we’re expanding the depth of this popular feature to further help marketers understand and optimize email link performance.

• Gain deeper insight with the SMS Performance Reporting Dashboard. A better understanding of how your SMS program is performing means better decision-making and optimization. The new SMS Performance Reporting Dashboard gives you a holistic view of your SMS channel performance with aggregate metrics from both Campaigns and Canvases, right in the Braze dashboard. Look at your SMS channel performance for a specific timeframe or drill down by tag, Canvases, or Campaigns to see data for a subset of SMS messages.

• With Snowflake Reader Accounts, seamlessly share data from Braze with your brand, all without procuring your own Instance. With this new feature, Braze customers get all-in-one, turnkey access to Braze data, with no maintenance required. We “share” data similar to our Snowflake Data Sharing product, but to a Braze-owned Reader Account rather than a client Snowflake account. All Event-Level data such as messaging and User Behaviors from Braze can be acted on within a Reader Account. You won’t incur additional computing costs and there’s no need to build any new, robust ETL processes; simply query your data upon access and get the granular campaign insights you need for effective customer engagement.

• Analyze the effectiveness of your overarching engagement strategy with Conversion Dashboards. Eliminate piecemeal reporting and see the full picture with an aggregate view of how your Campaigns and Canvases work together to drive customer conversions. An out of the box dashboard with ready-to-use filtering options allows you to evaluate your engagement strategy in one cohesive view and understand its success in driving your desired outcomes.

Looking for more insight into working with Braze on a technical level? Don’t forget to check out our new Braze Developer Community, where you can connect, learn, and get inspired by other developers building with Braze.

Final Thoughts

These days, brands of all sizes are pushing customer engagement personalization to the limits. Personalization has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ for brands looking to remain relevant and competitive in an increasingly crowded and uncertain marketplace. While their products may have attracted customers initially, brands today are grappling with how to keep those customers engaged, renewing, subscribing, and buying despite mounting macroeconomic challenges. These Braze product updates are intended to alleviate some of the pressure by offering new routes to differentiated contextual engagement.

The simple answer is: Get your data right, build smart audiences quickly, and engage them with delightful, modern campaigns. But that is all so much easier said than done. That’s why Braze continues to embrace innovation in its own product, thoughtfully crafting customer-centric approaches to marketing that leverage campaigns grounded in actionable metrics, efficient workflows, and engaged audiences. For more ideas on how to bring personalization to your marketing, check out our resources on smart segmentation, effective campaign orchestration, and data visualization.

Still want more Braze presents? Check out the recent launch of Braze Cloud Data Ingestion, our new solution designed to let brands quickly and flexibly collect, process, and unlock value from their data warehouse.