How to Manage Your Braze Migration

In our experience as martech consultants, migrating to Braze for customer engagement means streamlining your processes and making your customers happier. Braze’s easy-to-use platform focuses on personalizing your communication with customers so you’re not annoying them with spammy messages. Instead, you’ll seamlessly reach the right audiences across platforms, where and how they want you to.

Even if all of that sounds good to you, we know the idea of migrating all of your customer data and processes over to a completely new tool probably sounds like a nightmare. Getting decision-makers to buy in on a new software investment, handling data and integrations with your current tech stack, and having to teach your whole team a brand-new set of rules and processes are all headache-inducing challenges to tackle.

There’s also the pressure of knowing the migration and implementation phase is important to getting the most out of any tool in the long run, which affects whether or not stakeholders earn a return on their investment. So how do you make sure this process goes well? Our migration tips will help you successfully add Braze to your tech stack and start using it wisely.

Understanding the Need for the Migration

If you’re currently using an email service provider (ESP), a marketing automation platform (MAP), a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, a customer engagement platform (CEP), or a combination of them that just isn’t working for you, it may be time to move on. When trying to decide whether or not to make a martech change, consider questions like:

• Are your marketing campaign processes long, hard to understand, or clunky?
• Are your personnel making avoidable mistakes within your current system?
• Are clumsy integrations causing issues between platforms?
• Are your analytics not meeting your needs for evaluating campaign performance?
• Are you running into limitations with what you want to do with your workflows or other features?
• Do you need more expansive or easy-to-use email and ad design tools?
• Is your customer interaction data disorganized or easily misplaced?
• Do you think you could reach customers better with the help of a different tool?

If the answer to any or all of these questions is yes, it’s probably time to shop around. And when you’re looking, Braze is a great option for addressing all of these pain points (which is why our team of consultants shifted from being Salesforce experts to partnering with Braze at Stitch).

Braze Platform Benefits and Features

Braze’s CEP software is known for being easy to learn and use, especially for marketers with experience with other martech tools. Features like the Canvas Flow automation interface, Content Cards, and Feature Flags promote user success. And this success is proven by Braze’s excellent track record with clients across the globe, including some of the most well-known corporations.

Preparing for the Migration

To start prepping your migration plan, first evaluate your current email marketing, messaging, and automation strategies to see how you can achieve successful customer engagement with Braze. Identify what’s working and what’s not and see where Braze can fill in the gaps. Then build a plan for how you’re going to use the tool, working backward to an implementation plan that makes the migration easier.

Evaluating Your Data and Content to Ensure Compatibility With Braze

Our data migration tips for Braze focus on really understanding what you’re migrating and how to migrate it before trying to move everything over. Before moving any data, make sure it's complete, it's clear, it has the right fields, and it doesn’t have duplicates. If you use a data warehouse like Snowflake to store information, you can use cloud data ingestion to send relevant customer data directly into Braze, simplifying this process.

Braze’s integrations make it easy to add data directly from your current systems, but if you need a manual solution, you can also use Sheetlabs to input spreadsheet-based data. To collect future data, Braze uses software development kits (SDKs) to collect real-time app and website data on user attributes and engagement. To bring in data from other sources, you can also set up application programming interfaces (APIs).

Figuring out how to alter and migrate emails, messages, pop-ups, and other types of content so that they work with Braze is another obstacle many marketers face. If you need help moving your current data and content over to Braze, let us know.

Creating a Comprehensive Migration Plan and Timeline

After you figure out what data and content you have, what needs to be moved, and how much of it needs to be moved, you can start to get a clearer idea of how big the project is. At this point, you’ll want to clearly lay out the scope of the project, the tasks involved, who’s responsible for each part, and how long each task should take.

Once that’s done, work on assigning different tasks internally, in your current project management processes, or externally, with an outsourced implementation partner. Set clear, realistic deadlines and regular project check-in procedures to keep everything on track, and to address potential problems as they arise.

Step-by-Step Migration Guide

With Braze Solutions Partners like Stitch, companies can get up and running with the new tool and send out their first campaign in as little as six weeks. Whether you’re looking for an ESP migration guide, transitioning from a marketing automation platform to Braze, or switching from another customer engagement platform to Braze, the process should look like this.

1. Discovery and Planning

This covers the planning process we’ve already talked about, with evaluating your current systems, finding out how to move over different types of data and content, and more. You’ll discuss your situation directly with Braze or with a consulting partner and collaborate on your overall goals and an onboarding plan that works for both sides.

2. Training Workshops

To figure out exactly how to reach your goals within Braze, you’ll need to deeply understand the software and how it works. That’s why, whether you’re working directly with Braze for onboarding or with a consultant, you’ll be provided with training sessions and supporting system information that will put you on the right track at the outset. You can also schedule a demo with Braze or a consulting partner like Stitch.

3. Execution

This is the step where, alongside your onboarding team, you’ll migrate data, templates, and campaign assets into Braze. You and your Braze experts of choice will set up a data architecture and integrations that work for your business. This will allow you to optimize your current campaigns, create new hyper-personalized ones, and establish new data and reporting procedures with your team.

4. Closure and Ongoing Optimization

At the end, you and your success team will tie up any loose ends, celebrate a project well-done, and set long-term goals that align with your overall business objectives. If you’re working with a consulting partner, they can take on campaign optimization and build new campaigns to help you reach these goals over time.

Best Practices for Successful Migration

Minimize downtime and ensure a smooth transition with these Braze migration best practices:

• Testing before fully migrating: If you do a full-scale migration all at once, you run the risk of having to make changes to massive amounts of data if anything goes wrong. Try testing out smaller data inputs with each integration before going full throttle.
• Training on Braze features: One reason that many companies aren’t getting the most out of their marketing tools is a lack of clarity with employees on how and when to best use them. First, make sure that marketing leaders like yourself are well-trained with the tool by attending the onboarding workshops, asking your implementation partners ample questions, and browsing Braze's user guides for help in specific areas. Then, set clear processes for how you and your team should use the system, and make sure to have training and feedback sessions in place so your personnel understand and can improve upon them.

Post-Migration Optimization

Don’t just set it and forget it — after the migration, set regular intervals for analyzing performance metrics and adjusting your strategies as needed. If you’re working with a martech consultancy, this can come in the form of weekly or monthly meetings on campaign performance and progress updates. In the long run, you’ll want to monitor and fine-tune all of your campaigns to maximize your ROI.

To make your campaigns more engaging, consider using advanced Braze features like:

• Canvas Flows, which map out the customer journey through omnichannel marketing communications — this workflow interface features out-of-the-box filtering options to segment a hyper-specific audience and in-message reporting, showing you which campaigns are performing best
• Built-in frequency capping, which keeps your customers from getting spammed with too many messages or duplicate messages
• Auto-seed groups and test lists, which allow you to test your messages in action before they go live to their full audience

Braze Migration Case Studies

If decision-makers are on the fence about migrating over to Braze, use these post-migration success stories to get buy-in:

• GrubHub created personalized emails that led to a 100% increase in social chatter around its brand.
• Overstock boosted its digital marketing conversion rate to 21% with more engaging real-time messaging.
• Peacock reduced its churn by 20% with a year-end review campaign for existing subscribers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Braze migration take?

This varies greatly depending on your specific business's size, processes, data, and goals. However, with an experienced implementation partner and a mid-range migration project, you can launch your first campaign in as little as six weeks.

Will Braze integrate with our current martech stack?

Braze has several technology partners that integrate well with the system, which you can browse through here. If an integration doesn’t currently exist, then you can collaborate with Braze or your partner to find or create an API that will transport data from an outside source into Braze and vice versa.

Conclusion

While migrating data and content into a brand-new marketing tool can seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be with a good plan in place and the right onboarding partner. And Braze’s capabilities for enhanced customer engagement can make it all worth it for a business that’s ready to optimize its campaigns.

If you need more advice and support for your Braze migration process, reach out to our team at Stitch. We’re experts at getting the most out of Braze and will be here to help you every step of the way.

‍