Braze, Inc.

Braze serves as our primary platform for orchestrating diverse activities and actions across multiple channels, including push notifications, in-app messages, content cards, web push messages, email marketing, and SMS campaigns. We implemented different triggers based on behavioral messages and actions that our clients would perform, such as completing a form, abandoning a form, and during the onboarding process. We required both client and server-side features to flag different parts of the app where updates occurred and ensure target messaging aligned with active feature states without requiring App Store approval.

Using the visual journey builder, we created a complex interface with different multi-step journeys for users coming from various digital campaigns. Users landed on our landing page, filled out the form, and based on different actions, we were able to send them a web push or an SMS if they left the onboarding process for obtaining a credit card online.

We aimed to use several specific features for this solution. It was important for us to understand our objectives upfront, and the personalization and liquid templating that Braze offers brought our attention and proved very helpful for our acquisition decision.

The best features Braze offers in my opinion are the cross-channel messaging infrastructure, including push notifications, in-app messages, and content cards, which are persistent feed items, as well as direct messages for newsletter campaigns or SMS campaigns. Another valuable feature was the real-time dynamic audience segmentation, which provides instant segmentation based on real-time viewers, user attributes, location, device types, and historical interaction behaviors with our website or mobile app. Braze also offered high throughput streaming, which is a real-time data export layer that streams granular user interactions data directly into external data warehouse or event stream tools.

Automation significantly helped my team because instant segmentation based on real-time event triggers expedited our processes. Otherwise, we would have had to reach two different teams handling the database and audiences exported from our CRM. This ability allowed us to segment audiences faster. Another benefit was the server-side feature that provided better control, allowing our teams to perform feature rollouts for the mobile application, which proved more efficient and less time consuming than creating the entire business case and workflows we had previously.

For business impact, we achieved a 28% increase in credit card sales, driven by contextual targeting, in-app messages, and onboarding flows triggered immediately after specific users' touch points in the in-app application and on the forms on our website. We also achieved a 21% uplift in the number of qualified sales leads coming from different campaigns.

There are several things that would be worth optimizing by implementing strict SDK level event batching, addressing duplicate static user attributes, and leveraging Braze's consumption alerts to set up automated budget thresholds. This would help companies prevent billing spikes during high volume campaigns, which we also encountered.

The pricing is tied directly to data points volume, and unoptimized telemetry or redundant attribute tracking can quickly consume contracted allocations, leading to unexpected overage costs.

I have been using Braze for six months, and I used it at previous jobs for a few years already.

In my experience, Braze is stable and we did not encounter any issues. Downtime is non-existent in our processes and day-to-day activities.

Braze's scalability for our needs is excellent and has handled our growth and campaign volumes effectively. It eliminated some of the manual processes that team members were performing. Additionally, there were increases in the number of leads generated and the number of cards provided to end customers.

I received great support from both the technical and business sides of Braze. My experience was friendly, straightforward, and without any complications.

We did not have a different solution before Braze, but we conducted pitch interviews with other vendors when the selection process began.

Braze is stable and we did not encounter any issues with downtime affecting our processes. We measured business impact and improvements using A/B tests compared to previous periods, which showed significant enhancements in campaign latency due to transitioning from batch schedule marketing to sub-content behavioral event triggers.

We conducted pitch interviews with other vendors when the selection process began.

We achieved a 21% uplift in digital lead generation and a significant reduction in campaign latency implementation.

Before choosing Braze, we evaluated other options, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which we evaluated for legacy enterprise ecosystem capabilities, CleverTap for its combination of mobile engagement tools and integration real-time behavior analytics, and MoEngage for its mobile-first customer engagement and AI-driven insights.

Braze has positively impacted my organization overall by improving the efficiency of collaboration within our marketing team and with the operational, credit card, and loan teams, since some of the streams were created based on different procedures that every team had established. This created an efficient way of working, and the automation helped us reduce the time spent on delivering and creating digital campaigns throughout the company.

With regards to Braze's governance and security, there are no negative aspects I would mention. The platform is very secure, and we had an analysis and audit conducted by the security team, which went great with perfect results.

Based on what we have seen regarding Braze's AI capabilities, the reliability and accuracy of data is quite high. We do need to compare the outcomes from the orchestrations and workflows we have created, and this requires more time for data to settle, so we would have more data to compare.

I would suggest evaluating multiple options. In the end, you would see that the features, pricing, and overall process and implementation are better with Braze than with other competitors. However, this really depends on specific needs and the way any organization plans to work with any solutions available.

I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.