If this year has taught us anything, it’s that past marketing tactics won’t necessarily result in future success. The secret to working smarter this season? Unlocking your most valuable asset: First-party customer data. With new privacy updates and the looming death of third-party cookies, relying on third-party data is no longer enough. Success today means activating your first-party data to deeply understand customer preferences and insights, meet users where they are, and break through the noise with personalization at scale. With the new and improved features included in the Braze Summer 2021 product launch, you can take full control of your customer data at every step of the way—from insight generation to campaign execution.

Build Trust With First-Party Data Capture

Customer preferences and behaviors are changing rapidly. Brands looking to truly understand their customers need to build a rock solid first-party data foundation that balances flexible data collection with consent management. Using the latest Braze updates, marketers can seamlessly collect first-party data in new ways, activate this data through audience segmentation and message personalization, and remain compliant with new privacy requirements.

• Understand Customer Preferences With In-App Message Surveys. Quick and easy in-app messaging survey support empowers brands to seamlessly collect customer preferences and feedback as part of a web or mobile experience. Marketers can quickly create and deploy these simple surveys on their own time, without requiring engineering assistance. Plus, by tapping into survey data, marketers can not only learn more about existing customers, but also immediately put these new insights to work as part of current or future campaigns.

• Connect Disparate User Information Through One of Our New Customer Data Platform (CDP) Partners. Braze continues to expand its partner ecosystem with the introduction of four new global CDP partners: Adobe, Amperity, Rudderstack, and Treasure Data. 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. Looking for a complete list of our CDP partners? Check them out here.

• Efficiently Bring Customer Data Into Braze Using Our Data Model Enhancements. With this technical enhancement, brands have greater flexibility to pass first-party data into the Braze platform via our APIs, SDKs, or partner integrations. This saves your engineers time by making it possible for them to efficiently send custom data to Braze as is and equips marketing teams with all of the rich data required for best-in-class customer engagement programs.

• Stay Compliant With Email Pixel Tracking Enhancements. Respect customers’ data tracking preferences and stay compliant with ongoing privacy directives. Marketers can now manage consent within Braze by disabling email engagement data collection for any individual who opts-out of message tracking.

Orchestrate Dynamic Campaigns With Ease

Breaking through today’s noisy marketing landscape with dynamic personalization can be a significant undertaking. Braze continues to simplify and enhance marketers’ workflows with the latest updates to Canvas, our robust journey management tool, and our SMS/MMS channels. With these changes, marketers can experiment autonomously with more personalized, responsive messaging—and do it without any added complexity.

• Optimize Every Part of the Customer Journey Using Canvas Experiment Steps. Easily A/B test and optimize any element of the customer journey. Whether you want to compare the performance of different message copy and creative, timing, or channel mixes, the new Experiment Step has you covered for streamlined message, path, or Canvas-wide testing.

• Get Straight to Message Composition With the Canvas Message Step. Quickly create the best message possible across any channel without worrying about adding extra delays or filters. Combine messages with additional Canvas Components (e.g. Audience Paths, Delay Steps, Decision Splits) for a cleaner, easier-to-read Canvas.

• Streamline Customer Journey Personalization With Canvas Persistent Entry Properties. Canvas personalization just got even easier. For any action-based (e.g. abandoned cart) or API-triggered (e.g. order confirmation) journey, use the triggered event or API metadata to personalize any subsequent messages in the flow. Go beyond first-message personalization and eliminate the need for complicated workarounds.

• Increase Brand Recognition with MMS Contact Cards. Send your contact information directly to customers alongside any MMS message. Recipients can quickly save your brand’s contact information to their contact list, so they always know exactly who is texting them.

Uncover Deeper Insights to Maximize Conversions

Brands rely on data insights to gauge performance, understand what’s working, and determine how to improve outcomes moving forward. With the latest updates to Braze Reporting and Analytics, deeper insights are only clicks away. Marketers can use new reporting features to analyze and uncover more granular conversion insights and identify next-best-actions.

• Dig Deeper Into Key Actions With Conversion Correlations. Uncover insights about the types of customers most or least likely to convert after receiving a campaign, then let these insights serve as inspiration for future outreach and engagement. For example, use this report to determine which types of customers were more likely to refer a friend after receiving a referral campaign.

• Use Revenue Reporting Enhancements to Accurately Tie Customer Engagement to Revenue Generation. Leverage a granular last-click attribution model to track, monitor, and compare the amount of revenue and purchases generated after customers clicked on campaigns.

Final Thoughts

As marketers, we’re eager to take advantage of the new opportunities that lie ahead this season. The brands who are able to unlock and activate their first-party customer data today will be the ones who successfully future-proof their business for sustained growth now and in the future.

To learn more about these product updates and how they can help you unlock customer data for smarter insights and execution, check out the Braze Summer Customer Webinar. Join our team as we explore the ins-and-outs of all the tools and features contained in the summer launch in a single informative session.