Braze released their Braze’s Inspiration Guide: an ebook designed to help marketers unlock the full potential of the Braze platform, serving as a roadmap to expand and deepen their marketing initiatives — broken up into three categories: activation, monetization, and retention.

In our final episode of our “Thread the Needle” mini-series, we’re talking about retention campaigns. Kaleigh Porter, Solutions Architect, and Jessica Leeds, Director of Alliances, touch on:

• Creating successful retention campaigns 
• A creative use case from one of our Stitch customers that leveraged Braze features to drive loyalty opt-in 
• Some low-effort campaigns that can lead to quick wins

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Transcript:

Jessica:  Hello and welcome to our special “Thread the Needle” mini-series, where we're chatting about the use cases provided in the Braze Inspiration Guide and how we're seeing our customers actually apply them in their day-to-day marketing. The Braze Inspiration Guide is designed to help marketers unlock the full potential of the Braze platform, serving as a roadmap to expand and deepen their marketing initiatives.

Today, I've got Kaleigh Porter, Senior Solutions Architect at Stitch, and we're going to be talking specifically about the retention use cases in the Braids Inspiration Guide. All right, Kaleigh. So, retention metrics look really different for different brands. For some, it could be engagement and loyalty programs, others, it could be the completion of surveys or continuous feedback loops. Others could simply just be want to incentivize repeat purchases. So from your perspective and with the clients that you're working with at Stitch, what are the companies who have really strong retention programs doing? 

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Kaleigh: Well, Yeah, that's a great question. So the first is leveraging all of the cross-channel, opportunities you have in Braze. Once you get that email program set up, really starting to implement push, in-app messages, content cards, and expanding those touch points is the first one. The second is to make sure you have great retention-type banners in all of your communication. So you're getting that, you know, even if you're messaging them a newsletter, they're still getting a banner that tells them about their loyalty or something else that might encourage them to be retained. And then the last is just really improving timing on when to send messages to the right customers and Braze is great for that because of the custom event features, you can send messages whenever a user completes one of those custom events. So you can really hone in on the right time to send a message.  

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Jessica: Yeah, so I'd love to dig into some of these real-world examples a little bit further. So when you were reviewing the great ideas provided by Braze in the Big, specific to retention campaigns, have you had a customer conduct one of those campaign types and had it go really, really well?

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Kaleigh: So I had a major cosmetic brand who wanted to create a perks and rewards campaign, and I think that's slide 41 in the Big to drive loyalty and retention. They have this really unique idea to engage customers with a scavenger hunt. They sent push notifications to users with clues, and then users would be driven to the website to find a keyword on the website that related to that clue and also want to call out another really great work. Again, the use of banners to always drive loyalty in the emails of this particular client. Every single one of their emails has loyalty banners in addition to what they're doing with campaign-specific stuff. 

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Jessica:  I love that example. It's like a combination of perks and rewards, as well as gamification, which is also one of the use cases. What was the impact on them? What results did they see from that?

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Kaleigh:  That was awesome. Great site traffic. It encouraged push opt-in because that was the channel for which we were sending the clues. So users who weren't currently put, opted into push were encouraged to do so, and then also loyalty. You had to be a loyalty member to put the clues into the site and earn points, so it also had people joining the loyalty. 

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Jessica: So obviously that's an example of a customer who's doing things really, really well and is already pretty sophisticated. But for a marketing team who doesn't quite know where to start, what coaching or suggestions would you provide them in terms of lower-effort campaigns where they could just start to, make an impact and chip away at their retention initiatives?

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Kaleigh: Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, I think, I think Winback would probably be the first one I'd tackle. That's slide 52 in the inspiration guide. And those are great because they're really easy to set up and have a great return on investment. And especially in Braze, we have all that user data in one place on the profile. We know when users visited the app last, when they made a last purchase, and lots of other engagement messages,  engagement metrics related to their messaging that's coming out of Braze, so you can build segments that are targeting people who have not done any of those high-value engagement activities and encourage them to come back with high-value promotions or other things like that. Once you get that one knocked out, or if you have really great support from your data team, I definitely recommend, working on either a back-and-stock campaign or   a product launch campaign. Those are great for customer loyalty because they're encouraging retention by getting users notified of something they've told you they want, and you're telling them as soon as that thing is available, that you have it and you can drive them back to the site.

‍Jessica: I love it. Well, thank you so much, Kaleigh. I appreciate your ideas and the examples that you were able to give of the use cases kind of out in the wild when it comes to the Braze Inspiration Guide. So, appreciate your time, and if anyone was listening and you're eager to dig into the Braze Inspiration Guide and these use cases further, we've got it linked for you in the comments of this video.