With some brands, it feels like they really know you as a person. But creating that relationship starts with developing a customer engagement strategy—one that’s focused on allowing your brand to speak to your audience as individuals, in ways that show you truly understand their wants and needs and can help to meet them. One key tool that can help make that happen? Liquid personalization.

What Is Liquid, Anyway?

It’s not enough for a marketer to want to personalize a message; they need the technology to make it happen. For many marketers, Liquid is that tool. This open-source templating language, originally created by Shopify, allows brands to easily add any recipient’s personal details—from membership status to total number of loyalty points to recently shared articles or watched shows—into emails, mobile push notifications, web push messages, and more.

How Can Brands Leverage Liquid Personalization?

The possibilities and use cases for liquid are endless. Some of the most common liquid-powered personal attributes brands use to personalize their messaging include:

1. Basic Customer Details

• Name (e.g. first, last)
• Contact information (e.g. email address, phone number, mailing address)
• Birthday
• Account activity

These simple details can do a lot to add a personal touch to your message when they’re used effectively. That said, they’re best used as the first step toward a personalization program, not the final stage.

2. Email Subscriber Details

• Email list subscribed To
• Subscriber status

Leveraging these data points in messages can help to remind subscribers what messages they’ve signed up for and encourage them to self-personalize their outreach experience via preference center.

3. Custom Attributes and Events

• Reward point balance
• Recently viewed items
• Highest level achieved
• Abandoned shopping cart

These kinds of information can support activity-based campaigns—such as the classic ecommerce abandoned cart notification—that provide timely, relevant notifications that are triggered by (and speak to) individual customer actions. For instance, you might reward a gamer for finishing their latest round with a record high score.

4. Language Preferences

With Liquid, you can also send different versions of a message based on a given recipient’s preferred language—allowing brands to build a single campaign and then deliver it automatically in dozens of different languages.

All of these options and more are available through the Braze customer engagement platform. Braze client Delivery Hero, for instance, is powering its smart, relevant messaging with language personalization in 40+ countries across the globe to drive engagement.

The Engagement Effect of Liquid and Personalization

Liquid makes it possible to send important information without requiring a heavy lift or strain on your development resources. Simply insert basic lines of code called liquid tags into your campaigns, and you'll be set, and ready to start seeing the benefits—namely stronger engagement.

For a minimal amount of effort, you should expect to see positive impacts on your messaging metrics, such as an uptick in open rates. In fact, Braze research has found that brands can see an increase of as much as 225%!

Before Getting Started with Liquid

You can’t personalize a message with data that you failed to collect. The only way to successfully build out and send messages that leverage the information highlighted above is to ensure that you’re taking steps to build out a cohesive data collection program. (And, of course in the age of GDPR and data privacy, part of that effort is explaining to your users what information you want to collect and how you’ll use it to benefit them.)

At the planning phase, all your internal teams involved with your messaging and personalization efforts should agree upon what your company's strategy will be for:

• Data management: Which systems—owned and third-party—will store your customer data and how will the information be streamed between different layers of your technology stack? (Ideally, your brand will be able to manage this data in real time.)
• Data collection: What data matters? How will you ask for customer information in a thoughtful, non-intrusive manner? Ultimately this will come down to whether the details you're considering asking for will enable better communications and experiences for customers. What are your goals for data collection and how will you measure them?
• Data privacy: What is (or will be) your company's game plan for ensuring compliance with GDPR and other relevant regulations?

Next Steps

Liquid is a key component of personalization. Gartner has predicted that companies that invest in a holistic approach to personalization will be able to outsell brands that don't by more than 30%. So now's the right time to start applying personalization approaches that can make a difference. Get started with our guide "The Power Behind the Message: The Nuts and Bolts of Effective Personalization."

If your company is already using Braze and you’re ready to take your personalization efforts to the next level with liquid, check out our Learning at Braze (LAB) and our exclusive Personalization with Liquid eCourse.