When we talk about marketing, there’s a tendency to focus on the latest and the hippest tools and tactics out there—the “shiny new toys” of customer engagement, if you will. But while there’s no shame in trying out new tools and tactics, don’t make the mistake of neglecting tried-and-true channels, like email. By using email in marketing campaigns to successfully reach, engage, and convert recipients, brands can boost engagement by 45% and drive ROI of 42x, powering effective outreach that speaks to the people receiving it.

But those kinds of outcomes are only possible if you have the right technology to get the job done. As the evolving expectation of today’s increasingly mobile-first consumers transforms the marketing landscape, it’s essential that email marketing transforms with it to allow brands to continue meeting their customers’ needs. And that means investing in a platform that allows you to speak to every message recipient as an individual.

Luckily, the Braze platform was built to meet this mobile-first moment, making it the ideal ESP for brands looking to provide effective, thoughtful customer engagement campaigns. Here’s why:

1. Real-Time Data Flows

Today’s consumers never stop engaging. With many people carrying their smartphones wherever they go and using a wide array of existing (laptops) and emerging (Connected TVs, smart speakers, etc.) platforms, it’s become essential for brands to engage their audiences where and when they engage—otherwise, they’ll find themselves sending campaigns based on out-of-date information. To do that, you need marketing technologies powered by real-time data.

That’s why real-time, actionable data lies at the heart of any successful email strategy. Unfortunately, most legacy email service providers just aren’t built to provide you with the most up-to-date data; instead, they only update their customer data via intrinsically delayed batch transfers. In a mobile-first world, the current of engagement is fast and never lets up—which means you can’t be working with out of date information.

Braze, on the other hand, is built on a foundation of real-time, streaming data. Instead of processing customer data only when a specific time or threshold is hit, data streaming engines deal with each unit of data individually, allowing for ongoing, in the moment processing of information across different systems. This gives you the most up-to-date view of your audience possible, allowing you to craft email marketing that’s highly relevant at any time of the day.

What does this look like in practice? With the Braze, Overstock was able to highlight specific items that customers had recently viewed or saved—and to let them know when they dropped in price. By using Braze to send these triggered, segmented, cross-channel messages via push and email, Overstock delivered highly relevant, in the moment outreach that made it more likely that customers returned to their website and app while also seeing email open and unique clicks that were 3x and 9x higher than industry benchmarks.

2. Message Personalization

90% of today’s consumers are frustrated when they receive marketing that they find irrelevant. So it stands to reason that part of crafting a modern email marketing strategy means embracing personalization. Instead of the old-school batch-and-blast messaging that legacy ESPs support, you and your team need to lean into dynamic content that easily pulls in information that’s relevant to a specific individual.

Braze accomplishes this through its native personalization capabilities. The Braze platform’s support for Liquid personalization makes it possibly to easily customize emails based on each users’ names, previous app and web engagement, location, preferred language and a lot more. Plus, the Braze Connected Content dynamic personalization feature enables your team to harness content directly from your web server or from publicly accessible APIs and use it to personalize messages in real time, at any scale. It’s a cutting edge personalization tactic that ensures the content your users receive is always timely, relevant, and adds value to their customer experience.

During the COVID-19 crisis, getting relevant information to their users was more important than ever for graphic design platform Canva. To make sure members of the global graphic design community were getting email in the correct language, they used Braze Connected Content to translate their messages and localize them by region—increasing open rates by 33%.

3. Dynamic Segmentation

While many legacy ESPs use static, list-based audiences to help marketers target users, Braze embraces dynamic segmentation. This process leverages the Braze platform’s real-time data to constantly update different groups of users based on whether or not they’ve met certain criteria. For instance, you can use up-to-the-minute data about a user’s app activity to determine if they’re a good audience for your latest email publicizing a new promotion. Without this dynamic updating, you could send an email that’s completely irrelevant.

Showmax, the leading streaming service in Africa, leveraged the Braze platform’s dynamic segmentation capabilities to boost subscribers by 204%, ROI by 37%, retention by 71%, and win-back rate by 12%. The company was able to make it happen by creating tailored cross-channel campaigns (leveraging email, push notifications, and in-app messages) based on each recipient's personal attributes, including lifecycle stage, content preferences, key customer activity, and user characteristics, providing more relevant, more impactful emails and other messages.

4. AMP for Email Support

Big things are afoot when it comes to email innovation. Backed by Google, the rise of AMP for Email is making it possible for marketers to build out rich, dynamic, interactive email marketing campaigns that would have been unimaginable five years ago. And this evolution fits our moment, providing users with the smart, personalized content they crave and allowing them to actively engage with it, all without leaving the inbox.

Braze was one of the first email marketing/customer engagement platforms to support AMP for Email, allowing Braze customer Babylon Health to leverage the interactivity made possible by this powerful new tool to drive stronger email engagement. When Babylon Health launched its new campaign highlighting an interactive, health-related quiz, the innovative approach captured their users’ imagination and drove up engagement, leading to a 56% increase in click through rate.

5. Customer Journey Management and Optimization

Email is powerful, but the conversation you’re having with your users is bigger than any one messaging channel. That’s why it’s so important for you and your team to see the big picture of the customer lifecycle—and to better maximize the impact that every email—and every customer/brand interaction—has for your users and your long-term business goals.

Braze Canvas is the all-in-one tool for your customer journey management, helping you easily visualize, orchestrate, and optimize coordinated email marketing and cross-channel outreach flows. French carpooling platform BlaBlaCar used Braze Canvas to easily test and optimize its email strategy, finding along the way that changing the sender name on their emails led to a whopping 20% uplift in open rate.

6. Cross-Channel Customer Messaging

One of the best ways to enhance your existing email program is to complement the email campaigns you’re already sending with supplemental campaigns in complementary messaging channels. Braze has found that using the right combination of channels in your campaigns can significantly increase engagement—for instance, adding in-app messaging to your email campaign can support a more cohesive, end-to-end customer experience and lead to a 315% increase in engagement.

Thankfully, Braze is built to be natively cross-channel and channel-agnostic, allowing email marketers to easily bolster the impact of their campaigns by leveraging push notifications, in-app messages, web messages, and other supplemental channels within a single interface. In fact, British gym and fitness brand PureGym was able to use the Braze platform’s cross-channel capabilities to power coordinated campaigns that boosted their email conversion rates by 206%.

Final Thoughts

We’re living in a challenging, rapidly-shifting marketing environment. To make the most of your email marketing efforts, you need an ESP that’s built to support the kind of time-sensitive, highly relevant campaigns that today’s consumers crave. Braze is that platform. To learn more about the Braze platform’s powerful email services, check out the Braze Email Product Page.