How Braze Makes Email Automation Easy and Impactful

Hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day—and sadly that includes billions of emails that are irrelevant to their recipients. That’s because not enough brands are embracing a thoughtful, customer-centric email strategy. Meanwhile, the brands that are embracing modern tools and email automation are resonating with users and seeing high ROI.

Embracing email automation can take your email strategy to the next level, helping you adjust to changing customer behavior and a world where about half of all emails are opened on mobile. Fortunately, the Braze platform is uniquely positioned to help you harness the power of automation. Here’s how you can drive easy, effective automation with Braze.

Dynamically segment your audience

In today’s busy digital ecosystem, a one-size-fits-all approach to messaging just doesn’t work. Your audience is varied, full of unique subsets of users that yearn for content that’s relevant to their specific needs.

The name of the game is dynamic segmentation, which helps you deliver messages to targeted, live-updating subsets of your overall audience. Using custom attributes in Braze, you can define your users by specific preferences and characteristics (e.g., location or last item purchased), then focus messaging on that group.

Automate Message Personalization

People today increasingly expect personalized experiences from the brands they patronize—in fact, 90% of consumers express frustration when they receive messages they perceive as irrelevant to them.

That makes personalizing your emails more important than ever; thankfully, customizing your emails is also easier than ever. With Connected Content, the Braze platform’s dynamic tool, you can automatically pull relevant customer data into your emails from your company’s internal systems or from public APIs, allowing you to craft timely, personalized messages that speak to each recipient.

Email automation in action: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it was more important than ever for Canva to reach their audience with highly relevant information. They used Connected Content on the Braze platform to dynamically pull localized, translated content into their email campaign. Because they had the right automation capabilities at their disposal, Canva was able to send language-personalized emails at scale while boosting open rates by 33% and increasing engagement rates by 2.5%.

Test, test, test

Before you launch that next campaign, you want to make sure it’s set up to succeed. Is that subject line working? Are you sending at the right time of day? To answer these questions, you’ll want an efficient, automated testing strategy.

With Braze Canvas, the Braze platform’s all-in-one campaign management interface, you can quickly run A/B tests or multivariate tests and see results. Then you can apply these insights through quick and effective improvements to your email campaigns.

Email automation in action: French carpooling platform BlaBlaCar had a simple goal for their latest email campaign: higher open rates. To optimize their campaign, they launched a series of A/B tests in Canvas, gauging the impact of email sender name (i.e. “Mia” vs. “Aurelie” vs. “Julien” vs. “BlaBlaCar”) on engagement. By testing email sender names, BlaBlaCar was able to identify variants capable of increasing open rates by 20+%.

Easily Manage Cross-Channel Campaigns

Email remains the messaging channel with the biggest ROI—but before you can use email to build stronger relationships and drive higher revenue, you need to make sure your customers are opted in to receive messages in this channel.

One of the best ways to do that is by leveraging messaging channels like in-app messages or Content Cards to encourage active members of your audience base to subscribe to your email list. By using these supplemental channels, email marketers can increase their reachable audience while also making an affirmative case for the value of the emails they send, reinforcing the brand/customer relationship.

Email automation in action: Dating app Happn was frustrated by high bounce rates and low open rates for their email campaigns. To make sure they were reaching their users’ correct email addresses in an engaging way, they added an automated in-app message to their onboarding flow asking for the user’s email. After users entered their address, Braze automatically triggered an email confirmation, followed by a welcome email. Users then received an onboarding email with instructions and screenshots walking them through how to use the app. The whole flow created an effective onboarding experience while also developing the relationship between Happn and its new users, boosting open rates by 3x and decreasing bounce rates by 42%

Next Steps

With email automation in your toolkit, you’re ready to build more scalable email campaigns without sacrificing relevance. Your brand’s message will be ready to stand out in today’s crowded inboxes. To learn more, visit the Braze Email Product Page.