Published on April 15, 2020/Last edited on April 15, 2020/4 min read
In today’s tech-driven world, digital calendars—think Outlook or Google Calendar—have come to play an increasingly big role in the average person’s daily life. From influencing the course of our days at the office in 30 minute chunks to helping us make the fullest use of our free time, these key tools influence the way that we think about time and how we choose to spend it.
It’s long been true that brands looking to successfully engage their customers have needed to be conscious of time and the impact it can have on their marketing efforts. And from respecting time zones when sending push notifications to adjusting outreach timing based on users’ individual preferences, technology has made it possible for brands to be more thoughtful, considerate and “human” in the ways that they reach out.
To continue that progress and to allow brands to better engage customers in today’s digital calendar-driven world, Braze is pleased to announce a new integration with dynamic calendar marketing technology Rokt Calendar. By using Braze and Rokt Calendar in tandem, brands can seamlessly add calendaring to their cross-channel marketing mix.
Rokt Calendar allows brands to connect with customers through calendar notifications, keeping them excited and engaged about what’s coming up, from events to exclusive promotions. Because calendar notifications maintain the top spot of the mobile lock screen—and because calendar notifications are enabled by default on all smartphones—this channel can be an effective one for reaching and engaging members of your audience.
By combining those capabilities with the power of the Braze platform, marketing, growth, and engagement teams can now extend their existing messaging channel mix by adding conversational, personalization messages delivered to their users’ calendars. Integrating the two platforms allows Rokt Calendar subscribers and their associated subscription data to be leveraged within Braze in order to segment users based on whether they’re calendar subscribers—and deliver messages in the form of calendar events and notifications. From one-off calendar-based communications to including calendar invites in your cross-channel customer journeys, this partnership supports more complete, holistic engagement capabilities for brands worldwide.
What does that look like?
The Braze/Rokt Calendar partnership makes it possible for companies that hold regular events to increase brand affinity, bolster content discovery, and increase customer engagement via users’ phone and computer calendars.
For retail brands looking to hold in-store events, it’s now possible to inform customers about an upcoming event with a push notification—then send interested users a calendar hold for the event triggered by their click on the message’s call-to-action. And for health and fitness companies that run daily classes, this integration allows the brand to automatically adjust the timing of calendar invites for customers at scale when there’s an instructor out sick or some other unexpected hiccup.
While some brands depend exclusively on consumers engaging with their app or website in unscheduled, ad hoc ways, there are a lot of companies where their audience’s interactions are fundamentally driven by the clock...and the calendar. For these brands, the Braze/Rokt Calendar integration gives them another powerful way to keep customers engaged around time-sensitive events and experiences.
For sports and entertainment brands, that could mean using Braze in tandem with Rokt Calendar to nudge fans to sync their digital calendars with your game or episode schedule—and then automatically send them reminders to tune in minutes before your content airs. Travel and hospitality brands, on the other hand, could use the partnership to more seamlessly share travel alerts and itinerary updates straight to the calendars of affected travelers, while also pairing messaging about relevant future offers and reward points expiration dates with calendar invites.
While every brand is different, if your company does any time-sensitive marketing, it may make sense to leverage Rokt Calendar together with Braze. This partnership allows marketing, growth, and engagement teams to align their personalized marketing initiatives and extend personalized content to each end user’s calendar, providing a more seamless, more holistic user experience.
Looking to get started? Check out our Braze Alloys partnership hub or dig deep into Braze documentation on Rokt Calendar.