At Braze, we’re focused on building the best customer engagement platform, enabling brilliant messaging experiences across devices, channels, and platforms. What does that mean for you? We’re constantly innovating and improving upon our product so that you never miss out on an opportunity to connect with your customers.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this month:

Cross-Channel Personalization

Push Notifications & Badges

Push notifications are an important part of a personalized experience, but let’s face it, even the perfect push with the perfect campaign supporting it can’t predict every little detail of your customers’ hustling, bustling days—messages could come during a coffee with an old friend, an important meeting at work, or just during a good nap. In other words, despite your best efforts, there will be times when your customers don’t see or don’t get to your push immediately.

But there’s a whole lot more to engaging and connecting with your customers than just push. Badges—those visual indicators that let you know how many notifications, voicemails or other messages you have waiting in a particular app or—are an under-utilized feature on mobile for interacting with and notifying your customers of important news, updates, or moments for your brand.

Like any other channel, badges need to be accurate and personalized to the user. It can be just as frustrating to have a badge on an app saying you have 6 new messages no matter how many times you check your inbox, as it is to check your inbox on your own and realize you’ve missed out on a great sale or promotion. We’ve made it easier for you to create great mobile experiences by providing flexibility for setting alerts for iOS Badges. Now, you can ensure that your customers get the most personalized, accurate badge notifications. We also allow for more advanced needs through liquid templating and custom attributes.

Email

Email is a tried and true channel for lifecycle engagement. It’s an especially great channel for longer-form, informative information, and it’s a perfect opportunity for personalization through dynamic content. We’ve made creating and sending customized emails easier with Email Template APIs and an upgrade to our “Classic” Email Editor.

In an effort to make your email marketing an even better experience, we’ve added a REST API endpoint so you can create and update email templates stored within Braze, empowering you to automate more of your email workflows. Grab more information on our two new REST API endpoints here.

Additionally, we’ve improved our platform’s “Classic” Email Editor, making it easier for you to copy and paste HTML. That means that you can be sure that your emails are being created and sent the way you want, even when you’re in a hurry.

Data Agility and Management

Data is essential to brilliant experiences—collecting, measuring, and utilizing it for insights that push and improve your marketing. Currents, our data streaming tool, powers those insights. We’ve added further functionality to Currents, allowing you to dive deeper into metrics and customize how you use this powerful tool to drive better outcomes and a more engaging brand experience for your customers.

To give you more visibility into your data, we’ve added a time graph of Currents events exported to your dashboard.

We’ve also added more flexibility to Currents by allowing more customization of your settings with our Amazon S3 connector integration. Now, you can determine not only where your data is stored, but control how and when you use encryption, giving you the agency you need to meet your unique security needs.

Anything else?

Check back in to stay up to date on releases, updates, and announcements now, and throughout the rest of the year. In the meantime, check out our new and improved Braze Quarterly Roundup to see what we’ve been up to as a company.