March 2019 Product Update: Ask–Don’t Guess–How Customers Want To Engage

At Braze, we’re focused on building the best customer engagement platform out there, supporting brilliant messaging experiences across devices, channels, and platforms. What does that mean for you? That we’re constantly innovating and improving our product so that you never miss out on an opportunity to connect with your customers.

We’ve been busy at work to ensure that we deliver the best new features to our loyal customers. Check out what we’ve released in the past few months:

Google Cloud Storage

Data agility is essential to successful marketing. Customers expect brilliant experiences that are coherent across all of today’s platforms and channels. In order to create these seamless experiences, data must stream effortlessly, and in real time. To that end, we’ve partnered with Google to offer a Braze Currents connector to Google Cloud Storage! What’s more, our partnership with Google Cloud Storage reaffirms our commitment to multicloud hosting.

Google Cloud Storage is a massively scalable object storage for unstructured data offered by Google as part of the Cloud Computing product suite. Stream events using our Braze Currents high volume data export tool directly into Google Cloud Storage, where you can then use ETL processes (Extract, Transform, Load) to transfer your data to other locations, such as Google Bigquery.

Email Preference Center

When it comes to email communications, everyone has different preferences. While some customers enjoy receiving all brand communications, learning the latest and the greatest about new products and exciting offers, others may prefer only to receive transactional communication, for example. The Email Preference Center is a core product feature that takes the guessing game out of email marketing and allows your customers to self select what’s most valuable to them — especially when they click “unsubscribe.”

When sending out multiple categories of email campaigns, you can now offer your customers more customized groups to subscribe or unsubscribe from within a single page, using our Email Preference Center. Customers arrive at the Preference Center form from a unique URL that is generated at the time of send and are then able to update their subscription state depending on the types of emails they’d like to receive.

Subscription Groups

So, now that you’re allowing customers to self select their preferences, you’ve got some organically formed segments—Subscription Groups! Subscription Groups are the segment filters that can further narrow your audience from the Global Subscription States: Opted-in, Subscribed, and Unsubscribed. These Groups allow you to offer more granular subscription options to your customers, ensuring that they receive the types of emails they find most useful.

Note that there are other pathways for entry into Subscription Groups—customers can be entered into these groups either by API or by self-selecting within the preference center form.

Monitor the health of your different subscription groups via trend analysis for state changes across your App Group, available for download via CSV file.

Braze Alloys Spotlight: Inkit

Connect your direct mail and digital messages in one unified location using our newly launched partnership with Inkit! Inkit is a direct mail automation software that helps you engage with online customers in the offline world. With the Braze/Inkit partnership, you can integrate personalized postcards, letters, and more into your lifecycle marketing campaigns as easily as you would send an email using the Inkit webhook template.

Anything else?

Keep checking back here to stay up to date on releases, updates, and announcements now, and throughout the rest of the year. In the meantime, subscribe to Braze Magazine for the latest on customer engagement trends, emerging tech, and marketing strategy and best practices.