Are you evaluating Braze or actively preparing for a migration from Salesforce to Braze?
In this on-demand webinar, the Stitch team offers marketing and IT leaders tactical insight into what to expect in the migration process and how to effectively manage the migration.
What you’ll learn:
– The benefits of migrating
– High-level differences between Salesforce and Braze
– What to expect in the migration process
– Planning for nuances and differences between the platforms
– The top 3 most important things to consider when preparing for migration
Ready to migrate and looking for a step-by-step guide to navigating the move?
Check out our Braze Migration Guide — a comprehensive playbook for making the move to Braze without disruption. We’ve distilled everything we’ve learned from leading brands through this journey into this one actionable resource.
Transcript:
Everyone. Thank you, Bri. Glad to have all these folks join in. We’ll get started, and our main focus today is really about planning a migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze.
I’ll caveat the session — this isn’t a Salesforce Marketing Cloud bashing session, so if that’s what you’re tuned in for, stick around, because we will talk about some of the key differences between the platforms that we see based on our experience.
But before we jump in, I want to make sure that we get a chance to quickly tell you who we are and our background. We’re Stitch — if you’re not aware, a Braze-focused consultancy made up of a group of MarTech consultants and technologists over the past decade or more. Our team has built our careers on all things MarTech — customer engagement platforms, marketing automation platforms, ESPs and email service providers — and it’s really focused on customer messaging, customer experience, and how these platforms integrate with one another.
From a personal perspective, I’m Nick Raf, and I’m on our solutions team. As my title suggests, I’m a solutions lead. The question I get often is, what does that actually mean? In short, we’re really focused on that upfront solutioning, the planning, and the relationship building that goes into our customer base and how we’re helping those customers.
Quick credentialing — I’ve spent the last 11 years in the MarTech space, originally on the client side at Target within the marketing operations group, and then at NBC as part of the NBC Sports group, before jumping into the professional services realm as a solution architect, and then now doing what I’m doing now.
I’m also joined by Steven Rosenfeld. Steven?
Yeah. Hey, thanks Nick. Hello everyone. I’m Steven. I am the VP of Architecture and Delivery at Stitch. My team’s focus is on the strategy, design, and development of marketing use cases alongside our customers. My background — I started in MarTech about a decade ago, started as a Marketing Cloud solution architect. And so with that, I’ve got a lot of respect for the Marketing Cloud platform, actually. I think it can be really powerful and has been for marketers in the past, but I’m really excited to talk with this group today about why Braze is better suited for the modern marketer today.
Thank you, Steven. So as we jump into it, our objectives for this session are to share why we see brands making the switch, some of the key differences between the two platforms, and what that migration process looks like — from our point of view. We’ll address some of the nuances between the platforms as well, so what are brands kind of experiencing and where there are potential points of friction in the changes between the two. And then we’re going to provide some really specific things that you can do now to prepare. Knowing the audience, there might be a whole range of where you’re at in this process — it might be exploratory, it might be, hey, this is impending for us. Hopefully some of those action items will be relevant to you all.
And we’ll finish with open Q&A, so you guys can feel free to ask questions in the chat, and we’ll go through those here at the end.
Cool. So why do we see brands moving to Braze? I think the first one we want to call out — and there are primarily six here — is that Braze is viewed as a true cross-channel platform. They term themselves as a customer engagement platform, or a CEP. And so what we mean by true cross-channel is it really means that activation of data and events across email, web, mobile, SMS, WhatsApp, and advertising channels are all consolidated into one space within the platform. Does that sound familiar? It probably should. We’ll get into the real true meaning behind that a little bit later.
The second one, kind of in the middle at the top there, is really around real-time orchestration. So Braze places a heavy emphasis and recommendation on the utilization of the Braze web and mobile SDK. The reason behind that is because it truly powers direct API access to front-end digital properties — whether that’s obviously a mobile app, a web experience, or other kinds of digital platform experiences that a brand has. And it’s going to provide a really fast method of creating those personalized experiences and taking that data and those event properties and turning them into customer messaging.
The third one, and I think we’ve heard this from a number of brands, is under the consolidation category. Total cost of ownership in the MarTech space — knowing that there’s this ongoing trend of your MarTech stack kind of growing over the course of the years, and then it’s like, okay, what do we have here that’s duplicative? What’s really a point solution? How do we bring that back and reduce the amount of technical debt that we have?
I think everybody’s familiar with that because there’s always a mixed bag of MarTech. There are certain platforms that you’re never going to get rid of, and certain platforms that are always on the chopping block — are we really utilizing this to its fullest potential? As an example, we had one customer that was using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email, Optimizely for web, Attentive for SMS, Urban Airship for push messaging, and then they had some homegrown transactional services for both email and push. A big thing for their brand was efficiency and total cost of ownership — what can we do to find a platform that’s going to power more for us so we don’t have to jump into different platforms and have kind of some semblance of fractured teams?
Yeah. So I’ll take the last three here. The fourth reason we see brands moving over is because they have a longstanding relationship with Salesforce, and over those years they end up running into contact count issues. It gets expensive to pay for customers, prospects, and past customers in perpetuity. So unless you regularly purge your instance and have a whole solution built around maintaining those contact counts, that can be very costly.
The fifth reason we’re seeing brands move is making a substantial shift in their data and event strategy. They may be bringing on a customer data platform or onboarding a cloud-based data warehouse. And those data and event actions become really important to reassess in the larger MarTech infrastructure.
And then the last one would be marketers looking to remove barriers around data management and process management, and giving marketers a really straightforward approach to their tool set in a modern UI that allows for smarter messaging and faster operational execution when it comes to deployments.
Yeah, and Steven, that one hits home for a lot of our customers where we’ve got the different teams — marketing operations versus general marketers versus content marketers versus channel marketers versus the email campaign team. Like, just make it easy for those front-end teams. They’re doing execution for a retail brand that’s sending three different versions plus translations and alternatives per day or even more. Just make it really easy for them to interact with and get those campaigns out the door.
So let’s jump into some of what we would consider the philosophical differences, so we’re all on the same page. We don’t want this to be overly focused there — we’re going to get to the migration portion — but we want to make sure we’re all on the same page and on the same foundation for why Stitch thinks the way we think.
So putting these two platforms side by side and going top-down, we see Salesforce Marketing Cloud as data-centric. The reason behind that — we’ll dive into this more — is that it’s been around a long time and it’s built on a backend SQL server. So you have the opportunity to create a bunch of data tables, or what you all understand as data extensions, versus Braze, which we view as user-centric. And what we mean by user-centric — I’m actually just going to volley this over to Steven because he does a really good job of explaining that.
Yeah, thanks Nick. Whenever I’m trying to think about a platform’s function in the ecosystem, it really helps to understand when these products originated and what technology was like at the time. So when Salesforce Marketing Cloud was first being developed as ExactTarget, it was the late 2000s. We were a decade away from CDPs or cloud-based data warehouses. We were seven years away from the first iPhone, and years away from standardized JSON specifications.
And because of this, that product team rightfully focused on data management and creating some data flexibility within their platform. They created an extendable data model, and they did do a good job with that for the time and technology available.
Braze stepped into a very different world about 12 years later — one where smartphones had taken hold and it was all about interacting with consumers where they were. One could say Salesforce maintained Marketing Cloud and adjusted to that, but that’s still an adaptation, and you end up with a lot of legacy foundations around that data structure just because of how the technology was at the time it was being built.
So brands should expect to interact with consumers on a mobile device first, which Braze had in mind when they developed the platform, simply because of the timing in which it was developed. It’s a world where flexible data specifications are available. So when we say data-centric versus user-centric, we’re thinking about how each platform’s foundation is reflected in how we implement them.
Thank you. Going down to the next bullet — there’s no question, and we always say this, there’s complexity within Salesforce Marketing Cloud because of the power that it has. It’s a powerful tool set, and that goes back to what Steven said — we have a lot of respect for it. The amount of customization options that you have in Salesforce Marketing Cloud are relatively limitless because of the backend that Steven is talking about and the origination of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
On the flip side of that is Braze’s UI. If you haven’t taken that deep dive with the Braze team and gone through some product demos, hop on YouTube — you’ll be able to see them quickly there. Braze’s UI is largely simplified and the user experience is much more straightforward. So again, tying back to that previous slide, it’s about making the marketer’s job easier on the front-end experience.
But let’s move on to the next one — the partner ecosystem. This is one where we think, because of really the market share that Salesforce has — which we’re all very familiar with — across not just Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but more so they own more than 50% of the market for CRM and in other tangential products related to their CRM. It’s a huge portfolio, so it naturally has an exhaustive network of technology and service partners.
On the flip side of that, Braze definitely has an extensive and impressive catalog of integrated partners that continues to grow like crazy. If you were to subscribe to their email channel for platform and SDK updates, it’s very frequent that there are announcements for new partnerships. And it’s really cool to see because it’s every single week on our side.
Yeah. And the next item here — earlier we touched on marketing orchestration and operational management. Within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you’re jumping between studios and builders in that environment and leveraging components of Marketing Cloud Personalization and Intelligence, which are additions through acquisitions over time since the days of ExactTarget. Whereas in Braze, it’s all baked into one unified tool set in a platform where when you say, I want to do a message, you can literally select anything from mobile channels on a mobile device to web push to email, SMS, et cetera.
And the last main difference is how data is integrated and managed between these two platforms. Your Marketing Cloud instance has likely placed a heavy emphasis on SFTP integrations and Automation Studio with SQL. The focus is typically a delayed bulk upload to specific data sets within Marketing Cloud. Whereas in Braze, you’re looking at data driven through event collection via the API, with a heavy emphasis on the Braze SDK — whether that be from a mobile device or web — and direct connections to a CDP or a modern data warehouse like Snowflake to ingest data directly into Braze in near real time.
Cool. Let’s jump into a quick visualization on this too. So Steven, I’ll have you cover this as well. But the idea — especially for that first bullet where we’re talking about data-centric versus user-centric — I think this does a good high-level job of outlining that. If you want to jump into this, Steven.
Yeah. So let’s go deeper. When we look at how Marketing Cloud is structuring data — like we said — we end up with essentially a data schema within each account. We have larger relational tables that then need to be recompiled at the campaign level for execution. So we end up with a fairly heavy data management practice where we will have larger tables at the enterprise level — account-wide — and then we end up querying and kind of duplicating that data at a campaign execution level. And then we have to make sure campaign data matches the enterprise level. And that is to streamline the deployments within things like Journey Builder and Automation Studio — to make sure that all of the data that is needed is consolidated into a single table to limit the amount of lookups and things like that, to keep the account performant.
Flip side — to Braze, where we’re using event data structures against a profile. We’re creating a unique JSON structure that is attached to your user profile, where we have the flexibility of continuing to provide a unique data structure for each account, but we don’t have to parse through lots of tables to get to that data or copy that data from an enterprise-level to a campaign-specific table. Because at the time of sends — whether it’s unique purchase data or signup data — that data is linked to the profile that is being sent to, and so we can do a direct lookup against it every time.
Also, within the actual user interface, when we go to review that data, we pull up a user profile and can see in one spot all of the data that Braze has about that user, instead of needing to comb through a dozen different data extensions and then trying to write queries to do analysis — making sure we’re bringing in first name so that we can make it meaningful, for example. All of that is streamlined with Braze having that user-centric view right from its foundation.
So for those of you that are like me and need that summarized further — because some of that goes over my head in some regard — this is the too-long-didn’t-read version of it. On the left side, Salesforce Marketing Cloud — obviously the data model is extensive and it’s great for certain brands and certain companies that are going to want to have that technical skill embedded into marketing. Think of it almost as a marketing database manager role. And that ties back to some of my previous experience at NBC Sports, where we actually had that type of role embedded into the marketing team — rolled up to the marketing team — but doing a lot of that marketing database management that Steven is mentioning.
And then on the right side, Braze is offering that less rigid data — event-structured, event-oriented — making it easier to build those segments based on things that are happening and events that we can see.
So I think that’s enough about the key differences between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Braze. We could probably talk about this all day long just based on backgrounds like Steven’s and mine in both platforms over the course of our professional history. But now let’s talk about migration.
The idea behind your methodology on migrating to Braze is something that I think we’re all super aware of — is this a lift and shift? Is this a lift and optimize? Or is this a messaging transformation? We don’t need to define those — we’ll just make the assumption that we’re all aware of what those mean.
But below that, these are what I would call the extenuating circumstances or common scenarios that we run into when we’re talking about planning a migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze.
The first and foremost is timeline — a huge factor. I’d say like one in three conversations that we have about a brand going down the road of making this switch is going to run into the question of, when is our Salesforce Marketing Cloud contract up? We’ve had customers that are three to four months out from their Marketing Cloud end date. And that’s not a lot of time to really rethink messaging or look for key areas of how do we go and improve and optimize when we’re falling into those types of timelines. It becomes, okay, let’s get this moved and let’s get this shifted so that we reduce the amount of risk there.
The next one is brand refresh. Think of it like — let’s hit the rewind button to 2020 when, for example, GoDaddy switched their brand. Do you guys remember that little hand-drawn guy with the weird hair? They made that switch in 2020 and now, if you go to their website, we’re all familiar with their new brand — a new color palette, a new brand message, and a totally new logo, kind of a loopy heart. GoDaddy is obviously still the name.
The reason I bring that up is that rebrands, redesigns, and refreshes are a ton of work to figure out from a CMS perspective — where assets live in all these different places, because sometimes they’re hosted in Marketing Cloud, sometimes they’re external, sometimes they’re all over the board. And then there’s a ton of work in copy edits. So a lot of things get touched when there’s a brand refresh. That’s something to be thinking about too if that’s coming. If there’s a new brand launching within your overall brand portfolio, those things need to be considered when thinking about whether we make a lift and shift or a lift and optimize. And if we have a lot of time, does a brand refresh give us the opportunity to make substantial updates to that customer journey as well?
Steven, I’ll have you jump into the next one.
Yeah, so one of the other major contributions to timeline is data and event projects that are happening at the same time as looking at implementing Braze. So if you’re looking at setting up a CDP, moving to a cloud data platform, or setting up a Kafka streaming event service — those are when we start to really look closely at how we need to integrate properly into your tech stack, alongside partnering with your data and engineering teams to make sure we’re following the compliance that your business has built for itself. Those things can be time constraints because we are working cross-functionally. So it’s really important to get ahead of that and understand what is the critical path to onboarding into Braze and what makes sense for longer-term sustainability.
Seasonality is another big one. Back when I was at NBC Sports, all of our major projects always fell outside of our peak periods for our execution mode. We see this with retail brands that have kids’ product lines — hey, we’re not touching back-to-school season, so we’re essentially locked down from late June until October. We’re not going to do anything major there — there are going to be code freezes. And that also dovetails right into Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So seasonality — definitely be thinking about that. Major revenue-driving periods should be avoided at all costs.
Yeah, and I think we’re well aware too of this next one with the current economic climate. If you haven’t noticed, Stitch is very active on LinkedIn, which is a great way for us to provide industry and technology insights to our customer base. And each week I open it multiple times, and at least once a week there’s a consistent theme of a larger organization announcing some reduction in their org. So when organizations are strapped for resourcing, we’re happy to make a blatant plug here to help step in and accommodate for these things that need to be considered.
Thanks for the pipeline generation there, Steven.
Happy to do it. So the last thing we want to note on this slide is there are some brands we’ve worked with that have just crazy volumes. And I don’t mean that in a negative way — there are a lot of iterations of targeted messages with large customer bases. And so migrations can take a while and need to be considered, because everyone still has their day-to-day job while they’re also focusing on what this is going to look like in a new platform.
Yeah, I think that’s one thing that’s sometimes missed — both from a platform perspective and when folks are moving to other platforms. I think we sometimes forget, especially in that services partner space that we’re in, that these people are also trying to send all these campaigns out. Their workload was already kind of strapped anyway, and now we’re asking them for X number of hours per week to really dedicate on something future-facing, and that work has to go somewhere. So that’s just a callout that I think from a third-party perspective, from a platform perspective, and at the Braze level — we sometimes forget that, and that’s on us.
Let’s jump into the next piece here. There are really four stages of onboarding to Braze. You do see an open arrow at the end here — that’s meant to be like, yeah, okay, are there more stages? Yes, there are, like when we get into the testing and go-live. But we’ll cover that later. We’re focused on preparing for that migration.
So the first stage — we’re not going to spend a ton of time here because we’re assuming that folks in attendance have already started down the pathway of figuring out their North Star — by the way, Minnesota North Stars. I’m a native Minnesotan, so I get to throw that into every deck if I can. Establishing those goals, the criteria of what this is, what is going to make this a success, and then really defining what are the sheer pain points that we’re struggling with — whether that’s truly time to value or operational efficiency — really laying out what some of the main KPIs that we’re going to keep in mind are. Because you’re always going to have to loop back with your leadership teams on, where are we at? What are the pain points and the friction points that we’re addressing and we’re not addressing? It’s like a constant reminder.
The next stage is what we would consider an inventory stage. This is something that we’ll talk about in some of the key recommendations on where you can start now. This is a big piece of it. A lot of the customers that we have who have come from a Salesforce Marketing Cloud background have had it for a while — 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 years. There’s a lot of stuff that ends up being in there for a long period of time, and you have to go figure out — okay, what does our actual inventory look like versus what’s actually inside of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for us?
Now there are other parts of it that are tangential to the actual platform — what does our campaign process look like? We need to really define that, because it’s going to have to undergo some modifications based on what we talked about with the philosophical differences between Marketing Cloud and Braze. There are going to be things that need to get changed there.
We run into some customers that don’t have a strong way to really catalog how integrations are coming in, where this data’s coming from, and what the cadence of data looks like. So anything that you can do to prepare yourselves during that transition process and do that now is really going to help set the stage for what the future state looks like.
And we can jump into the workshop here. That workshop session — the plum purple section — is really in Steven’s realm of how do we figure out what the future state should look like, what architectural design should look like, where should the data be coming from, and is there a better way to do it? That’s usually involved in actual sessions we call workshops, which is why it’s titled “workshops” — diving into all of the mechanics behind data flow and where there’s potential latency between a CDP or between an enterprise data warehouse, or if there’s a front-end platform that does some manipulation of data.
And then the next portion is, what does the campaign process actually look like inside of Braze? Let’s go deep and dive into that so that you can reestablish your campaign process, because it will look different. Now if you took 10 steps out of that process, eight of them might still be the same. But anytime you’re switching platforms — especially to a Braze UI that is friendlier, easier to use and access — what can we do to make this go faster and reduce some friction on those marketing teams?
The last portion of this is really based on timing, prioritization, and resourcing. Really having a strong stance on what does this actually look like. Sometimes that’s broken out week by week if you can get to that level of nuance and detail. But typically it’s more of a waterfall approach where there are going to be portions of your migration timeline that are table stakes — you can’t move those. They have to be done. Think of things like sender authentication packages and getting your DNS set up. Those are technically easy, but you can’t get around them, and sometimes those take some time.
Steven, I’ll have you cover the migrate piece.
Yeah, so for migration, we’re talking about actual execution of migrating integrations from one platform to another. And so we’re really looking to understand the foundations of how Braze should be set up for execution within your active channels and the channels that you want to move into within Braze.
This could be within email — so we’re talking authenticating sending domains — and enabling your campaign operations team on how scripting changes between the platforms and how that changes given the event structures that we’ve talked about. In addition to just how we can trigger consumers into journey-esque campaigns given they make a purchase or take an action, and we need to respond to that action both by activating them within a specific campaign workflow or driving a decision split within a journey.
Data integrations would be things like what file feeds do we have going to the SFTP today that we then need to focus on — maybe doing a cloud data ingestion component to get that data into Braze in a more direct fashion, which is a great win because in those instances the data’s never leaving. It’s never going through a middleware platform, so it never has to be extracted and stored somewhere else. Security teams really love that as well.
And then we talk about reviewing the assets that we have within Marketing Cloud and how we’re going to move those over for campaign execution — what the content strategy is going to be in terms of, are we using a lot of content blocks, or are we doing dynamic content within single emails? Do we need drag-and-drop templated emails, or are we going to do pure HTML? Those things from the executional side ensure we’re creating operational efficiencies for the team going forward.
Cool. I know we’re getting close on time. We do have a little plug here at the bottom — email me at [email protected] if you want a copy of what we look at for our customers from a migration workbook perspective. This helps with both the inventory and the migrate portions — the two bubbles there — because it starts to help catalog things. It’s in an Excel or Google Sheet format, just because that’s the easiest method and way to share it. We’re happy to share that, so email me directly if you’d like to see a copy and we’ll send it over.
Let’s move on. This portion of what we’re talking about — I know we’re close on time, so we’ll cover this at a high level — but some of the biggest changes that we see our customers really dealing with and having to manage through. I’m not talking about organizational change management — I’m talking about some of the feedback we get from certain folks, like, “Well, in Marketing Cloud we do it this way.”
So at a quick high level, the first bullet is about the customer profile data in Marketing Cloud living as a row within a data set — here’s John Smith and here are all the attributes we have on him. And then here’s all the hub-and-spoke model of the relational data of, okay, how do we stitch this together to really make sense of an audience? Versus in Braze, we’re dealing with what Steven has shared — you have this user profile that contains all these events and all these attributes that are one-to-one to this member.
So our recommendation there, and how you manage this change, is really having a strong way to build out an event data dictionary. Sometimes that lives in an Atlassian Wiki page, sometimes in a Google Sheet, so that cross-functional teams have a good understanding of what’s in Braze, where it’s coming from, and how these profiles are built. Because if you miss that step, it becomes the snowballing effect of, hey, this thing’s running and it’s sending messages, but we don’t know where the data and events are coming from. So that’s one recommendation there.
The other one I think we should cover here, Steven, is really on the AMPscript piece. So everybody in Salesforce Marketing Cloud knows AMPscript — it’s the personalization language that’s proprietary to Salesforce. Braze operates on Liquid scripting, which is a Shopify-invented language, and it has wider functions because it’s open source. So there are changes that are going to be happening from a personalization perspective that are just part of the learning curve — figuring out who has this, who may be on a web team that could help the marketing team learn this language faster, or how do we see the difference between these two? Because there are different methods in Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s AMPscript versus the way Liquid is built. And that’s just calling out the big change there.
So without further delay, the three things that you can do to plan for this migration are: one, start that auditing process. Again, we have a workbook that we can share — really understand what’s in there now, what’s actually active, how things are integrated to Salesforce so that they’re documented for the team that is going to handle the actual migration project, which will certainly be a cross-functional team all speaking the same language on how things are currently set up.
The second one is about people planning. And I think we’ve made mention of this — thinking about roles, resources, teams on engineering, teams on IT, and really having a good understanding of how you’re going to support Braze from a people perspective. You’ll have folks on the campaign team that are email developers — their jobs won’t change apart from some of the learning curve aspects like we talked about for personalization. But there are going to be folks on the team that say, I spend all my day doing SQL queries — what am I going to be doing in the Braze environment? Thinking about those roles and how that time might be shifted or changed.
And then on the last piece, which is largely upstream, is thinking about who in IT and engineering on the data side really needs to have a good heads-up that this is coming, so it’s not like, here are all the requirements, get this in your backlog. There needs to be a lot of coordination there. So really start thinking about people.
And then the last one — which is a shameless plug — talk to somebody like Stitch who has experience on both sides of the fence, who can help you unpack the size and level of complexity, call out some of the things that you might be challenged with from an organizational or process perspective, because there is change coming.
Steven, anything to add there? I don’t want to lose out on our Q&A session.
No, I think that last one really is a critical step. We understand both of these platforms in detail, and to your point — even on the AMPscript to Liquid conversion — it’s not uncommon for us to just sit down and talk with clients about, you know, typically when we have this type of loop performing this function in AMPscript, this is how we would represent that in Liquid and how we need to think about it from both a data and operational perspective. It’s a really important step.
Cool. ChatGPT is your friend for making a translation between AMPscript and Liquid too — although don’t trust it blindly.
Let’s jump into the Q&A section. Appreciate everybody’s time thus far. Brie, do we have any questions in the Q&A?
Yep, we have one. Can Braze handle huge contact records similar to Salesforce, which is best suited for enterprise level?
Steven, I’d defer to you on that.
It for sure can — both managing inbound data, outbound data for message events feeding into your data warehouse at scale, and segmentation at scale. It absolutely performs those events at scale very quickly. I’d encourage you to watch the Braze webinar with Wynn Resorts that they had yesterday, where Aaron from Wynn talks about how they turned on Snowflake Cloud Data Ingestion and within 20 minutes had uploaded billions of records into Braze ready for segmentation.
Another one is, how does Data Cloud impact planning around the migration? Does it change things?
Oh, that’s a good question. So for those that aren’t aware — though I think everybody’s probably aware since Salesforce has likely talked to you about Data Cloud, or the CDP option within Salesforce — it depends, and I hate to answer with “it depends.” When we have Braze integrated to a CDP platform, a lot of these CDPs have the same functional types of ways to integrate with activation platforms. So going from Segment and mParticle and down the list — and now Data Cloud is part of that — or even an Adobe CDP, it’s all going to function under the same type of method, but they’re all built a little bit differently.
So from a Data Cloud perspective, it’s probably going to be more closely tied to a broader Salesforce ecosystem — you’ve got Sales and Service Cloud, or if you’re in a specific vertical, you might have Financial Services Cloud and then Service Cloud.
I think the changes that happen with a migration are just thinking about what kind of latency you might have within a Salesforce CDP environment. They’ve made substantial updates to it, but two to three years ago it was an emerging CDP on the market that was much more batch-oriented. And now they’ve gotten into this micro-batch area where there is a more real-time feed if Braze is the endpoint — it can pass that over and it can see upstream into the Salesforce environment really well.
Anything to add to that, Steven?
No, I think that was well put, Nick. It is very much an “it depends” on the tech stack and exactly how and when we need to configure those integrations.
Awesome. I think we’ve got time for one or two more, so if anyone has any, drop them in the chat. But we had another one. What are the biggest differences in marketing team resources between Salesforce and Braze?
That is a good one. I think I’d mentioned one in particular — if you’ve got somebody on your team that’s doing all of the data transformation, basically the king or queen of Automation Studio and running SQL queries, their role will change. Braze does have SQL functionality — they have what are called segment extensions that get into slicing and dicing audiences in greater detail and more in the way that a Salesforce Marketing Cloud resource would want to do it. That’s one in particular.
The other particular resource that I think we’ve talked about in the past, Steven — and you can add to this — is that you’ve got to have somebody when you’re thinking about event structures. And this came from my past too, when I was an actual end user of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and we had an application and a digital property. I was into the campaign management and campaign operations aspects. I didn’t really have an understanding of how event streams work at the time.
So if you don’t have somebody on the team that understands how things can happen on the app and how that can feed into a Braze environment, you’re going to want to be able to tap somebody who really understands things like — what’s a race condition, how does that happen from an event category standpoint, and what can we do with some of the web personalization or app personalization events that we can stream in through the Braze SDK?
Yeah, I love this question. Given that I had the opportunity to lead operations teams within Marketing Cloud and operations teams within Braze, it’s a really key question for me. One of the other things I’ve found is that a data-focused person where you are focused on a different type of data modeling — to Nick’s point — is understanding the event structures and how those things come in instead of a relational database normalized structure. So again, technical, but that is a key difference.
The other piece is that within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we would have email developers that were constantly doing campaign execution work and sending beautiful HTML-driven emails out to customer bases. And that skillset starts to extend within Braze to in-app messaging and content cards where we have additional channels available to us — where we are intentionally marketing to consumers on their mobile device as a primary channel.
I know we’re at time, but we actually have three more questions. Do we want to keep going and at least get everyone’s questions answered?
Yeah, let’s rip through them. Y’all have my email address and we’ll send the recording after too, along with a follow-up with this deck so you have that material. So if you have more questions afterward, feel free to reach out. But yeah, Brie, let’s jump into these.
All right, so the next one — it’s a good one. Is Braze AI similar to Einstein, and does Sage have similar functionalities?
Steven, I’m going to kick that one to you.
It certainly has similar functionalities — send time optimization, channel optimization. Sage AI has a few other things as well that may be newer in the Marketing Cloud space since AI is so new. Obviously both platforms are going to be releasing new things, and I’m more focused on Braze right now. They do have copywriting help for generating content within Braze. And within one of the really interesting pieces I found — we talk about how data gets into Braze, but obviously in order to run an application, you do have a relational data model behind the actual Braze application itself. And Braze allows you to write some queries against that, and they actually have AI that can take natural language and convert that into SQL query language on your behalf, which I thought was really cool. So similar for sure. There are going to be overlapping use cases across the board, and I think both platforms are going to continue to push here since it’s so popular in the market right now.
Awesome. The next one is, can you describe how Stitch and Braze would staff a migration project? Is it only through a partner or directly, and what are the roles the folks have on the migration team?
Yeah, I can cover that one. So Braze has what are known as onboarding and integrations teams. Those are folks that you can kind of view as a Sherpa — they’re there to guide you through an implementation and migration to Braze. They’re on the Braze team. It’s essentially an extension of that Braze account team to help you along the way.
Braze also has the partner ecosystem, which Stitch lives in, that can offer augmented-type services. So based on whether it’s timeline or capacity, we can plug in — or a partner can plug in — similar to the Salesforce services environment. You’ve got Salesforce Professional Services and you’ve got a lot of other partners out there, some of whom are really dedicated to certain verticals, some to certain portions of the Salesforce platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or MuleSoft or whatever. So it’s not dissimilar.
When it comes to the roles of that migration team — from a Stitch perspective, just to give you an idea — you have your classic solution architect that is leading functional design on how things should work, looking at integrations and data. And you’ve got what we call technical producers, who are the big kind of contrast to what Steven had mentioned. We don’t just have email developers — they have to be really good at messaging across all the different channels. So we call them messaging SMEs because a campaign is now not just an email campaign or an email drip, it is a cross-channel messaging campaign.
The other primary resources on our side are going to be a business strategist, which is a mix between a business analyst and a program manager. The unique skillset there is really understanding the requirements, because we do deal with a lot of what we consider legacy cloud migrations to a different environment. It takes a deep understanding of what they’re currently doing so we can translate that to Braze. And they’re also really driving engagement as the main points of contact. That’s how we do it. I’m sure other partners have a different kind of secret sauce — we think ours is the best. And then we augment that with the Braze onboarding services, where they are providing some of that Sherpa guidance.
And the last one that came through is, what’s the typical implementation and migration timeline?
Oh boy, I knew that one was coming. Two weeks — no, that’s a bad one. I have bad humor. Again, this is one of those “it depends” questions. Our typical is between about 12 to 20 weeks, so three to five months. But a lot of that is dependent on volume, complexity of campaigns, complexity of data structures, and some of the things we mentioned like what else is happening — big data projects, etc.
The Braze onboarding is pretty quick. Now if you’re sitting out there and you’re Charles Schwab or Fidelity or somebody, I would not answer the same way because I know there’s a lot of complexity — especially from a financial services perspective. So caveat that if you are a Fidelity out there and saying, you said three to four months — don’t hold me to that.
Awesome. I think that wraps up our questions. So thank you guys. And like Nick said, feel free to email Nick at stitch.cx with any additional questions, or you can come through our website stitch.cx as well. We’re happy to follow up.
Cool. Thanks y’all. Thanks for joining.
