Today’s consumers don’t choose a single platform or channel to engage with brands and then just stick to it — nor do they put up with irrelevant, poorly timed, or broken experiences from the companies they patronize.
That means today’s marketing, growth, and engagement teams are tasked with the ever-evolving challenge of delivering seamless, cross-platform experiences that speak to the people receiving them. Thanks to Branch’s partnership with leading customer engagement platform Braze, it’s now possible for brands to ensure seamless transitions between different experiences to support the consumer/brand interactions that matter most. From enhanced onboarding to ongoing customer campaigns, pairing Branch and Braze makes it possible to drive brilliant customer experiences across push, mobile email, and more.
Branch and Braze: What We Make Possible
By combining Branch’s suite of digital growth solutions with the Braze platform’s customer lifecycle marketing capabilities, which are designed to help optimize engagement beyond the point of acquisition, brands can achieve deeper visibility into how their user acquisition efforts translate into concrete long-term results, all while supporting more cohesive, more personalized end-to-end customer journeys through robust attribution and deep linking.
“Marketers need to deliver relevant, personal messages to their consumers and Braze enables that to occur across all relevant mobile channels,” said Eric Stein, EVP at Branch. “Together with Braze, we have dozens of clients benefiting from our integration who understand that it is not enough to just measure the downstream impact of your marketing activities when you can improve the performance of those activities as well.”
Some of the key benefits of using Branch and Braze in tandem include:
1. Understanding exactly when, where, and how users are acquired
For many companies, key activities around growth, marketing, and engagement are often carried out in silos. That can make it difficult to understand the impact of each individual team’s efforts as well as the combined results the larger collective group is driving.
That’s where Branch’s attribution capabilities come in. Attribution, which enables brands to accurately trace key results back to specific marketing activities, is critical for companies to gain insight into each activity’s true ROI. With Branch’s attribution features, companies can understand and improve upon the effectiveness of both their paid and organic channel selections and campaigns. Tracking the touchpoints of a given user from various acquisition channels is essential for brands to understand how they’re growing their audience and which acquisition methods are resulting in highly engaged customers.
Consider the Facebook ad campaign seen below. The process may seem simple, but issues like double attribution — was it really that Facebook campaign that led to the app install, or was it driven by engagement in another channel? — as well as biased attribution, data discrepancies, and app install fraud (when bots automate app installs or when app installs are misattributed to the wrong channel) can complicate brands’ efforts to get a full, useful picture.
But if you use Branch and Braze in tandem, you can benefit from Branch’s ability to get a deeper, more accurate understanding of how each user really finds their way to your brand, while leveraging Braze allows you to seamlessly move new users into a custom onboarding process within your app or website using in-app messaging and other channels, ultimately increasing user retention.
2. Optimizing cross-device outreach at every step of the customer journey
Today’s consumers expect to be able to engage with a brand on any platform or channel at any time, and they quickly get frustrated with irrelevant or broken brand experiences. To meet that challenge, brands need to be able to deliver relevant, responsive messages across channels, while also tracking user engagement every step of the way.
Thankfully, both Braze and Branch are built to support highly customized cross-channel experiences. The Braze customer engagement platform is architected to be cross-channel but also channel agnostic, allowing brands to easily build out, manage, and optimize messaging campaigns involving a wide variety of messaging channels (email, push notifications, in-app messages, web messaging, and more) while also supporting nuanced, real-time message targeting, triggers, and personalization. And because Branch’s deep linking capabilities are built to plug into all of your marketing channels, using it in tandem with Braze makes it possible to deliver seamless, personalized experiences with every message and touchpoint.
What does that look like? Imagine that your brand is looking to send a promotional campaign to showcase a deal on athletic apparel. By using Braze and Branch together, you could create a cross-channel campaign using email and push to grab recipients’ attention and in-app messages to nudge active users on your app to complete a purchase, then leverage deep linking to drive those users to highly specific in-app content, like pages highlighting the sale, and more.
Taking this approach drives stronger engagement with the messages you send and provides personalized experiences and seamless transitions between the promotional outreach your brand sends and the in-app experiences you’re driving users to. And because customers with strong cross-platform engagement spend 2.2x more and have a 10% higher retention rate, using Branch and Braze together can bolster your bottom line too.
3. Smart campaign interaction driven by deeper insights into user engagement
Great marketing can’t rest on its laurels. Consumers’ behaviors and preferences are always changing, and it’s important for brands to ensure that they’re collecting actionable data to drive, personalize, and optimize future campaigns. That’s where Branch and Braze come in. Pairing Branch’s attribution functionality with the Braze platform’s segmentation tools makes it possible to target users who came in from different acquisition channels with different onboarding and promotional campaigns, which allows for a more relevant, personalized brand experience.
In addition, Branch’s deep linking solution allows brands to both track engagement with various marketing activities and surface insights into downstream events — like conversions, purchases, and more — across all channels, devices, and platforms, revealing what key actions were driven by a particular click. Plus, with the Braze platform’s audience insights and campaign management, marketers can use these insights to iterate on future campaigns and adjust message targeting, triggers, timing, and content to bolster their effectiveness and help brands reach their long-term business goals.
Final Thoughts
To learn more about how to use Braze and Branch together effectively to drive stronger customer engagement outcomes, check out Branch’s “Using Braze” overview and the Braze Documentation section on Branch’s attribution and deep linking capabilities.
About the Author
Mary Kearl is a writer and digital strategist, who has led email, social media, and content marketing for several brands. She has helped launch six mobile apps and one niche social network and is always up for a good Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime binge recommendation or travel tip.
