May 2019 Product Update: New Platforms and Channels and Partners—Oh My!

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 some of our new features and updates:

Content Cards

Seasoned Braze users may have experience with News Feed Cards—the very first messaging product built here at Braze. While trusted and true, we’re happy to announce the release of a new and improved product: Content Cards. This key new messaging channel will utilize the same robust delivery, targeting, and personalization features that exist within our other first-class channels.

Our documentation site utilizes Content Cards to give our users easy access to and keep them up-to-date on the latest and greatest from Braze!

With Content Cards, you can send a highly targeted, dynamic stream of rich content to your customers right within your app or website, all without interrupting their experience. Or you can pair Content Cards with other channels, like email or push notifications, to enable cohesive marketing strategies. In addition, Content Cards give marketers and consumers alike more control over this channel by supporting card pinning, card dismissal, API-based delivery, custom card expiration times, and card analytics.

Content Cards help bolster other messaging channels to make a more cohesive messaging strategy. In order to get started with Content Cards, reach out to your account manager for more details.

Roku for data enrichment

As the digital landscape evolves, one of the biggest trends out there is the rise of over-the-top or OTT platforms. At their core, OTT platforms are about giving consumers and brands ways to do things without having to rely on a given device’s built-in capabilities. It’s given us OTT messaging platforms like Braze Alloys technical partner Facebook Messenger, and OTT media platforms like Apple TV. And as digital consumers broaden their footprint into channels like Roku—one of the key players in the streaming device market—brands have to stay on top of these emerging technologies to ensure they’ve got an accurate view of their customers.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that we have launched an open beta for Roku within the Braze platform. By including Roku as a data enrichment source, Braze users now have the option to ingest data directly from Roku devices and use them to gain a better understanding of user behavior on this key platform. With this new feature, you can track custom attributes and events related to user behavior on a Roku device, such as when a user has watched content, how long they watched for, when they started or ended their session, etc.

All customers are eligible to participate in the Roku open beta. To get started, Braze users will need to integrate Braze’s new Roku SDK.

Campaign/Canvas Notifications Update

Trying to foster transparency & awareness across your organization? We feel you. That’s why we’ve expanded our Notification Preferences to include a Campaign/Canvas Updated email notification. This notification alerts Braze users whenever a Campaign/Canvas is activated, updated, reactivated, or deactivated.

Jampp

We’re excited to share one of our latest Braze Alloys technical partners—Jampp: a performance marketing platform for acquiring and retargeting mobile users! The Jampp partnership enables Braze customers to add richer data sets to their retargeting initiatives within the mobile advertising ecosystem.

In-App Messaging Campaign Update

The latest update to our in-app messaging capabilities allows Braze users to select which platforms their in-app messages are delivered to––either mobile apps, web browsers, or both. This update will make it easier for Braze users to select which platforms to deliver to before creating the messages, and will not impact previously built campaigns.

Currents Email Events Update

Braze Currents, our high-volume data export tool, allows users to export data from the Braze platform for further analysis. As part of our ongoing enhancement to our Currents capabilities, we're adding “dispatch_id” as a field to Currents email events across all connector types.

What does this mean? The “dispatch_id” is the unique id generated for each transmission—or, dispatch—sent from the Braze platform. And while all customers who are sent a scheduled message get the same “dispatch_id,” customers who receive either action-based or API triggered messages will get a unique “dispatch_id” per message. The “dispatch_id” field enables you to identify which instance of a recurring campaign is responsible for a particular conversion, providing you with more nuanced insights and information on which types of campaigns are helping move the needle on your business goals.

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.