Exploring the Vertical Stack: The Trouble With Channel Silos

Today’s brands are living in an in-the-moment, technology-driven, mobile-first world—and so are all their customers. To break out of old habits and transform the way you’re speaking to your customers, you need to take a hard look at the technologies supporting your customer engagement efforts.

One key ingredient you may not be leveraging? A vertical engagement stack built on real-time, streaming data. To help you better understand what a vertical stack makes possible and how to leverage it effectively, we’ve put together a seven-part content series exploring all the ins-and-outs. Enjoy!

In the old days—back in the 1970s, that is—there was email. And while many like to say that it’s a dead channel, in reality it still powers significant, meaningful results for brands of all sizes and industries. In fact, Braze research has found that businesses that add email marketing to their customer engagement strategy can see an uptick in engagement of up to 45%. That said, it must have been a marketer who came up with the adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” because the saying applies when it comes to customer outreach and engagement.

When we think back on the early days of digital marketing, many brands put a lot of their eggs in that one channel (or basket) that existed—email marketing. But in the decade-plus since the introduction of the first iPhone back in 2007, we’ve seen the rise of newer digital avenues, like push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS, giving marketers many reasons to shift some of their eggs to these newer options (or, you know, baskets).

Making the jump isn’t always easy. Since email efforts usually rely on third-party email service providers (ESPs), email data and mobile data—along with information from branded websites, connected device applications, and other emerging technologies—usually end up in distinct silos. These kinds of silos, created by technology solutions that can’t speak to each other, are a reality for many businesses, and can result in ineffective customer messaging and impose limitations on brands’ overall marketing and engagement strategies.

There’s an urgency to take action: Moving beyond a single channel leads to positive results when it comes to customer engagement. When users receive messages via a single channel (either email, push, or in-app messages only), they see engagement rates that are 179% higher than users receiving no outreach at all, according to a Braze analysis of customer data from over 300 million people all over the globe. That’s great, but it’s just the beginning. When brands are able to offer true cross-channel messaging, there’s the potential to see a rise in engagement by as much as 844% compared to brands that send no outreach.

That means that companies that fail to embrace cross-channel messaging are leaving significant engagement opportunities on the table. Don’t be one of them.

Next Steps

If you’re ready to take action and put a holistic framework in place that enables your team to pursue outreach via all the major channels that matter to your community, we’ve got you covered. Head over to the Braze Product page to learn about building a technology stack designed for creating meaningful connections with customers in a cross-channel world.