With modern consumers now expecting seamless experiences across channels, it’s more important than ever that marketers leverage every opportunity to create data-driven personalized journeys that drivecustomer engagement across channels. It isn't just about staying competitive with other brands; it's about delivering superior customer experiences that drive loyalty and revenue. 

In this video, Anima Hossain, Solution Architect, walks through building an omnichannel journey within Braze, including: 

• What an omnichannel journey is and its importance in modern customer engagement
• Setting up your Canvas
• Building an email 
• Leveraging personalization within your messaging 
• Segmenting your audience through Audience Paths 
• Building a web and in-app message 
• Sending an SMS message

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Transcript:

Hi! I’m Anima, a Solutions Architect here at Stitch! If you’ve ever wondered what Omnichannel marketing is and how you can incorporate it into your marketing strategy using Braze, you’ve come to the right place! 

Let’s get started! 

First things first, what is an omnichannel marketing strategy? It's not just a buzzword. An omnichannel marketing strategy in simple terms means keeping your message, look, and brand voice the same everywhere. Whether that's on social media, like Twitter and Facebook, your own brand website, or any device your audience might be using, think of it like sewing together a dress where each marketing vertical is a section of that dress.

Your traditional ad media may be the sleeves, your socials the skirt, and CRM the top of the dress. Each component has value, and when you sew them together, you get one cohesive and complete dress. Or marketing strategy. Now, how do you apply this to your CRM marketing? You really want to think about how your emails, pushes, socials, to name a few, work to better the user experience and tell a brand story.

Luckily, with Braze Canvas Flows, you have one one-stop shop for all of your omnichannel marketing needs. Let's dive in. 

With Canvas Flows, you can build a cohesive journey for users across multiple messaging platforms. We will work together on a welcome journey for your brand, Green Stitch Apparel, a sustainable clothing brand. First things first, we're going to navigate to Canvas Flows. Here on my screen, you can see that we are currently at the home dashboard.

We will navigate to Canvas Flows, which is right here. And we are going to create a new Canvas. Let's call this ‘Green Stitch Apparel Welcome Journey 2024.’ We can always go back and rename this later, but for right now, this is what it will be called. Here we also have a description that you can add if you'd like, as well as tags and conversion events.

This is a welcome journey, I will tag this as a welcome and create a tag and then also triggered.

Perfect. Next, we have conversion events. So conversion events are what you want to track, it's what you're measuring the success of your messages against, so you want to have conversion events set for all Canvases and all campaigns. So for me, for this campaign, I will have two conversion events. The first one will be 'Makes Purchase' because that is what will tell us that our journey has been successful because we are incentivizing them to sign up.

So it will be 'Makes Purchase' and then also 'Start Session' because if they are opening the website or the app based on this messaging, then we also take that as a win. So we will have 'Makes Purchase' and a 'Start Session' as our second conversion event.

Next, we will have the 'Entry Schedule'. Here you can set up additional targeting filters, delivery settings, and other requirements that you might need. So, because this is a triggered Canvas, we are going to set it up as an Action Based Canvas. So this will be triggered every time a user takes a specific action.

In this case, it will be triggered off a custom event, The custom event will be loyalty sign up. So once a user signs up for the loyalty program for Green Stitch Apparel, they will automatically be entered into this Canvas because they've triggered this action. And the entry window will start whenever we launch this campaign and there will be no end time.

So in 'Target Audience', you have any additional filters that you might want to add, so if that's that they have to have a valid email address, they have to be in a certain country, you could all put that in here. And you also have some additional exit criteria.

So if they do particular action, you can exit them from this journey as well. Next, we have our send settings. These are just additional delivery settings like frequency capping and quiet hours. And lastly, we actually have the journey page itself. So, when thinking about this journey, you want to first have a strategy for your brand voice and incorporate that into each step of the journey, and think about how the user will flow and interact with your messaging.

 For Green Stitch Apparel, we're incentivizing customers to sign up by offering 10 percent off their next purchase. The first step in our journey is going to be a welcome email that goes to users right after they sign up.

Here, we'll grab our message component and drag it just here. We want this to be an email, so we'll go to email, and we do have a template set up for this, so I'll go to welcome template, and this is what our basic email will look like. It'll just say "Welcome to the Club." I've added some customizations, so I can put in a name like Sarah.

It'll say "Hi, Sarah, we're so excited to have you join Green Stitch Apparel." It also shows them the coupon code, and also puts in a plug to sign up for push notifications. And then you have a link to the collection that they can browse through. And it's a very simple and clean email, and super straight to the point.

So they get a sense of the brand's personality, which will be sprinkled throughout the whole user journey. So like I did here, you do want to make sure you add in some personalization, which we did, but once you get started with Liquid, using personalization, the possibilities will be endless. But we'll cover that for another time.

So this is just the first step in the journey. When a user gets this email, you can also include your sending address, and then you can put in a subject as well. So this one will just be, "Welcome to the Club." And then a preheader, "We're so excited to have you." And that's done. 

So once a user gets the email, what next? You want to think about the cadence of your messaging. They shouldn't be too spaced out, but you also don't want to bombard users either. So once users get the email, we are going to send them another message after one day. So first, we will set up a delay step.

So we'll put it here, and then after one day, we are going to send a push notification. So on day two, we are going to send a push to users who are push-enabled. We are going to send a web push for now, because we have a website, and for the push, we will say, "Welcome to the push club." And the message will be very easy and just say, “Keep your eyes peeled in this space, be the first to know.” 

Perfect. So we have our push message and then we can also have, we have your on-click behavior, which we can open to site or redirect to a web URL, and you also are able to add images. So that will be our day two push. So after day two, we will have another three-day delay step. 

And then we will have an audience path. Audience paths are a great way to create different pathways in one journey. So, it's always good to remember that when a user enters a journey, they might all be in the same space, and might be in the same pathway up until that point. But once a user enters a journey, they will all interact with your messaging differently.

So user A might not be the same as user B three days into the journey the way they were on day one. So that's why we have audience pathways like this. The first one will be users who've made a purchase. So we'll make that this one. And this one will be, they've made a purchase, so you can just say purchase.

And then for this one we'll just say, ‘First made purchase.’ And we can just put in a date or you can use any one of the other purchase events as well. So we can also use purchase product as a simple easy one. For this one, we will use total number of purchases. We are going to say has made more than zero purchases. So that means they must have made at least one. That'll be group one. And then group two will just be everyone else that has not made a purchase. 

So for group one, we're going to send a message that says, we'll do another push that says..and then here we can say, “We're so glad [and then you can add in the product item] found a good home. Tag us on Instagram to showcase your new fit.” So here, not only are you personalizing it with what they just bought, but you're also plugging engagement with your socials, which is great. That's for users who've made a purchase for everyone else. We have to think about what we want to do with that audience path.

You still want to keep them engaged and remind them of their unused coupon code. You can send them a push saying, so we'll create another push here, and we'll do a web push. And for this one, we can send them a push saying "That 10 % won't use itself. Shop our hottest summer linen now." We can say for the title, “You still have a coupon.” And then the messaging itself can just be something simple and straight to the point. You always want to keep the messaging light and playful because that's what's similar to their initial email that they received.

So if you have additional insight into what your customer is interested in, you can use that to make your omnichannel journey even more engaging. For example, if I knew that my customer was really interested in cashmere sweaters, because of either an attribute on their profile or an action they took, like adding it to their cart, I would send them a push notification highlighting a cashmere sweater and deep linking to it so they can then click on the push and it would go straight to their cart.

Next, we have on day eight an in-app. So we're going to put another delay and we're going to merge these two audiences back together. So we have another three-day delay here, and we're going to create an in-app message, so we'll do message, and then do an in-app, and we're going to do the traditional editor, and we're going to do a model, including image. Then I’ll upload my own image, and then I have an in-app message here, and then we're actually going to keep it just image for this one. 

So this in-app is giving all users access to free shipping. This is a way to keep the brand momentum going since they just first joined, and keep the excitement around the brand alive. So users will be able to get free shipping on their next purchase.

So, the next step in this journey is going to be, so this delay is going to be another four days. Day 12 we're going to be at, and we are going to do another audience path. This will be the last step in the journey, and we really want users who have not converted at this point, so they have not made a purchase, and we really want to have them purchase before the end of this journey.

So, group one, we will have another filter, so I will do filter, and then purchase, And I will use, again, total number of purchases, we'll do less than one. So, group one are users who have not made a purchase. No purchase. So for these users, we are going to send them an SMS. So we'll do a message step here, and send them an SMS that tries to get them to make a purchase. So this SMS is going to say, "We have a secret. 15 % off all summer linen." And you can even link this SMS to the category page for summer linens. And then we'll also include from now until, and then you can add in a dynamic dates: 8 from now to 7 days from now. So if you add in a specific date, you can pull that information in based on one day first joined, and you can do all that stuff with liquid. You can add that data in to really personalize it. That can be your last touch point for this welcome journey.

So as you can see with Braze Canvas flows, you're really able to take your omnichannel marketing to the next level. Make sure to keep your messaging personalized, sprinkle your brand personality throughout the whole user lifecycle, and diversify the platforms you're using to get the most out of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

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