Lifecycle Marketing and the Braze Canvas Difference

People talk a lot about managing customer relationships and providing rich, cohesive experiences across a variety of different devices, platforms, and channels. But they rarely explain HOW brands are supposed to make it happen. There’s a reason for that. It’s hard.

Successfully orchestrating the customer journey is a major pain point for a lot of brands, something that often keeps marketers from building the kinds of strong customer relationships that make it possible to reach their goals. You’ve probably experienced it—getting contradictory messages, messages delivered at strange hours, or with irrelevant copy—and wondered what the heck was going on. In most cases, marketers didn't have the technology (or the know-how) they needed to orchestrate their customer journeys properly, leading to broken experiences.

At Braze, we have a unique perspective on this because our customers have to make this work every day to be successful. So, to help them get there, we put our heads together and created something—a visual customer journey tool designed to make it easy for marketers to conceptualize their campaigns and to seamlessly coordinate targeted, personalized messages across channels. We call it Braze Canvas, and it makes effective customer journey management simple.

Canvas supports “experimentation at every level of the program, from the actual success of the program at large to every single message, piece of content, and delivery mechanism,” says Milan Thakor, passenger engagement lead at Lyft.

For marketers, having the ability to easily visualize the different steps, stages, and messages involved in their customer outreach in a single location is powerful. It can make the difference between overwhelming your customers with a flood of disconnected messaging and reaching them with the right outreach at the right time in the right channels. Of course, effective lifecycle management isn’t just about visualizing and orchestrating the customer journey; it’s also about finding seamless ways to improve it. That means finding ways to test your customer engagement strategy performance and iterating on the results you find in the moment.

Braze Canvas makes that possible.

Fiverr + Braze Canvas: Optimizing Lifecycle Marketing

At its core, Braze Canvas is designed to make it easy for marketing, growth, and engagement teams to manage their customer relationships. For global freelance services marketplace Fiverr, having those capabilities was essential as they grew their business—and using Braze facilitated their progressive way of thinking by making it easier to chart customer experiences as a journey across the brand, rather than as a series of ad hoc interactions.

Back in 2016, Fiverr was looking for ways to take their already comprehensive customer messaging strategy to the next level, and needed a technology that worked as quickly as they did. Because Braze Canvas supports the seamless testing of different campaign variants within one highly visual interface, Fiverr was able to test multiple approaches within a single master campaign, making it possible to more quickly test, validate, or dismiss their different hypotheses and creative strategies.

Two years later, Fiverr created a Canvas that tested four approaches to encouraging users to make a first purchase and compared all four to a control group of users who received no messages at all. Using Braze Canvas made it possible to assess how the number of purchases, purchase value, and the total revenue generated by selected customers was affected by message timing, messaging channel choice, and other strategic factors. In addition, Fiverr optimized all four of the Canvas variants using:

• Intelligent Timing: This send-time optimization tool leverages machine learning to allow brands to ensure that the messages they send are delivered during each recipient’s unique high-engage periods throughout the day
• Exception Events: This tool makes it possible for brands to automatically suppress messages in situations where they are no longer needed—for instance, canceling an abandoned cart email when a given user makes the purchase it’s intended to drive before the message is sent
• Connected Content: This tool allows brands to dynamically add copy, images, and other content from public APIs and their own proprietary servers to messages in the moment, ensuring responsive, relevant communications

As they anticipated from past experience, all four approaches that Fiverr tried using Braze Canvas significantly outperformed the control group, but their experiment determined that the best-performing campaign variant leveraged a cross-channel customer journey featuring mobile and web push notifications, in-browser and in-app messages, and email, driving:

• 8.8% increase in the number of purchases made within three days
• 10.1% increase in average order value associated with those purchases
• 20.9% increase in revenue connected with that campaign variant

“As marketers, our job is to understand and identify various journeys for different customer needs and intents, and to make those customers happy,” says Ben Blanki, Growth & CRO team lead for Fiverr. “To make that happen, we develop and test hypotheses that help us find out key insights—like which channel or combination of channels is more effective for communicating with our buyers. Braze Canvas allowed us to build a flow where we could easily track each step of the customer journey across multiple variants, and to see the final results of the test in one place. The test made a significant impact for us and led to a noteworthy increase in conversions.”

Next Steps to Improve Customer Engagement

Looking to learn more about visual customer journey tools and how they can benefit your business? Get started by checking out our Braze Canvas overview.

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