Braze, Inc.

My main use case for Braze is sending emails. For sending emails with Braze, I managed all email and app communications for CrossFit. Anytime they wanted to promote anything about the CrossFit HQ portion, which included training credentials, health and fitness, and workout of the day, I would send emails to our subscribers, of which there were two million. I also sent emails for anything related to the sports division of CrossFit, which included competitions such as the open semifinals and the CrossFit Games. I would send regular emails to sports fans about the competition, specific emails to ticket holders with details about what they could do on-site, and different communications for those who would watch online.

For Blumhouse, I send campaigns primarily, and I have managed a Canvas, which is mostly used for tagging behaviors and custom attributes, but also at least a couple of canvases for welcome series and evergreen type content. Most of my campaigns are one-off campaigns for film releases or new trailer announcements.

Regarding my main use case for Braze, I have taken classes to specialize in Liquid Logic, which is something that is very intriguing to me. I have used Liquid Logic and catalogs as often as possible to personalize campaigns to the fullest extent.

When I think about the best features Braze offers, I believe it has a lot more capabilities than other platforms. Although it lacks somewhat in reporting, I do a lot of manual reporting based on certain exports. I have used Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot, along with many different email platforms. Now that I am very versed in Braze, I would definitely lean towards Braze as my preferred tool for its design capabilities, personalization features, ease of use, A/B testing, intelligent timing, and real-time engagement testing. I have used Liquid Logic in Klaviyo, but it does not feel as robust or straightforward as it is in Braze.

Braze has positively impacted my organization, but I do not think the tool itself is the sole reason for our increased followers and open rates. Being able to provide guidance on Braze, which is not always straightforward, is crucial. As a contractor, I understand the intricacies of the platform and serve as the go-to person for the marketing team that may not be as knowledgeable about technical terminology or how things operate. I think that is useful.

I wish Braze could improve in a couple of ways. I use link aliases for every link in every campaign I do, and when creating a variant for an A/B subject line test, all the link aliases that existed in version A are no longer in version B, which means I have to retype every link alias with each variant. I have gotten efficient at it, but it is somewhat of a pain.

More improvements I wish Braze could make include the ability to create a dashboard that exactly meets my client's needs. Currently, I end up exporting data and maintaining my own Google Sheet. My client is very interested in historical trending, but there is not a default way to do that. I have looked at extensions and other third-party tools, but we do not need a massive lift to resolve this. For example, determining how many people opened an email by twenty percent is easy, but finding out how many of our subscribers opened twenty percent or more of our emails over time is a significant hurdle. However, using custom events for tracking email receipt versus opens, I have been able to collect some valuable data, though I still have to export it to demonstrate to my client how many of our three hundred thousand subscribers never opened a single email or how many opened five of every twenty emails they received.

I have been working in marketing for probably more than fifteen years, but I have used Braze for two years at CrossFit HQ, and I am going on a year and a half with Braze for Blumhouse. So specifically, my experience with Braze is probably three and a half to four years.

I find Braze to be stable.

Customer support used to be amazing, but now it requires going through a portal, which means I often speak to different representatives who do not fully understand the specifics of my organization, and that is challenging. When I worked at CrossFit HQ in 2022-2023, I had a dedicated rep I could contact via Slack for help. After he got promoted, we were pushed to use the support ticket system, which causes delays in responses and requires continuous re-explanation of our issues. It often feels like they do not fully read or understand the context of our requests, which leads to disappointment compared to how it used to be.

I have personally used many different email suppliers as a freelance consultant, including Klaviyo, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp. Specifically, Blumhouse used Mailchimp before transitioning to Braze.

I have not seen a return on investment with Braze since my work has primarily been with clients where it has never been for sales or e-commerce. It has always been a marketing tool to raise awareness. I do not have clear metrics, but I recall years ago coming up with ways to automate emails that people were previously sending one at a time with their personal emails. I utilized a catalog to streamline that process, but I do not have concrete examples beyond that. I have shown organizations how using all of Braze's capabilities, such as catalogs, Liquid Logic, campaigns, and canvases, can save time and money.

I do not have much to say about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing, except that it was not a decision-maker for me. However, I know that both Braze and CrossFit spent a significant amount on Braze.

I do not recall if I evaluated other options before choosing Braze, but it was part of that decision-making process.

Regarding Braze's AI capabilities, I have not been using them. To me, it feels as though they are still new, and I would not trust that they are as knowledgeable as I am personally. I do not use the AI capabilities because I presume they are not accurate or reliable, but I cannot say for sure.

For others considering Braze, my advice is that while I believe it is the best solution compared to others I have used, the decision depends on the budget. If someone finds it would be a significant financial commitment, I would advise against using Braze, especially compared to a solution such as Klaviyo. Therefore, my recommendation hinges on several other factors, such as their budget, specific goals, types of messages they wish to send, and the desired capabilities. I would rate Braze a nine out of ten overall.

I am responsible for all email marketing push notifications, in-app messages, and building out landing pages, so I am in the platform one hundred percent of my time at work.

We set up campaigns for our weekly newsletters and set up canvases for journeys specifically with our game zone notifications dependent on a fan's custom events. If fans have opted into certain games, they will receive certain emails depending on that selection. When it comes to in-app messaging, we promote that on our site. We are also building out a new app, so we are in the beginning stages of sending out push notifications. When it comes to landing pages, we have partnered promotions with our clients that we typically build out contest pages.

Day to day specifically, I am creating the emails. We have an internal design team that will help me build out the creative, but I will be using content blocks to pull in certain modules. If we are pulling in a fan's favorite team and if they have that data field in their profile, I create content blocks that will change depending on a fan's data profile. I only have to build out one email, but within that one email, there are multiple content blocks to use different dynamic content as well as pulling in personalization in the first name of the subject line. We also do AB testing creatively as well as time of day testing, and our send time optimization per fan.

For me, the ease of Braze is valuable. It is very user friendly, so anyone like myself can pick it up and learn quite quickly. I personally appreciate that I can do everything relatively quickly, and Braze can have the checks of whether or not my email is applicable for all devices. They have their own litmus testing equivalent, and then it flags any accessibility issues as well, which is good to note before sending out.

I am the sole proprietor on Braze, so I do not really collaborate with anyone else on my team when it comes to accessibility and those checks. It is helpful because as someone that is not a front end or full-stack developer, these are things that I definitely need to make note of and change in order to have our email render properly on every device, whether that is mobile or desktop. I have learned that some of our brand guidelines, fonts, and colors do not render on light and dark mode, and these are things that I have had to make note of moving forward with our emails in the present and in the future.

One of my biggest drawbacks with Braze, coming from someone with experience in Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe Campaign, and Pardot, is that I am very well versed in the data world and knowing that the data is the most important thing when it comes to sending out emails. If your data is not proper, then that causes problems with you sending out correct information. Having to use a third party data asset management tool such as Snowflake in order to have our data stream through Ticketmaster, then go through Snowflake, and then go into Braze has become more complicated than having a platform that has the data built in, such as Salesforce, where you can access the data via SQL query. With Braze, you have to open Snowflake in order to then create a table and then have that table. There are multiple tables, and it is just becoming not one master table where all the data lives and then creating segments off of that.

My biggest complaint for the most part is how complicated it tends to be with Ticketmaster specifically. Ticketmaster will ingest data directly into Braze, but it will also ingest data into Snowflake, meaning that there is double the amount of information going into Braze. I do not know if that is something that was told by my data team internally, but that is something that is not best case. It would be great for someone in my role to be able to go in, check out the entire master data, and see if there is anything in terms of an outlier or if there are data field names that need to be improved. It is just not as simple as what Braze ought to be. The platform should be very user friendly, and it is not.

I would probably give it a six out of ten, seeing how I have had experience in other CRM platforms. It is definitely not my favorite, but it is definitely easy for people that are not technical.

The reason I would rate it this way is because it does not have that technical layer that Salesforce does when you can go into the master table and look at all the data. You essentially have to have multiple connections for the data itself. For me, what is most important is the data, and that is what is lacking with Braze.

I have been using Braze since the beginning of April with this new job, so five months.

I have not experienced any stability issues. Everything has been smooth sailing. I have not had any of my emails break. The only thing would be that Braze's litmus equivalent is not actually litmus, and so when you view an email in their litmus equivalent, it does not actually look like that, which I find concerning. When you send an email and you are seeing the preview in Braze, in Outlook for mobile for example, and then I send myself an email in Outlook and look at it on mobile, it does not render how it is showing me on screen. This is a big concern if someone is just going off of the preview feature that they have.

We do not have a large volume. Our biggest audience size that we send to is about two hundred and fifty thousand. Some of the other clubs have about a million in terms of audience size, but from our volume, we have not experienced any issues. I know some clubs when it comes to their sends are having issues with their Hotmail and seeing that it is considered spam and that they will not send to Hotmail users, and then they have to warm the IP. I do not know why one team is experiencing that or whether their club was not set up correctly, but that is something that I have noticed.

I do not particularly like our support team. I find that they are very salesy, and that is not what I am looking for. I am looking for technical answers, and all I am getting is questions about whether I want to come to events that they have a conference for and whether there is anything that they can add to my account to improve my budget, which discourages and upsets me. When our support representative cannot answer the questions, they ask us to put in a ticket, so it feels that I have this person when they cannot even answer any of my questions, and I have to submit a ticket. It feels that the need or the ask that I am searching for, they cannot even answer.

So far, I think things are fine. I have not experienced any issues with regards to not following compliance. I think we are good on that front, but I find that our designated support representative is not well versed in the technical or compliance capabilities, so that makes things complicated. I feel that I am talking to a sales rep and I am not actually talking to someone that has that level of detail that I am looking for.

I have used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Adobe Campaign, and HubSpot, as well as Mailchimp. Working at an agency, I was able to work on different CRM platforms.

The issue with me starting five months ago and looking back at some of the metrics from the previous person is that this role was not filled for an entire year, which means that we were not sending emails and I cannot base my changes that I am making in Braze on previous data. I know that what I am doing is impacting because I can see that we are at about a hundred percent increase overall in fan engagement or unique click-through rate when it comes to contest pages or just being able to segment our audiences based off of province and send out emails for those. I think internally, the company has seen a surplus of engagement, but I cannot justify that from previous numbers because there are no numbers that I can go off of.

I am somewhat of an outlier because year over year, obviously, the numbers have improved significantly because we were not pushing through any emails as of last year. I can tell you from when I started until now that we have seen stagnant numbers of about an industry average of three percent click-through rate and a forty percent open rate. I do not know if those metrics are a result of me including first name personalization in the subject line or adding a CFL logo to Gmail so fans can see that CFL is an identified domain and that it is trusted. I am just doing what I know from past experiences in email marketing and applying them to this role.

My only thought is that Braze is not my first choice in CRM platform. One that has stood out to me, which I still have not used to this day, is Klaviyo. That could be because of how it is being sold to me, but from a technicality aspect, that is something that I am more leaning towards when it comes to our renewal if that is a possibility. I do not want to be hopping from one CRM platform to another. I want to stick with one that has all of the use cases that we need and then we are set to go. I just find that our biggest weakness is the data and then our Braze support team, which feels very sales-like. The conversations go on and on, and I am looking for someone with more technical experience when we have to have monthly conversations with our Braze support representative. I do not want to be talking about the Forge conference that is happening in Las Vegas.

From my previous experience working at an agency, I was only focused on the deployment and data side as well as reporting. Being in this new role, I feel that I am doing six people's jobs in one in terms of designing, deploying, reporting, and building landing pages as a full stack developer. I am assuming the company is very happy with me being in this new role. Instead of hiring six different employees, they can have me. But it is still not ideal, especially if you are sending out large volumes of emails and it is only one singular person.

I cannot answer what other options were available because the contract was submitted in twenty twenty-five, and it was a three-year contract. I do not know what other options were available. All I do know is that they needed to look at easier options that can be implemented across all of the clubs, especially from their marketing side that may not have the technical background. If I am assuming correctly, I am sure it was between Braze, Klaviyo, and potentially HubSpot. But I do not have that information.

My advice would be for organizations that do not want a heavy data aspect. If they are just looking for something easy to use and a teachable platform, then Braze is a good choice. However, if you are looking for something more complex, I do not think that Braze is the solution. In terms of design and ease of use, it is great, but from a technical data aspect, that is where it is lacking. I would rate Braze a six out of ten based on my experience.

Braze is primarily used for sending marketing emails and marketing communications in an omnichannel manner. A specific example of how I use Braze for my marketing communications is an onboarding campaign where, as soon as a user registers, the event fires, Braze sends the email, and based on the user behavior on the email journey, it can tailor the whole workflow accordingly, from being two emails to three emails to also adding other channels if the user is active over there.

The best features Braze offers include their Canvas, which is a very good feature to visualize everything in a visual manner, and also some of its data capabilities. Canvas really helps in building the whole campaigns in a very visually structured manner, making all the workflows from one step to multiple steps quite easy, and from a data capability standpoint, it is very easy to create segmentations and personalizations based on that.

Braze has had a positive impact on my organization in that a lot of things which required some amount of technical effort previously can now be streamlined by the marketers, making marketers more agnostic and self-served, which has been the biggest impact. Self-service has changed things for my team in that, for example, previously any kind of segmentation we used to build required a lot of data analytics capabilities, but now they can slice and dice on Braze, and setting up API-triggered campaigns, which previously required engineering effort, can now be done by marketers on their own.

Braze does a very good job in terms of capabilities, but sometimes the roadmaps could be a bit clearer.

I have used Braze for the last seven years, in both my current role and my previous roles.

Braze is stable.

Braze is very scalable.

I experience a good amount of customer support and account management with Braze.

Previously, I used Salesforce, and the goal was to make marketers more self-serve.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive; they are very transparent, but I think the pricing could be a bit more competitive.

I have seen a return on investment, as productivity has gone up and the overall impact on revenue has been fairly positive.

I evaluated other options such as Customer.io and Iterable before choosing Braze.

My advice to others looking into using Braze is to always verify if it meets their use cases and capabilities, as it is a very thorough solution. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Braze is for a client called RBI, the owner of Burger King and Popeyes. For RBI, we are operating journeys and campaigns that are multi-channel, along with automations, personalization, and all types of campaigns.

Compared to other tools and platforms, Braze is very friendly for building automations, and this is the biggest advantage I see. The integration is very easy also, as Braze is integrated with the app and other data sources. Braze has positively impacted my organization by enhancing engagement, conversion, sales, and customer lifecycle.

I find the accuracy and reliability of Braze's output to be very good, very effective, and it helps tremendously.

Braze could improve the use of AI agents in the tool, as we currently have AI only in a few features such as copywriting, but we cannot build journeys with an AI agent supporting the process. They could improve modeling what they have available regarding propensity to buy or behaviors. What keeps it from being a ten is the capability to have an AI agent support the journey construction.

I have been working in my current field for five years.

I have not encountered any issues with Braze's stability, as there are no issues with downtime or reliability.

Braze is very easy to scale and can handle increased users or campaigns easily.

The customer support is good; they are responsive and helpful, providing training when needed and allowing us to include support tickets if we have any doubts. I rate Braze's customer support a ten.

I previously used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but I prefer Braze because I think the tool is more friendly, easier and faster to learn, and has good functionality.

While I cannot share numbers, I find that the campaigns are representative in revenue. I think we could take advantage of the velocity in campaigns and get more engagement, increase the frequency of purchase, and increase the ticket value.

Before choosing Braze, I considered Salesforce Marketing Cloud before deciding on Braze.

I would recommend Braze as I think it is a very good tool with good support and a good cost structure. I rate this product a nine overall.