Braze: Modern Customer Engagement Powered by Snowflake
How Snowflake Helps Our Customers Better Understand Theirs
By Jonathan Yam
What is Braze?
Braze was founded ten years ago on the belief that the rise of mobile would drive tremendous changes in business and society alike. Our founders — Braze CEO Bill Magnuson and CTO Jon Hyman — saw an opportunity to build on this new technology and help companies grow by helping them cultivate their most valuable asset: Their customers.
The great apps of that era that were able to grow into strong, sustainable businesses did so by creating and fostering authentic, long-term relationships with their customers. In turn, many existing businesses began adapting their approaches and the products they offered to take advantage of the direct consumer relationships that the mobile world made possible.
Today it’s clear that forging strong bonds with your customers is essential for businesses of any size — and making this happen has increasingly become a critical priority for brands. And that’s where Braze comes in. Our comprehensive customer engagement platform is designed to power these direct interactions between brands and consumers, delivering great experiences through personalized messaging across the full range of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and beyond.
Braze Powered by Snowflake
Our customers use Braze to engage with their consumers throughout the customer journey. That level of interaction means working with a lot of data: Braze processed over 9 trillion consumer-generated data points during the last fiscal year alone and sent over 1.5 trillion messages to approximately 3.7 billion monthly active users.
And when Braze was looking for a new partner to support a new data lake capable of managing all that information, we turned to Snowflake. Why? Because we needed a technology that was capable of:
- Supporting scalable solutions for complex analytics workloads
- Efficiently handling semi-structured data on the fly
- Providing connections for developer teams to access data through preferred tools
- Supporting best-in-class tools and exciting innovations
In the end, only Snowflake checked off all these boxes. And over the course of our partnership, we’ve seen Snowflake grow from just our analytics engine of choice into a true innovation resource for our platform.
Braze Analytics Powered by Snowflake
Today, Braze works with more than 1,300 brands across 64 countries, each with their own complex messaging setups and needs. To support such a wide customer base, our analytics solution needs to be able to handle many concurrent loads across a range of different developer, business insights, analytics, and customer success teams. Thankfully, Snowflake’s architectural setup makes it possible for us to decouple storage and compute resources, freeing us from data loading bottlenecks that can hinder teams when insights are needed the most.
In addition, Snowflake’s Warehouse resourcing and policies empower our teams to flexibly scale our workloads based on the intricacies of our data insight needs. Before Snowflake, it used to take our customer success teams days to produce reports on the year-on-year effects of cross-channel messaging activities; today, those insights can be gathered in just a few hours. This kind of data agility frees our teams to delve deeper into our customers’ needs and to discover more profound insights into their customers’ activity. Internally, we’ve been able to integrate our disparate range of data sources into Snowflake, allowing us to accelerate operations and to develop a single source of truth, something that is so often elusive within the data space.
Braze Innovations Powered by Snowflake
Snowflake’s innovations have enabled Braze to improve internal team cooperation and deliver more data to our customers. Our internal teams use Data Sharing capabilities as a core part of our cross-team collaborative efforts, with teams across engineering, data and analytics, and services creating new datasets in our setups. Leveraging Data Sharing has made it possible for us to share new assets across teams without needing to stand up data pipes to existing repositories or run the same codes to generate duplicate sets.
Braze now provides offerings across the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Our customers can access our Braze Benchmarks datasets via the Data Marketplace to better understand how their current customer engagement results stack up against industry standards. We’ve also developed a Snowflake Data Sharing integration that can be leveraged by our customers to support easier access to their data. This feature lets customers bypass the need to build ETL processes with a few simple clicks, ensuring that data is delivered structured and ready to use once it’s been added to that customer’s Snowflake instance. Views are updated automatically as new events occur, ensuring access to the freshest data available and — because these events aren’t stored on the customer’s side — reducing related storage costs. Braze Data Sharing minimizes the time to insight, saves engineering resources, and helps our customers get back to delivering the best experience possible for their customers.
Final Thoughts
To hear more about how Braze and Snowflake work together, check out our recent interview of CTO Jon Hyman. Interested in learning more about Braze and how we can help you build a best-in-class customer engagement program? Visit our website here.
Jonathan Yam is a Senior Technical Data Consultant at Braze
