It's hard to believe, but we're now officially more than halfway done with 2022! Time is flying, and the winter holiday season will be here before we know it. In fact, we're already seeing a lot of customer engagement teams working hard to lay the foundation for their 2022 holiday marketing strategies—so while you may be enjoying some much-deserved rest and relaxation right now, it won't be long before you find yourself shifting into high gear.

Thankfully, the Braze Summer 2022 Product Release is designed to help you do just that by giving you access to fast and flexible workflow tools, new and improved Braze SDKs, and expanded, AI-powered segmentation capabilities. Taking the time to add these new capabilities to your customer engagement toolkit now could set you up for success for the rest of the year, making it easy to feel confident about your marketing, even during crunch time.

(Still craving more? Check out the recent launch of Braze Canvas Flow, our next-generation journey orchestration tool that helps brands of all shapes and sizes deliver cohesive, responsive, and personalized customer experiences.)

Expanded Audience Creation Capabilities

To deliver the kinds of highly relevant, personalized experiences that today's consumers have come to expect, you need to know your audience, as well as their wants and needs. With the enhanced segmentation and targeting functionality included in this release, it's easier than ever before to create the right audiences for your upcoming campaigns.

• Proactively target more customers with prediction windows up to 60 days. In 2020, we introduced the Braze Predictive Suite to help marketers segment audiences and tailor messages based on predicted customer outcomes, like uninstalling an app or making a purchase. These no-code machine learning models can be easily customized to address your brand’s unique business goals. With this release, we’ve expanded the prediction window up to 60 days, giving you more granular control over the timeframe of each prediction and helping you proactively reach even more customers. For example, a marketer at a fitness brand can now predict which customers are least likely to book a class in the next 30 days, see what those customers have in common, and use that information to create a targeted campaign to drive class bookings going forward.

• Fine-tune your audience with Segment Extensions enhancements. Build more granular audience segments with additional no-code filtering options. With this feature’s longer lookback period, you can now target customers who’ve performed specified actions in the last two years. Brands can use new message engagement events to segment users based on those who have received, opened, and clicked your content across a variety of different channels. Plus, tack on additional event properties to efficiently reach the right audience using simple AND/OR operators.

• Add new users to multiple email and SMS subscription groups in one API call. Streamline subscription group setup by adding customers to email and SMS subscription groups with a new API endpoint that creates and adds new customers in a single, unified request. With this release, you can set multiple subscription group status for multiple customers, all in one API call.

Fast and Flexible Campaign Tools

As the holiday season and the end of the year approaches, it's normal for many marketing programs to expand, bringing with them bigger workloads and larger challenges. So as you prepare for the last few months of 2022, start taking advantage of these campaign workflow advancements now to save your time and energy for when it really counts.

• Find inspiration with our new AI Copywriting Assistant. Writer’s block can be a real pain for marketers who compose a lot of message copy. The new AI Copywriting Assistant adds an extra digital brain to the brainstorm by automatically generating compelling message copy based on any word or phrase you input. Try A/B testing your own message copy against the AI Copywriting Assistant’s version to finally settle the human vs. robot debate.

• Streamline email creation with updates to the Braze Email Drag and Drop Editor. Enjoy improved flexibility, speed, and environments in the Braze Email Drag and Drop Editor with quality-of-life updates including smaller file sizes, faster editing, and easy social icon creation.

• Build beautiful emails with our new Drag and Drop Content Blocks. Quickly design engaging and customized emails with a library of saved Content Blocks that you can easily drag and drop into your email template for local editing.

• Measure success with Email Dashboard filters. Drill down to get more clarity into what’s happening with your email program. Slice and dice your Email Performance Dashboard by individual tags, campaigns, or Canvas Flows.

• Stay compliant with industry regulations through Message Archiving. This update helps brands respond to customer experience inquiries and comply with industry-specific regulations by offering message archiving to programmatically save exact copies of all email, SMS, and push messages to an Amazon S3 bucket.

For Developers: New and Improved SDKs

In our Spring Release, we shared our renewed focus on our developer community to better equip and empower developers to build with Braze. We’ll continue to use these seasonal product releases to share relevant new features, like the Braze SDK updates below.

The Braze SDK is the powerhouse of customer engagement, enabling brands to collect actionable, real-time customer data and deliver personalized, relevant messaging across mobile and web channels. Braze is continuously improving our suite of SDKs to add new functionality, to expand our offerings, and with the goal of providing the best possible developer experience.

• Easily integrate the Braze React Native SDK with the new Expo Plugin. Expo is a popular framework for building apps using React Native. With our new Expo Plugin, brands can integrate the Braze React Native SDK more easily, with less native coding, and without having to "eject" from the preferred Expo workflow. Our React Native Documentation has all the details you need to get started.

• Migrate to the new Braze Swift SDK. In April, we announced that Braze has released a new, more performant, and developer-friendly Swift SDK. Moving forward, all new features for iOS campaigns—such as our new no-code Click Actions—will be available exclusively to Braze customers who have migrated to the new Swift SDK. In this release, we’re adding support for Cocoapods to the Braze Swift SDK, in order to make it easier to manage dependencies in Swift projects. This release also includes support for Content Cards on the Swift SDK. For more information on migrating to the Swift SDK, visit our Swift SDK GitHub repo.

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

As the year rolls on, take a moment to evaluate whether you’re using all of the customer engagement tools that you have at your disposal. There are so many Braze features you can take advantage of now to make your job faster, easier, and more effective. Assembling those now can set you up for success going forward—so what are you waiting for?

To learn more about the updates included in the Summer Product Release, register for the Braze Summer Product Webinar on August 31. Join our team as we discuss how these new and updated features can help you better reach and engage your customers.