These 5 things will revolutionise how you implement Braze

Customer engagement platforms are amazing. When you think about what you can achieve: the customer connections you can make, the consistent messaging you can deliver and the depth of insight you can unlock, it really is transformative! Braze is a key player in this area, and when it’s implemented thoughtfully and considerately will pay you back in bounds. 

Shaw/Scott Europe are specialists in supporting clients across sectors through their Braze journey. Understanding a platform will help you to get the best from it, so here are our key things to remember when you’re setting out.

1.  Target smart, not hard

Yes, a great campaign spans multiple channels. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-communication. This can leave your customers with message fatigue and a drop in engagement.

Our advice: Manage how often users hear from you across channels with frequency caps. You can do this globally or by tag. When your users do hear from you, it needs to be the right message in the best format. Campaign prioritisation, for example through Intelligent Channel filtering will keep this pin-point accurate. 

2.  Reporting keeps you relevant

How do you evolve your offering to stay ahead of the competition? By understanding what’s working and what’s not, and the way to do this is with smarter reporting.

Our advice: Standard Braze reporting doesn’t always capture the performance of personalised content. Use tags within Message Extras to identify variations of content, which will help you to break down engagement data.

3.  Test to the max

Liquid content is fantastic for personalisation, but when it stutters it can cause more harm than good. Think about missing brackets or null values – they don’t look great!

Our advice: Establish a robust testing process. Mirror real data by creating custom users and dummy profiles. Use Postman for small-scale live testing and make sure you include fallback values.

4.  Rules not made to be broken

Everything is more straightforward if you have set out conventions from the outset. The flexibility and scope of Braze is powerful but can end up in confusion if your rules are inconsistent.

Our advice: Set clear standards across areas like Campaign, Custom Attributes, and Segments from day one. This should include intuitive naming conventions and casing rules that are easy to follow.

5.  Keep your journey on track

A canvas journey can so easily go from being straightforward and intuitive to convoluted and frustrating for the user. As you keep adding more steps, delays, and rules to the flow of messages, it can become harder to test and improve.

Our advice: When you’re making big changes to a journey, create a new version instead of editing the original. If you want to stop new people from entering the journey without affecting users already going through it, set a rule at the beginning that no one qualifies for. For example, user_id equals XXX.

If there’s one common factor amongst all our tips, it’s that planning and understanding is key to getting the best out of Braze. This is true whatever platform you’re using; remember that any technology is only as good as the information that it is fed.

At Shaw/Scott Europe, our years of experience in Braze and platforms like it, makes us ideally placed to enable your organisation to get off the best possible start. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help you.