Year-in-review campaigns are a great example of personalization at scale in action — using data-driven storytelling to drive engagement, celebrate loyalty, and deepen customer relationships.
In this episode of Thread the Needle, Michelle Ohlson, Solution Architect at Stitch, shares how to design and execute a year-in-review style campaign for a fictional travel brand, Roamio. To set yourself up for success, she recommends following this approach:
Transcript:
Hello, my name is Michelle Ohlson. I'm a Solution Architect here at Stitch, and today we're going to discuss how to build better relationships through a year-in-review style campaign. What we're going to chat through today is first, what is a year-in-review style of campaign, and what benefit does it bring to both you and your customers?
We're going to go through a strategic exercise discussing the why, what and how of building a year-in-review style campaign. We're going to then walk through a sample use case of how to leverage Braze to build out this style of campaign, and we're going to close with some next steps. So first, what is a year-in-review style campaign?
This type of campaign uses a series of communications that highlight how a user has interacted with your brand. It can celebrate milestones, show personalized statistics, and overall help reflect on how your user interacts with your brand. A side note here, you're going to hear me say year-in-review style campaign a lot. That does not mean that this has to be used to just send someone's year review. There are many, many use cases in which the style of communication can apply as we'll see once we get to our sample use case.
What benefit does a year-in-review style campaign have for you and your customers? First, it allows you to build better relationships with your users over the course of time and show how the customer interactions have grown year over year. It can also drive engagement, particularly if you include a compelling call to action or share on social, and it can also build a sense of community, both between your customers and users and yourself as the brand, as well as between different users of your brand.
Now before you start jumping in to build this style of campaign, there are three key questions that you'll want to be sure to ask yourself and think through and strategize as you build this campaign. First, why — what goals are you hoping to achieve with a year-in-review style campaign, and what is the benefit that you hope to achieve for you and your customers? For example, from your customer's perspective, you may want them to feel a sense of accomplishment for hitting a certain milestone. I mean, don't we all?
You also may want them to feel seen and valued by their favorite brands. Now, from your perspective, you may want to encourage social sharing. You may be seeking to build community. You may want to increase app or website traffic. Highlight additional products and services for your customers to potentially use if they haven't already.
You may want to gather user insights to drive future marketing efforts, and this style of campaign is also a great way to reengage lapsed users. Once you identify your goals for this style of campaign, we can next move to the what, so what milestones or interactions will highlight and achieve the stated goals and what will be most valuable engaging for my customers, for my user base.
This is going to differ widely depending on your specific industry, user base, and own company values. But some examples are current and future tier status, total hours streamed, number of workouts completed, how users have engaged with your brand community, and many, many more. Once you've identified your goals and what customer interactions you want to highlight, we can start thinking about how you actually want to build a year-in-review style campaign.
These campaigns live and breathe on data and personalization at scale, so it's crucial to have a really good sense of what data you have access to in order to achieve these goals as well as what capabilities and channels you may want to leverage for this campaign. Some examples of data you may want to leverage are your Braze custom attributes and custom events.
And also you may have the opportunity to perform some Liquid calculations on your attributes and events to derive other information to use in your campaign. You can maybe see engagement with previous campaigns such as engagement with a brand survey. You can use social media interactions, external data integrations, connected content to a publicly available source, and there are so many other places where you can gather and store data that will help with forming these and displaying these interactions.And then finally, you can nail down based on your capabilities, what channels will best communicate this information.
Now that we've talked through the strategic side and what you want to think through when building a year-in-review campaign, we're going to use the example of how Roamio Travel used Braze to implement a milestone campaign.
So Roamio's specific use case is that they're a travel brand and they specialize in identifying low cost travel options for users. When a traveler hits a new tier status, Roamio wants to give them a highlight reel to show them how they've engaged with the brand to get them to their current tier.
Roamio's goal is to strengthen the relationship with their customer and also gently encourage them to keep engaging with the brand to achieve the next year status and unlock even more benefits. So hopefully this looks familiar to you. We're going to go through the same strategic exercise specifically for Roamio's campaign to start with.
The Why — Roamio's goals are mainly that they want their customers to feel like Roamio knows them and understands their travel preferences, so that customers will be more inclined to engage with them in the future. Roamio wants to also build more of a community around its users, so it's less of a one-to-one interaction with the brand and more interactions among the community. Roamio also wants to make sure that they're communicating their new tier benefits to the customer that just achieved them, and also encourage travelers to keep engaging with the brand and take steps to unlock even more benefits in the future.
Now on to what customer interactions they want to highlight to achieve these goals. Of course, Roamio naturally wants to talk through the traveler's new tier status and what benefits are available to them, maybe what benefits they've already leveraged. Roamio also wants to highlight travelers' favorite destinations and connect them with other users that have traveled there, and also highlight the user's proximity to the next tier and what benefits they can unlock once they get there.
So now, what data does Roamio have available to it and what channels do they want to leverage in order to demonstrate these customer interactions? Well, we of course have the current tier number of user loyalty points, loyalty points, until they reach the next tier number, next tier, their number of bookings, number of unique destinations they've traveled to. What percentage of Roamio travelers have been to the same destination? And through an assessment of their capabilities and channels, they're going to use email, push, in-app message, and content cards.
So now here's an example of how Roamio can use Braze to bring this use case to life. First, they're going to start with an email and push congratulating the user on achieving this next tier milestone.Now Roamio is going to use Braze Intelligent Channel and Intelligent Timing to make sure they're only sending either the email or push, and make sure that they're catching travelers at the right time with the right message that they are most likely to engage with in this email and push.
Roamio is going to tease some of the personalized stats for the users and include a compelling call to action to drive users to the app. Once users open the app, they'll be met with a scrollable in-app message once more, acknowledging and congratulating them on moving to the next tier. This in-app message can include a mix of static images, gifs, and video to display some of the personalized stats identified earlier and create a truly memorable user experience.
And one note is that Roamio can either use Braze's drag and drop in-app message functionality, or use a completely custom HTML in-app message to truly customize that experience. Once the user is in the app, their stats and accomplishments will be displayed prominently, and the Roamio data team will work with Braze to ensure that the most recent data is displayed for each traveler.
And then Roamio is going to step it up a bit with content cards. Specifically Roamio is going to use Experiment Paths in Braze to run an A/B test on different content within their content cards to see which content users most engage with. For example, they can run an A/B test to see if users are more likely to respond to an article highlighting their next tiers benefits, or if they are more likely to engage with a content card showing information about a destination that they've never traveled to. And by using Experiment Paths in Braze, Braze will over time, as the lifecycle of this campaign progresses over time, show users the content that they are most likely to engage with.
Finally, Roamio is going to include a compelling social share call to action, and that will allow travelers to post a snapshot of their personalized stats to their social media of choice, and again, build that community and generate buzz, and hopefully connect Roamio travelers for years to come.
This is just one of the very, very many ways that you can use Braze to implement this style of campaign. Now I hope that I've whet your appetite a little bit for using a year-in-review style campaign, and I'm going to leave you with just a couple of next steps as you work to strategize and implement these campaigns.
First, identify your use cases and remember. Be creative here. This does not need to be a campaign that you just send once to all of your users one time a year. So definitely lean into what, how you can use this personalization to surprise and delight your customer base.
Next, mind your data. As I said, year-in-review style campaigns, live and breathe on data. So make sure that you are working with your data sources to collect data that is relevant and will be salient for your users as you build out these use cases. Please, please, please. Above all else, make sure that you're using good data hygiene practices to make sure that your data is accurate.
Finally, test, test, test. Once you launch a year-in-review style of campaign, make sure you're going back and revisiting it and refreshing your content as needed by providing fresh content and continuing to optimize based on what your users do and do not engage with, you'll keep having your customers and users coming back for more, and you'll continue to build that relationship for years to come.
So that is all we had. I hope you found this video helpful, and thank you very much for your time.
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