It's no secret that marketers across industries are seeing the value in Braze — from their 4.5-star rating on G2 (along with being named to several 'Best of' lists from G2 in 2023) to their classification as a category leader in Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs by Forrester Wave.

As the marketing tech world continues to rapidly evolve — including the continued unbundling of martech, the increasing need for scalable technology that enables marketers to engage their customers across channels, and the growing demand for modern platforms that offer marketers ease of use (ultimately driving more adoption and faster time-to-value) — it makes sense why more marketers are moving to Braze. As the best-in-breed platform for customer engagement and cross-channel marketing, Braze offers marketers all these things and more.

Braze is a modern marketing platform that offers marketing automation tools, omnichannel orchestration capabilities, and robust data activation to enable marketers to execute their marketing strategies efficiently and effectively. With its flexible, open ecosystem and diverse marketing channel capabilities, it is unparalleled in its versatility as a marketing platform. We could go on about all the reasons we love Braze (and we're happy to do so — reach out here). 

As a team with extensive experience across many major martech platforms, we're bullish on Braze because we are confident in its ability to provide marketers a better solution than what's become commonplace: clunky, costly martech stacks that are not equipping marketers to drive meaningful ROI.

While Braze continuously impresses us with its modern UI, ease of use, and robust capabilities, here are some of our favorite features that make the lives of marketers (and ours as partners to these marketers) better:

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1. Frequency capping: The concept of frequency capping is not novel. No marketer wants their brand to be seen as spammy or annoying, but preventing this from being the case when your brand produces a high volume of messages and content can be challenging. Frequency capping can be hard to implement on many martech platforms — where realistically executing frequency capping often looks like setting up an automation within your platform to check the frequency by subscriber email address and configuring a weekly suppression list, or taking away autonomy from marketing teams by having to rely on their data teams to build audiences and feeding that back to their platform to determine who receives what message and when based on in-house frequency rules — but with Braze, it's a built-in feature when building your segments that becomes even more powerful when you're leveraging Braze for all of your cross-channel messaging.

2. Canvas' out-of-the-box filtering: Canvas is Braze's interface where marketers can create cross-channel campaigns to form cohesive, personalized journeys for their customers. While we could say a lot about Canvas' general user-friendly interface and its all-in-one journey-building capabilities, one of our favorite things about Canvas is its out-of-the-box filtering features. Assuming the implementation of Canvas was well-executed and that best practices for data collection and governance were followed, the out-of-the-box filtering is intuitive and allows marketers to easily create audiences based on user attributes, custom data, or engagement data (including message engagement, purchasing history, etc.) throughout the journey — no SQL required. This is a great benefit for data-driven marketers who continuously optimize their campaigns for performance and want to better target their customers with relevant messaging.

3. In-message reporting: In addition to the out-of-the-box filtering capabilities within Canvas, analytics are built into every step in Canvas by design — making it easy to see how your Canvas journey is performing, including how customers are moving down the various paths and which messages are performing well. This takes the guesswork out of monitoring the success of your journeys and, once again — doesn't require after-the-fact SQL queries to fulfill basic monitoring requests.

4. Auto-seed groups and test lists: Few things elevate marketers' blood pressure more than the first send of a new message — even despite extensive QA. Auto-seed groups and test lists are two ways Braze gives marketers additional peace of mind without the need for data extensions or extra manual work. Test lists are an easy-to-use feature that allow you to send test messages to a pre-determined group internally without playing with live sends. Along those same lines, auto-seed groups receive a copy of live messages as they're deployed automatically.

5. Teams: Teams might be one of our favorite Braze features. Teams allows Braze admins to use a tool similar to tags to control access across different teams.  Braze admins can control access on everything ranging from campaigns and content to data to messages and templates. The possibilities here are endless — as access can be divided by internal teams, branches of business, regions, and beyond. Having the ability to manage permissions at this level also creates an opportunity for broader adoption of Braze across the organization — ultimately driving increased ROI.

6. Feature flags: Braze is continuously adding features that help teams across the organization — including marketers, product, and engineering — to meaningful engage their customers across channels, with a unique focus in-app and in-product. Feature flags allow companies "to remotely enable or disable functionality for a specific or random selection of users." They also enable product teams to turn a feature on and off in production without additional code deployment or app store updates. This means teams across the organization can more easily work in harmony for product launches, feature roll-outs, in-app personalization, and risk mitigation. What we love about this feature for marketers is that it enables them to create more personalized experiences for customers — from thoughtfully rolling out new features to curating in-app experiences for specific audience segments. Feature flags are currently in beta testing — but it's really cool, and we're excited for it to become a GA feature. 

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This is just a small sampling of all that Braze offers marketers. While there are many ways to measure the value of your martech, Braze is well-positioned to drive ROI for brands with comprehensive digital customer experiences. With its forward-thinking approach to cross-channel customer engagement, it is an excellent solution for modern marketers looking for flexible platforms that allow them to continuously optimize their customer experience for maximum impact.

Want to learn more about how Braze can drive value for your company? Let's talk.

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