For Smart Message Personalization, You Need Braze Connected Content

Does it ever feel like some marketers must have some sort of superpower that enables them to create and deploy relevant content in real time? Well, they do—and you can, too. We'll let you in on a little secret, the tool at their disposal is called Connected Content, also known as dynamic content. Just like these names suggest, it is truly dynamic content that can help you better connect with your customers. And now's the time for your brand to start harnessing this superpower to improve your marketing campaigns and reach your business goals.

What Is Connected Content, Anyway?

In short, it's a technology that can help you send messages that matter and updates that are fresh and populated in real-time up to the minute. With Connected Content, you can customize your cross-channel campaigns—those sent via email, in-app, push, and more—with personalized information from your company's own internal servers and third-party APIs.

Once you see the technology put into practice, you'll realize the applications are endless. Some of the most common types of Connected Content campaigns include those populated with information from:

• Recommendation engines. Purchase or content suggestions based on individual and aggregate customer behavior.
• Localized weather. Real-time weather information from sources like Braze Alloys technology partner AccuWeather.
• Other public, third-party APIs. The most relevant information from news outlets like the New York Times, event platforms like Eventbrite, finance information from industry sources like Yahoo! Finance, health updates from agencies like the FDA, and more.

Plus, with Braze Alloys technology partner Transifex, you can also ensure that the messages you send can leverage dynamic content to support automatic translation. That makes it possible to deploy your personalization-powered messaging to audiences across the globe.

Connected Content in Action: How Overstock Boosted Email Opens by 3x the Industry Average

When marketing teams have to put together campaigns like these manually on a one-off basis, it's nearly impossible to react to key events in a truly real-time fashion, creating so many potential missed opportunities for optimal engagement. Braze customers who use our Connected Content capabilities have been able to turn things around, saving staff time and improving engagement rates.

One great example? Leading eCommerce platform Overstock. With the Braze platform’s Connected Content dynamic personalization feature, Overstock was able to highlight specific items that customers had recently viewed or saved—and to let them know when they dropped in price. By using Braze to send these triggered, segmented, cross-channel messages via push and email, Overstock made it more likely that customers returned to their website and app while also seeing email open and unique clicks that were 3x and 9x higher than industry benchmarks.

“We’ve seen tremendous results in driving stronger email and push open rates, engagement, and conversions through leveraging Braze to improve our message targeting and personalization,” said Paul Ford, Senior Product Manager, Overstock

The Engagement Effect of Connected Content-Powered Personalization

Content that's designed to make your brand interactions more personal, helpful, and considerate sounds like it should resonate, but how much of a difference does it make when it comes to key metrics, like open rates? We wanted to dig in and learn more, so we conducted an analysis of over 500 billion messages created using the Braze customer engagement lifecycle platform. Here's what we found out about just how the tool has an impact on consumer behavior, broken out by channel. Based on our research, brands that utilize Connected Content see:

• Android push notification open rates increase by 1.5x
• iOS push notification open rates increase by 1.3x
• Email campaign unique click rates increase by 1.7x
• Web messaging open rates increase by 4.1x

Next Steps

Connected Content is one of many personalization tools that have been shown to boost engagement. If you're ready to learn more about other effective approaches and how you can put them into practice for your brand, check out our in-depth guide, "The Power Behind the Message: The Nuts and Bolts of Effective Personalization."