April 2025 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Neighborly’s Kayla Upton

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Kayla Upton, Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation at Neighborly®, a family of global home services brands focused on being remarkable with consumers and franchise owners. Let’s dive in.

Tell us about your background and the role you’re in now.

I grew up moving around quite a bit, mostly in small West Texas towns, which taught me how to adapt quickly and embrace new challenges—skills that have been incredibly valuable in my career. Over time, email marketing snowballed into multiple channels and a focus on the greater MarTech landscape. I spent the first half of my career in auto finance, leading my first platform migration and quickly discovering that I had a knack for the technical and functional aspects of marketing automation. Solving complex problems, building sophisticated solutions, and optimizing systems became my passion. I went on to work in a corporate retail oil and gas role, playing a big part in their loyalty rewards app program, where I had my first experience with Braze. I’ve worked in more platforms than I can probably count, but I really fell in love with the Braze platform’s in-product capabilities and incredibly rich data ecosystem. It has enabled me to create things I couldn’t have imagined building in traditional marketing automation and CRM platforms.

In my current role, I’ve had the pleasure of bringing these possibilities to the home services industry. While every role and company has its own unique set of puzzles to solve, I thrive in building custom solutions that feel specialized and endlessly expansive at the same time. I feel very fortunate to have found a career path that combines my strengths with my passions, allowing me to continuously grow and make an impact.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Honestly, my favorite part of my job is the creative problem-solving it demands. There’s something really satisfying about diving into a brain-busting challenge and figuring out how to make things work better, faster, or more efficiently. Whether it’s building a new customer journey, optimizing an automation workflow, or brainstorming ways to use our tools in unexpected ways, I love turning ideas into reality.

One thing I really enjoy is how varied my day-to-day work can be. One day I could be helping the team launch a new canvas, and the next day I could be focused on detailed analysis and data design. We’re in the process of moving our native app offers into Braze Content Cards™, using a combination of Braze Catalogs and Connected Content to customize offers for all brands in a user’s zip code. We hope to grow this into a function that will eventually give our franchise owners the ability to control which offers are shown at their own discretion, essentially removing the human intervention that’s required in our current process and helping our franchisees deliver personalized promotions that match the needs of their local markets.

By leveraging the Braze platform’s robust data and automation features, we are able to create more relevant and timely experiences, which has been a game-changer for our results. Plus, I love collaborating with different teams—it’s so rewarding to see everyone’s efforts come together to bring a campaign to life. It’s a role that keeps me on my toes and constantly learning.

How long have you been using Braze?

I’ve been using Braze for a total of about 3.5 years across two companies. In my previous role, I leveraged Braze to power a mobile app loyalty program, which was a great introduction to the platform’s capabilities for driving engagement and retention. Now, in my current role at Neighborly, we’re using Braze to support 15 brands on multiple channels. While email is currently the main channel since we just completed our migration to Braze, we’ve also incorporated our mobile SDK and just launched our first Content Cards, with in-app messaging and push notifications closely following suit. It’s amazing to see how quickly we’re expanding our use of the platform to create more connected experiences for our customers and franchisees.

What company goals are you focused on, and how do you prioritize them?

This year, a big focus for me has been enhancing our marketing tech stack and expanding what we can do with it. One of the most impactful projects I’ve worked on was this migration. It wasn’t just about moving platforms—it was about rethinking how we structure our data to make sure everything flows seamlessly and gives us the insights we need. It was a huge team effort, but it’s been worth it to see how it’s setting us up for a lot of future success.

Our team has been hard at work identifying high-impact opportunities, like lifecycle marketing programs and triggered campaigns, to create more relevant and timely experiences for our customers. Just a few months into launching the platform, we already have 28 canvases and hundreds of campaigns live, with an impressive 50+ new journeys on the roadmap for 2025. We’re also really excited about growing our channels to include in-app, push notifications, SMS, and audience sync for our digital teams. Although we’re still in the early stages of using Braze, it’s already opening up so many new possibilities for how we connect with our audience.

To keep everything on track, I’ve been leaning heavily on data to figure out where we can make the biggest impact, working closely with stakeholders to align on priorities, and relying on very solid project management support to keep us moving in the right direction. It’s been a busy year, but seeing the results—whether it’s better campaign performance, stronger customer engagement, or just smoother processes—has made it all worth it.

What has your experience working with the Braze team been like?

My experience with the Braze team and the larger community has been unmatched! The first time I partnered with Braze, I had such close working relationships with everyone on our customer success team that I actually stayed in touch with most of them even after moving on from that role. In fact, our current account executive was someone I met through my former CSM, and he pointed me to the role I’m in now. (A special thanks to him!)

I got to attend Forge for the first time last year and really enjoyed meeting members of our new Customer Success team in person. Everyone at Braze has been phenomenal to work with over the years because they’re some of the brightest (and funniest) people I’ve encountered in my career. And I could easily say the same about other Braze customers—I personally love the Bonfire community because it’s a great resource to tap into when you need some out-of-the-box, hacker-esque ideas to solve uncommon problems. It’s just a wonderful place to share inspiration with like-minded martech experts.

Tell us about a time you used Braze to do something creative.

One of the most creative challenges I tackled with Braze was our very first email campaign for the IP warm-up, which we launched in early November 2024. If warming up a new IP wasn’t challenging enough, we wound up launching on election day while also trying to establish a new sender reputation mere days before Black Friday inbox traffic took over (no pressure.) The biggest hurdle we face in most cases is the sheer number of brands we support at the national level. We typically communicate with our customers from the individual franchise brands they’ve used for their home services rather than the Neighborly parent company name. This meant that we needed to find a way to ensure the campaign still had that familiarity without having to split the segments into 15 additional brand groups each day of the 14-day warming period.To solve this, we leveraged the Braze platform’s dynamic content capabilities to personalize three key areas of the email: The “From” name and email address, the header logo, and the footer. We created a Content Block for every section, each with 15 if/else statements, that dynamically populated the brand associated with each customer. Using Liquid, these blocks were then pulled into a single email template that we used for the entire ramp-up period. This approach allowed us to maintain brand recognition while simplifying the process of managing multiple brands in one campaign.

What made this campaign even more exciting was that it was the first time we incorporated deep links to our mobile app from an email, essentially leveraging one channel to drive traffic to another. This allowed us to track not only email engagement and deliverability, but also app sessions in real time. It might seem like a small feat, but bringing our two channels together in one place was something we just never had before. The launch was not only successful in establishing a strong sender reputation for our new domains but also drove awareness and adoption of our mobile app, a centralized hub where customers can explore all Neighborly brands. Right out of the gate, it showcased how the Braze platform’s customizable, dynamic capabilities can solve intricate challenges while driving multiple business goals in one cohesive effort.Since the launch, we’ve achieved many more milestones, but we’re especially excited about the initiatives already in progress that we’ll be rolling out in the very near future.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.