Founded in 2019 with headquarters in Stockholm, Memmo is one of the biggest marketplaces for personalized video messages from celebrities. I spoke with one member of the Memmo team, Arso Risteski, Senior Manager, CRM, to learn how Braze supports the global company's localization strategy and customer engagement efforts on the B2C side, celebrity side, and B2B side. Risteski shared the channels the company is using and considering adding to the mix, how the brand's KPIs have improved since teaming up with Braze, and how other marketers can get the most out of the Braze customer engagement platform.*

Tell me about Memmo and your business strategy. The company operates across several countries, using a localized approach. What does that look like?

We're a global company with a hyper-local offering. Memmo has really taken off over the past couple of years—growing both in terms of new markets and company headcount.

We have a wide variety of consumer offerings—video greetings for birthdays or celebrations, AMA-style videos, anything you can think of. While there are similar US-based offerings available, what differentiates Memmo is our large focus on providing customers with access to local celebrities. So take Germany, for example—we have a lot of football players from the local teams on our platform that people outside of Germany likely haven’t heard of.

We also have a business offering where companies can request celebrity videos for marketing and CRM purposes. For instance, companies can use our platform to get a celebrity to endorse their brand and create a customized video that can then be emailed to that company's subscribers to drive engagement and retention. We have sales and account management teams in all of the markets where we're live to support those efforts on the B2B side.

And how do you use Braze to support your localization efforts?

Braze enables us to centralize all of our outbound communications, so we can enjoy a complete view of our entire CRM strategy across our different channels and markets in one place.

In the past, we had to create multiple campaigns—one for each market. Whereas now with the help of Braze features, including Connected Content [the Braze dynamic content personalization tool] and API services, we can produce our email copy in English, send it to our translation agency, and automatically pull the translated copy using Connected Content in Braze to create one centralized campaign and distribute that to our different markets. This helps us save time while ensuring consistency in our messaging—something that used to be a challenge with our previous solutions.

Tell us about the different channels you use to engage with your customers.

We use email as our main channel for engaging with the consumer side of the business to convert newsletter subscribers to paying customers, and paying customers to retained customers. We've been using emails since Memmo launched, and we've just started discovery efforts to add more channels and increase engagement. We all know that SMS is highly impactful with sky-high open rates and click-through rates, and with that, of course, conversions, so we've been looking into adding this channel to our communication strategy.

On the celebrity side of the business, we have a mobile app. Originally with that app, we used a different platform for our email marketing and we had basic push functionality built into our admin platform. Now, we've moved our celebrity-facing emails and push notifications to Braze. Beyond that, we have deep linking enabled and we are exploring in-app messages and Content Cards.

For our business clients, we have a business webpage where companies can book celebrity endorsement videos for marketing purposes. When it comes to booking, all of our outreach and scheduling used to be manual. But using Braze, we’ve automated the booking flow to trigger email communications right after somebody submits a request for more information. If the client doesn’t engage with our initial emails, we route them to a lead nurturing flow—allowing us to stay in contact with more companies.

How are you using Braze to personalize the experience for your different audiences?

Before we partnered with Braze, everything was static—we sent the same message to everybody at the same time. Since I've joined the company, we've started experimenting and personalizing everything. For instance, we've seen that whenever we have the chance to use a celebrity name for the “from” name in an email, engagement goes through the roof.

Another example is the actual content in our emails. In the past, you’d place an order, you’d get a welcome series highlighting the same five or six celebrities. Now, we reference data from our user profiles to insert dynamic merchandising and personalized recommendations using Connected Content—helping us deliver a highly customized, unique experience for each user. And the results have been incredible.

Ever since enhancing the personalization of our email campaigns, our click-through rates have increased significantly.

What have been some of your biggest wins with Braze?

These personalization efforts have been a big win, something that was never really done properly here before Braze. Another big win for us as a CRM team has been centralizing all of the CRM efforts, having everything in one place. For a lot of companies, this is a struggle because there are providers that offer email as a service, and some that offer SMS, but it's rare to find a good company that offers all of the channels at once and offers a way to structure channels to work together using the same platform.

Another big win since starting with Braze is that we can now see and analyze our campaign engagement data alongside our user activity and engagement with our product and use Braze campaign data in different analytics platforms, like Snowflake and Amplitude. This enables us to make tactical decisions on messaging treatment, timing, and content.

How has using Braze for your CRM efforts changed your dependence on engineering resources?

Braze enables marketers to build and launch CRM campaigns independently—thus reducing the reliance on engineering and product teams.

Before Braze, it took a lot of effort to create personalized campaigns. Every time we wanted to launch a new campaign, we had to pull a list, upload it to the platform, then to add personalization, an engineer or somebody on the analytics team would need to help pull all of the data, map that out in the email tool, and figure out how to implement it dynamically. But now with Braze, all of these complicated steps can be done seamlessly without involvement from engineers.

What have been some of the key results you've achieved since working with Braze?

Our open rates have increased because we're sending our communications at a more appropriate time for the user, based on learnings. Click-through rates have also increased because we do a lot of A/B testing within our emails, whether that's related to our email design, such as where we place the CTA or how we actually take the users from the email to the website.

We have also been testing dynamic links that automatically apply coupons, which wasn't possible in the past with our other engagement platforms. So right now we can send an email from Memmo, customers can click on the celebrity link, and then a 20% discount will automatically be applied on the site.

Overall, we have seen an increase across various metrics since we started using Braze—open rates, click-through rates, and even purchases.

What advice do you have for other startups using or considering Braze?

First, stay highly engaged during the implementation process to ensure you have all the right data available for campaigns.

Second, it’s OK to start small and add sophistication as you go. Braze has so much functionality that you likely hadn’t even considered using, and if you pace yourself, you can continuously improve your strategy.

Finally, and most importantly, get other teams interested in Braze. Operationalizing collaboration across Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Analytics has helped us tackle core challenges like customer retention. By creating a cross-functional squad that is focused on solving for a single metric, we were able to tackle retention from every angle. Braze is the type of solution that anyone from a non-technical marketer to a developer can get excited about, so use that to your advantage and be the catalyst for change in your organization—it’ll go a long way.

Final Thoughts

Hundreds of innovative small and growing companies like Memmo, WeShare, Quil, Elevate Labs, Doktor24, YNAB, IDAGIO, Branch, and Grover are using Braze to disrupt their categories and achieve success within their industries. See for yourself why Braze is the secret weapon startups turn to to gain a competitive advantage, engage thoughtfully with their users, and ultimately drive business outcomes like user growth, conversions, revenue, retention, and more.

*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.