Personalize Every Experience for Every Shopper With Braze and Shopify

Personalization is key for retail and eCommerce success. Today’s customers expect shopping experiences that are tailored to their unique preferences, with 80% reporting that they want personalization from retailers. And until recently, brands relied on third-party data to power these experiences. However, over the past two years, privacy-related changes driven by tech giants like Apple and Google have led to an industry-wide shift toward the use of first-party data instead.

What Is First-Party Data?

First-party data is information that is collected directly from a brand’s audience. Compared to third-party data, which is aggregated by outside organizations, first-party data is not only more reliable, but also makes it easier to comply with privacy regulations. Given the benefits, more brands than ever are embracing first-party data as the future of personalization.

While first-party data does create new opportunities to connect with customers, it also brings new challenges, particularly when it comes to gathering and analyzing information. Retail and eCommerce brands need strategies to effectively reach, engage, and retain customers across both digital and in-person experiences. And that requires you to collect customer-related data from your:

• eCommerce platform (like Shopify)
• Website
• App
• Messages (like emails, push notifications, etc.)

But simply collecting that data isn’t enough. Brands need a tech stack where data can move seamlessly from solution to solution in real time. Customer data degrades quickly, and unless you act on it in the moment, it may soon be outdated. This can lead to broken experiences that leave customers angry and frustrated.

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to build a tech stack that meets the modern retailer’s needs. By combining the Braze platform with Shopify, brands can leverage the first-party eCommerce data they need to deliver personalized experiences in real time.

How Braze and Shopify Support Personalized Consumer Experiences

To understand the value of integrating Braze with Shopify, you first need to get a handle on the capabilities that both of these solutions make possible on their own.

1. Braze for Engagement

Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant and memorable experiences between customers and the brands they love. With Braze, brands can instantly interact with customers by triggering personalized emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and more—all based on their behaviors and preferences.

2. Shopify for eCommerce

Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that provides online stores and retail point-of-sale systems the tools they need to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. It includes out-of-the box SEO tools, analytics, messaging features, and more. Shopify makes it easy to deliver better shopping experiences to consumers everywhere.

What’s Possible When Braze and Shopify Are Used Together

By integrating Braze with Shopify, it’s possible to supercharge customer experiences using real-time customer data, supporting better customer relationships and stronger marketing performance. Using these technologies together, brands can:

• Deliver personalized customer experiences using real-time Shopify data
• Orchestrate communications across all marketing channels
• Optimize campaigns and customer journeys to boost sales and customer retention rates

Once Braze is integrated with your Shopify account, you can take advantage of the Braze platform’s engagement tools, which include:

• Real-Time Segmentation. Use the Braze platform’s real-time data streaming architecture to segment your audience based on whether users have carried out certain actions, like whether a customer has placed an order or how many times they place orders in a given window.
• Campaign and Customer Journey Triggers. Use Shopify events to create path-to-purchase campaigns and Canvases (Braze-powered customer journeys) across multiple channels, supporting real-time campaigns like abandoned cart conversion campaigns, post-purchase retargeting, and cross-sell/upsell outreach based on previous purchases from a Shopify storefront.
• Transactional Messaging. Engage with customers via automatic ordering and fulfillment messaging flows based on user actions, allowing you to keep them informed and engaged as they move through your brand’s customer lifecycle and ensuring they’re always informed regarding when orders are fully paid, returned, or updated.

Best of all, the Braze/Shopify integration is marketer-friendly and easy to set up. All you need to do is locate Shopify within the Braze dashboard, install the Shopify application, and verify completion. No coding necessary!

Final Thoughts

By integrating Braze with Shopify, you can transform Shopify data into personalized, real-time customer experiences in scaleable, sustainable ways. This empowers you to drive relevant, timely messaging across the full range of messaging channels, all while reaping the rewards of a customer-centric approach.