Braze + Amplitude: Power Personalized Experiences with Customer Data

Learn how to deliver personalized customer experiences that engage users on their preferred marketing channel with the right message at the right time.

Perspectives
July 27, 2021
Image of Cat Perez
Cat Perez
Strategic Partner Manager
Braze + Amplitude: Power Personalized Experiences with Customer Data

Customers often have channel preferences and may only interact with brands across one or two platforms. Some may have a propensity to read email campaigns while others will eagerly engage with push notifications.

The solution isn’t to engage with customers on every available channel. Marketers must reach customers on their preferred marketing channels with the right message at the right time.

This highly personalized approach pushes customers to take the next step in their buyer journey. To offer this level of personalization, companies need the right customer data and tech stack to pinpoint their audience’s preferred channels and deliver relevant messaging.

By combining Amplitude’s behavioral data and personalized recommendations with the Braze customer engagement platform, companies can increase the likelihood of breaking through the “noise” of notifications and drive results.

Braze: Cross-Channel Experiences in a Single Platform

With so many channels to manage, companies can use Braze as a single solution for every customer interaction. Braze collects data from your apps, websites, and other systems (such as a customer data platform) to highlight customer preferences. This data becomes the foundation for personalized messages across mobile, web, email, SMS, and other channels.

Companies can improve conversion rates by triggering messages in a nuanced way based on user behavior instead of specific timeframes. After all, sending a customer a push notification within 30 seconds of visiting a website may not compel the customer to take action if they’re “just browsing.”

With Braze, companies can trigger a message based on relevant actions, such as viewing a particular product. Companies can even create action-based triggers within Braze via API, based on behavior that takes place outside of their website or app.

Braze advocates a cross-channel approach that focuses on both in-product messages (in-app or in-browser messages) and out-of-product messages (email, push, SMS). Braze found that customers who receive a combination of in-product and out-of-product messaging are more valuable and stick around longer.

Graphic design platform Canva wanted to send localized and helpful content during the COVID-19 pandemic but needed a way to scale up email communication while still maintaining relevancy to a global audience. The solution? Using Braze to send more targeted emails to its millions of creators.

To effectively scale their email volumes, Canva increased email sends a certain percentage each day using a random bucket strategy. At the same time, they used the Braze platform’s Connected Content dynamic personalization feature to localize their emails by automatically pulling in content using the same template but translated into 20 different languages.

The results were clear: Canva saw a 33% uplift in open rates, a 2.5% increase in platform engagement, and maintained 99% deliverability, even while increasing email volume from 30 million to 50 million per week. These numbers are incredible, given the sheer size of Canva’s user base.

Amplitude: Behavioral Analytics and Real-Time Cohorting

As Canva saw, deploying relevant communication at scale plays a huge role in customer engagement. Companies can experiment with and refine their messaging by grouping customers based on common characteristics, such as customer loyalty or overall value, or, in Canva’s case, location.

Amplitude’s Digital Optimization System combines behavioral product analytics with personalized recommendations. Product analytics give visibility into user engagement with a company’s product, including visits, events, and interactions.

With Amplitude, customers who take similar actions in a product can be grouped into behavioral cohorts, such as those who downloaded a song in a music app or added an item to a cart. Behavioral cohorts can also be defined as customers that don’t take a specific action, such as those who downloaded an app but never took the next step of signing up for a subscription.

Using behavioral cohorts, Amplitude Recommend can anticipate future behavior. Machine learning technology generates personalized recommendations to offer the best next-step content for each customer. These recommendations could include sending reminder campaigns to the customers with the highest propensity to respond or special offers for customers on the fence.

With Recommend, media company iFlix used behavioral segments to target users and execute highly customized experiences and campaigns. The result was improved conversion-to-view rates and a four-fold increase in ad revenue.

“iFlix has improved campaign conversion-to-view rates and increased ad revenue four-fold by leveraging behavioral segmentation to target users. Amplitude Recommend has empowered us to execute highly targeted experiences and tune campaigns to drive impact.”

Emmanuel Frenehard, iFlix’s CTO

Braze + Amplitude: Combining Engagement Data and Machine-Learning Recommendations

Amplitude and Braze have launched a new integration to take user personalization to the next level. This integration allows companies to use their Amplitude behavioral data to build user-level recommendations for the next best action and then sync the data to Braze.

Looking at the full customer journey, Braze collects data about customer engagement, such as whether a user clicks on an email and the action they take after that. This data from Braze is then sent to Amplitude. From there, companies can use Amplitude to create behavioral cohorts of customers who took the same actions.

Amplitude can then return recommendations for that specific cohort, such as the next best product to offer for these users. These suggestions can be synced back to Braze, and Braze uses the recommendation data for the next interaction with the customer, and the cycle continues.

Jumbo Interactive—the owner of Oz Lotteries, a platform that resells Australian National Lottery products—used Braze and Amplitude to deliver a personalized experience to its customers. Amplitude allowed Jumbo to create cohorts based on customers’ on-site behaviors. Amplitude Recommend predicted what lottery tickets the customers would buy next and generated messages that encouraged these cohorts to make another purchase.

Jumbo used Braze to send different product offerings to these customers based on where they made a purchase (online vs. in-app). The offers were then refined using A/B testing. Jumbo also created Content Cards with Braze for customers who clicked through an email or push notification. Within two months of using Amplitude and Braze together, Jumbo saw a 158% increase in conversions on one checkout page.

Create Personalized Customer Experiences Through Automation

By using Amplitude and Braze together, digital teams can deeply understand user segments and drive engagement. The integration creates a 360° view of the user journey from the initial touchpoint to ongoing messaging and everything in between.

Amplitude Recommend delivers machine learning-powered predictions and recommendations to determine the content that will maximize conversions. Braze allows companies to act on these insights by sending each customer the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. Together, growth marketing teams can rely on this automated personalization to reduce acquisition costs, drive loyalty, and keep customers engaged.


To learn more about how Braze and Amplitude work together, check out the QSR E-Book.

About the Author
Image of Cat Perez
Cat Perez
Strategic Partner Manager
Cat Perez is a strategic partnerships manager at Amplitude, where she manages Amplitude's technology partner program.

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