Now more than ever, brands rely on customer engagement to drive customer lifetime value (LTV). That means you not only need a precise method to measure and optimize engagement campaigns, but an efficient way to share your success across teams within your organization. To make it easier to do just that, Braze recently launched our new Global Control Reporting feature.

What is Global Control Reporting?

This feature lets brands measure the impact of all their campaigns and Canvases using global control groups. By defining and excluding a subset of users from receiving messages, Braze Global Control Reporting makes it possible to easily compare the results from users within and outside of your control group, providing a better understanding of how your customer engagement programs are impacting user behavior and contributing to your business goals.

With Global Control Reporting, you can:

• Automatically randomize and exclude control group members from receiving messages

• See estimates on the number of excluded users

• Easily measure the overall success of campaigns and Canvases based on your chosen metrics

You can even access visual reports to help you determine how your efforts have impacted key customer behaviors and metrics, and easily share them with other teams inside your organization, supporting stronger alignment and cross-team collaboration.

Global Control Reporting in Action

While Global Control Reporting is a powerful feature with the ability to help validate the impact of your customer engagement efforts, it can be a little hard to wrap your head around it in the abstract. So let’s take a look at a hypothetical use case to show off what this feature can do.

In this example, the process began when a streaming service discovered that getting new users to watch their first TV show was a high-value action (HVA) that had a significant positive impact on their business. Based on that insight, the company’s CRM team set a quarterly goal to encourage 15% more users to watch a new show within one week of their first session. Then, to drive this key action, they launched a series of triggered campaigns and Canvases in Braze to achieve it.

But while they were confident that their marketing program would have an impact on customer behavior, the company needed a way to verify that belief. Using Global Control Reporting, they were able to set up a control group to exclude a random percentage of customers from TV show-related campaigns.

At the end of the quarter, the company was able to use this feature to determine that they had exceeded their goal, increasing the number of new users who watched a show in their first week by 20%. Here’s how they did it:

Step 1: At the start of the quarter, the CRM team navigated to the Global Message Settings section of the Braze dashboard.

Step 2: From there, they selected the “Global Control Group Settings” tab, where it’s possible to set up a global control group.

Step 3: On the same page, they assigned 5% of their total users to the global control group. That meant that a random 5% of users would no longer receive messages. (It’s possible to set the percent to any number between 1% and 15%.)

Step 4: Since some messaging still needed to go through to users in the control group under certain circumstances, the CRM team defined exception events using tags; this allowed them to continue sending messages that are key to the user experience. (It’s possible to add as many tags as needed to fit the use case.)

Step 5: At the end of the quarter, the CRM team navigated to the Global Control page to run the report. To see the quarterly impact on TV show adoption, they selected that custom event from the list and filtered by date.

Step 6: Upon finding that their messaging program had driven a 20% uplift in week one TV show engagement, the CRM team shared the results with other teams.

If the CRM team wanted to go further with analysis, they could have used the Braze platform’s Report Builder to determine which campaign or Canvas had the highest uplift in conversions. Based on that insight, it’s possible to apply those learnings to future messaging to improve results and strengthen customer relationships over the long haul.

Final Thoughts

Knowledge, as they say, is power. Accordingly, Braze Global Control Reporting provides brands with additional ways to set marketing goals, compare campaign results, and share your findings.

To learn more about how you can leverage data and tools within Braze to drive better results, check out our on-demand webinar Data-driven Customer Engagement (Without the Headaches).