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Braze

Score8.8 out of 10

194 Reviews and Ratings

What is Braze?

Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.

Braze works for mobile app product-led orgs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it extensively in 2 main ways:

- standardized automated in-life comms once a user has created an account on our app and started their new customer journey

- designing and deploying multi-touch nurture email outreach campaigns to B2C consumer contacts

Pros

  • Canvas feature has been really good for creating customer journey paths and long-term messaging campaigns.
  • They have been addressing feature requests to continue to improve the Canvas feature. One of the simplest but most-handy features is allowing Delay steps wait for a very specific date on a calendar -- so you can plan seasonal campaigns or when you have evergreen-style drip campaigns it allows for avoiding public holidays/etc.
  • The catalog feature provides a lot of use-cases and flexibility for personalizing comms or customizing comms for whitelabeled versions of our standard comms (for our B2B2C scenarios).
  • We use the catalog as a repository of our B2B2C brand info, messaging customization - it basically allows us to offer a whitelabeled configurable version of our optimized automated in-life comms in the branding of our b2b customers.

Cons

  • A master/global exclusion list was 1 weakness of Braze, which they just recently launched a feature for this so is no longer a weakness.
  • Their rep support has been inconsistent - we're likely a moderate-tier customer but have had differing SLA fulfillment in our 4 years as a Braze customer.

Return on Investment

  • We don't have the greatest comms analytics (outside of Braze) - but we know it has improved our Acquired to Activation rate.
  • We don't have the greatest comms analytics (outside of Braze) - but we know it has reduced our Dormant and Churn rates.
  • We don't have the greatest comms analytics (outside of Braze) - but it has increased our user acquisition, which any customer email marketing tool should support.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Intuit Mailchimp and HubSpot CRM

Other Software Used

Holistics, Mixpanel, AppsFlyer, Webflow

Braze Drives Results

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Braze for B2C communications (mainly email & SMS) for brand and shopper marketing across multiple brands. Braze addresses several business problems for us.

1. Personalisation - we tailor messaging based on customer data

2. Unified view of customer - thanks to our integration with Tealium (our CDP), we're able to apply more effective targeting

3. We're able to communicate with our customers on the channels they prefer to be engaged on

Pros

  • Multi channel orchestration - build effective journeys across whichever channels we choose to activate (SMS, email, push notifications)
  • A/B testing - pretty simple to setup and activate e.g. test subject lines or send times
  • Integration with our CDP partner, Tealium - unified view of customer

Cons

  • Can be costly pending on your use cases - e.g. predicative AI features can only be unlocked at a significant cost
  • Reporting (to date) has been disappointing although I see this is about to change based on the latest roadmap developments
  • Consultancy services - consider factoring this in upfront as opposed to an after thought because setup and onboarding can become quite complex if you're new to marketing automation platforms

Return on Investment

  • Since moving from our previous vendor to Braze we've definitely seen a shift in engagement metrics across all brands we've setup. Unique Open Rate has increased by 15%, CTOR has improved by 10% and our unsub rate is the lowest it's ever been at 0.07%
  • We're onboarded and trained additional marketing people who expressed an interested in wanting to activate their own campaigns

Usability

Other Software Used

Tealium Customer Data Hub, Shopify, Meta Business Suite

My Journey with Braze

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Braze as an all in one customer engagement platform for major touchpoints. This cuts across email marketing, SMS, push notifications, in app banners, content cards all automated through Braze. Before now, this would have to be tracked on different platforms but with Braze, I am able to meet my users where they are, track communications with them with detailed reporting, reduce churn across touchpoints and ensure that a user is engaged throughout their lifecycle.

Pros

  • Customer Engagement across various touchpoints
  • Detailed and Custom Reporting
  • Detailed Automations
  • Interactive Landing page set up

Cons

  • I would say more flexibility and options with designing emails
  • Easier way to bulk unsubscribe users

Return on Investment

  • Increased app usage by up to 35%
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Reduced Churn

Usability

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot CRM, ConvertKit, Zoho CRM and Salesforce CRM Analytics

Other Software Used

Stripo, Canva, Amplitude Analytics

Braze review and why you should use Braze

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've used Braze in my past and current job as a way to communicate/ resolve issues for our customers. Braze helps identify marketing tools and allows me to resolve customer issues by looking for their codes, past emails they may have missed.

Pros

  • helps me evolve and keeps me learning new tools to better help my customers
  • keeps the customer engaged with the content we provide/ marketing emails to receive birthday codes and updates

Cons

  • Braze could limit the amount of marketing emails (this is feedback from our customers)
  • as far as the level of ease it took me some time to navigate Braze's website, however, with time I've found it to be easy to learn

Return on Investment

  • Braze helps keep customers engaged and in my opinion keeps them subscribed longer

Usability

Alternatives Considered

MoEngage

Other Software Used

Google Drive

If you can afford it - go for it

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Braze to automate emails and campaigns. We are using catalog to connect with our Data, we us an API within Liquid code to get data directly from our Website and we segment all our different use cases. From Newsletters, Marketing Mails to Onboarding Journey or Activity Mailings. It is a big tool that used around our entire company with more than 50 people.

Pros

  • Orchestration
  • AB Testing
  • Segmentation

Cons

  • Analytics
  • Current Streams
  • Localization Features

Return on Investment

  • Open Rate improvement
  • Click Rate improvement
  • Less Spam/ Higher Reputation Management
  • Higher Tool costs

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Intuit Mailchimp