Are you sending your customers generic, batch and blast, one-size-fits-all messages? You might want to reconsider. 90% of today’s consumers express frustration when they receive outreach from brands that they find irrelevant, meaning that sending these messages runs the risk of irritating—or even driving away—your audience.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With the right strategy and the right tools, marketing, growth, and engagement teams can personalize messages at scale, allowing them to serve up highly relevant, tailored experiences to their customers, campaign after campaign. So let’s take a look at one of those essential tools—the Braze platform’s Connected Content feature—and how leading brands are leveraging it to make their personalization dreams a reality.

What Is Connected Content?

Braze Connected Content is a real-time personalization tool that makes it possible for brands to customize their cross-channel campaigns—those sent via email, in-app, push, and more—with personalized information from the company's own internal servers, as well as from third-party APIs. Some of the most common types of Connected Content campaigns include those populated with information from:

• Recommendation engines. Purchase or content suggestions based on individual and aggregate customer behavior.

• Localized weather. Real-time weather information from sources like Braze Alloys technology partner AccuWeather.

• Other public, third-party APIs. The most relevant information from news outlets like the New York Times, event platforms like Eventbrite, finance information from industry sources like Yahoo! Finance, health updates from agencies like the FDA, and more.

Connected Content: How It Support Personalization for Real-Life Brands

Knowing that personalization tools like Connected Content are out there is one thing; knowing how to use it effectively is something else altogether. To help you start thinking about how you can leverage this kind of feature to support exceptional, customized brand experiences, let’s take a look at two real brands that have taken advantage of Connected Content to more effectively reach their audience.

1. Supporting Personalized Cross-Channel Engagement for Payomatic

Payomatic, New York's largest provider of check cashing and financial services, was looking to embrace digital customer engagement to transform its traditional brick-and-mortar business. To make that possible, Payomatic leaned on Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, to consolidate customer data in one place and on Braze to take action on that data in meaningful ways.

With all their customer data usable and at their fingertips, Payomatic was able to use machine learning to build on a 360-degree view of their users and then act on that view by sending personalized cross-channel messaging campaigns to support their onboarding and re-engagement efforts. The emails and in-app messages sent by Payomatic used Braze Connected Content to dynamically update message content via API, supporting a more relevant, more personalized brand experience for their customers. Through these tactics, Payomatic was able to increase mobile app engagement by 11% and a 32% uplift in direct deposit via app.

Final Thoughts

As personalized experiences become more central to today’s customer engagement programs, brands need to be thoughtful about ensuring they have the right data, tools, and tactics to provide the tailored messages that consumers crave. To learn more about message customization and how to make it work for your brand, check out The Power of Personalization.