Silos between paid and owned marketing efforts can drive up costs, hamper results, and negatively affect the overall customer experience. Brands can maximize their impact when they successfully integrate their campaigns across both key owned channels, like email, SMS, and in-app and in-browser messaging, and crucial paid channels, like search and social.

That’s why the Braze customer engagement platform is designed to empower brands to align their marketing efforts across channels—both paid and owned—to improve advertising personalization, reach, and results, and to support best-in-class cross-channel engagement that delivers long-term outcomes. One of the features that makes this all possible is Braze Audience Sync, a tool that enables brands to use first-party data from their owned efforts to optimize their paid targeting and campaigns and execute cohesive, cross-channel campaigns to get the most out of each channel while bolstering customer lifetime value.

What Is Braze Audience Sync?

Braze Audience Sync is a feature built into the Braze platform that allows companies to automatically create and deploy targeted, in-the-moment ad campaigns in response to real-time customer activity across popular advertising channels. With Braze Audience Sync, brands can:

1. Dynamically and securely integrate their owned first-party data from the Braze customer engagement platform into the following top advertising platforms:

• Facebook (and Meta-owned platforms, such as Instagram)

• Google (and Google-owned platforms, such as YouTube)

• TikTok

2. Use this data to deliver personalized ads to audiences based on real-time customer behavior, activity, segmentation, and lifecycle stage

3. Extend the reach of and expand upon cross-channel customer engagement campaigns associated with owned channels

For instance, if a customer abandons a shopping cart on a company’s app or website to do more research on Google, that brand can use Braze Audience Sync to reach that specific customer with a sponsored Google Ads campaign related to the items in their cart. If a formerly active app user hasn’t logged in in a while, marketers can also use Braze Audience Sync to power retargeting campaigns on social media that encourage users to start a new streak.

Key Benefits of Braze Audience Sync

Get more mileage out of your first-party data, adapt to a cookieless future, enhance your paid marketing personalization, and step up your cross-channel marketing outcomes with Braze Audience Sync. Find out how this feature can help advance your advertising efforts on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more.

#1: Save on advertising costs and boost your return on ad spend (ROAS) by suppressing irrelevant ads, such as by eliminating customers from campaign audiences once they’ve completed a desired conversion or high-value action.

#2: Increase your customer lifetime value. Research from the Braze 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review finds that companies with a cross-channel customer engagement strategy see 94% higher lifetime value from their customers, compared to those that don’t.

#3: Use your company’s owned first-party data to build custom advertising audiences for retargeting across key advertising networks.

#4: Launch more relevant, personalized ads based on customers’ behavioral triggers, customer segmentation, and when customers reach key stages within the customer journey.

#5: Save time on building ad campaigns by automatically reaching the right advertising audiences. No more manually exporting audience lists from your database and uploading them to ad platforms. With Braze Audience Sync, instantly determine which customers should receive ad campaigns within the Braze platform’s Canvas Flow customer journey orchestration tool.

#6: Complement and expand on existing cross-channel customer engagement efforts by using paid channels in addition to owned channels, such as push notifications, SMS, email, and in-app and in-browser messaging.

#7: Integrate your owned and paid customer engagement efforts, making it possible to understand the full impact of all of your channels and optimize each.

#8: Connect with users you can’t reach via other channels. With Braze Audience Sync, you can leverage paid marketing to get in touch with customers who are non-responsive on other channels or have unsubscribed from receiving your campaigns.

#9: Acquire new customers who are similar to your existing high-value customers using the Braze platform’s 100+ pre-built dynamic segmentation filters. Expand your customer reach among your target audience by harnessing your brand’s first-party customer engagement data from Braze alongside advertising platforms’ native audience matching capabilities.

3 Key Use Cases for Braze Audience Sync

To see the advantages of Braze Audience Sync in action, let’s walk through a few sample use cases from three different fictional brands across the categories of retail, financial services, and health and lifestyle.

#1: Integrating owned and paid channels to boost sales

Instead of relying solely on owned channels like SMS to encourage sales and conversions, marketers at Flash & Thread use Braze Audience Sync to amplify the reach of their promotional campaigns. First, they send an email marketing campaign to select customer segments, then wait a few days to see who engages. As a next step, they then follow up with customers that don’t end up engaging with the email campaign via targeted ads that appear on major social platforms.

This is a great way to tap your powerful first-party data to reach users where they are—and where they’re engaging.

#2: Finding new customers who look and act like your company’s existing high-value customers

The customer engagement team at financial services firm Pyrite Financial has a wealth of insights about their customers’ interests, behaviors, and activity and what separates high-value users from the rest. By utilizing this first-party data via Braze Audience Sync, the brand can reach similar high-value users right at the moment they’re looking for a new bank on a platform like Google.

#3: Improving advertising efficiency and boosting ROI

Ever seen an ad for a product, after you’ve already bought it? It’s an annoying—yet all too common—experience, and it’s a waste for advertisers. Since you’ve already converted, that ad spend would be better allocated trying to reach target customers who haven’t yet made the leap.

That’s why in this campaign illustrated here, the marketers at fitness brand Steppington use Braze Audience Sync to control who is on the receiving end of their ad campaigns. For instance, when Tara, a free-trial user, becomes a paid user at the end of her trial period, she is removed from Steppington’s audience for all ads related to upgrading to a paid membership. This elevates Tara’s customer experience and helps Steppington save on ad spend, driving value for both parties.

Want to learn more? Check out Activate Your Data to Unlock ROI.