Key Trends from the Braze 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review
This post was co-authored with Sharice Siegel.
The Braze 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review is out, and it’s a must-read for any retention marketing team. In this review, Braze shares best practices of the “Ace” brands that they work with who are meeting and exceeding their customer engagement goals.
Braze also identifies three key trends: creativity and strategy with AI, the potential that data brings, and the rapid evolution of cross-channel messaging. In this blog, we’ll look at some key insights from this review, and how marketers can use Braze and Snowflake together to become Ace brands themselves.
AI-Powered Creativity and Strategy
First up is AI — the hottest topic both inside and outside of marketing. In this section of the review, the part that struck us the most was this:
When marketers treat AI as an advisor and a collaborative partner, a wide range of new possibilities opens up, creating new efficiencies and greater impact. Used effectively, AI could be the bridge between creativity and ROI, allowing marketers to push boundaries while gaining a clearer, more timely view of their impact.
It’s crucial to treat AI as a partner, and not necessarily a replacement. As a brand uses AI to create content and copy, a rigorous QA process is still needed to review everything. AI makes iterating on new strategic and creative ideas faster, easier, and more accessible, but it won’t replace the process that your customer engagement team has already created today.
AI is also extremely limited without a data strategy. Snowflake’s Marketing Data Cloud can help brands develop a data strategy for AI by busting data silos and creating a data foundation for your Customer 360. Using Snowflake Cortex, marketers can easily access Machine Learning and LLM functions that sit on top of their data. Marketers can also use Braze, which is Powered by Snowflake, to deliver AI-driven experiences to their customers.
The Potential for Data and Data Collaboration
Speaking of data, this brings us to the next key trend of the report. Unsurprisingly, data is still important to deliver personalized experiences, but many brands aren’t using the performance data provided to them..
50% export performance feedback to business intelligence platforms to generate advanced analytics.
At Snowflake, we see hundreds of brands getting their performance data from Braze seamlessly via Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing. From here, they use Snowpark ML and Snowflake Cortex to create predictive attributes in Snowflake. Finally, they then send insights back to Braze via Cloud Data Ingestion to better segment their customers and personalize their messaging.
Only 24% are mapping customer behavior and sentiment.
This number is still too low in our book. Mapping customer behavior on your web and devices to your Braze performance data is key to knowing your customers. It’s also why we’re excited about the new Native Application from Braze on Snowflake: Braze Instant Insights (BII). With this native app, they lower the barrier for less data-mature brands to accelerate their intelligence on customer behavior.
Our data suggests that more frequent communication is more impactful: Our analysis found that top-performing brands are 82% more likely to involve multiple teams and sync weekly on customer engagement, compared to other companies.
On to our favorite part of the report! One of the best and easiest things a brand can do today is collaborate cross-functionally with other teams internally. Sharing goals, and yes, even budget, together can help a brand solve some of the biggest challenges, especially with data. For many reasons, 2024 is shaping up to be the year of “Data Collaboration” — something Snowflake has enabled brands to do for years. If your customer engagement team feels friction with your IT team, data team, or data analysts, make this year be the year that you solve it together!
The Rapid Evolution of Cross-Channel Messaging
The last key trend is the evolution of cross-channel messaging. Brands don’t want several platforms to use — like they’re customers, they want one cohesive experience.
Without that clear, comprehensive understanding of the customer, creating a relevant, cohesive experience becomes a major challenge.
It was mentioned earlier, but Braze is Powered by Snowflake. This means that Braze built the core of their analytics solution on Snowflake, and as a brand that uses Braze, you’re reaping the rewards. By being Powered by Snowflake, Braze has extended their channel reach to not only offer more channels for cross-channel messaging, but also gives brands a friction-less way to bring their data to one place and collaborate together on it in Snowflake!
Conclusion
Are you looking for a better way to work with your data from Braze? Contact us to get started, and be sure to check out Snowflake’s recent Marketing Data Cloud Forum!
