Power Streaming Data Integrations with Braze Currents

For brands, data is the key new currency of the digital age:

• 90% of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years, with approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day
• Less than 1% of data is ever acted upon and only 22% of enterprise brands have the ability to made decisions based on in the moment customer analytics
• Decreasing the data accessibility gap by just 10% can increase a typical Fortune 1000 company’s net income by $65.7 million

The upshot? Brands that find ways to harness the vast amounts of first-party data at their disposal have a major competitive advantage that can support stronger business outcomes and better customer experiences across the board. But getting there can be challenging. To get the most value of your data and chip away at silos, brands need solutions that support direct integrations to leading data technologies, including:

• Data management platforms
• Data warehouses
• Data enrichment tools
• Business intelligence tools,
• Analytics providers

While the term "real-time" gets tossed around a lot, most data integrations are still handled via batch processing, meaning it is accurate only up to a certain time in the past. That’s not good enough in a world where most people engage constantly with different platforms and channels via their mobile device—if your data isn’t keeping up with your customers’ ongoing behavior, you’re always going to be a step behind.

Modern brands require high-volume, continuous data streaming (also called unbounded data). That is, data that never stops updating and provides a live view of the various interactions that consumers are having with your brand.

The Braze Difference: Scalable, In-The-Moment Data Flows

Ever received a flight delay notification hours after your plane has already taken off? How about an appointment reminder after you've already seen your doctor? Or an abandoned cart notification just seconds after you receive a purchase confirmation? Any time you've received a dated push notification, email, or other marketing message like these, that's likely a signal that the brand's data systems are siloed or that their technology is based around batched data, instead of on a foundation of streaming, in-the-moment data.

With in the moment data integrations and technology like Braze Currents, these types of annoying (and out-of-touch) communications can be avoided. We've designed our data export technology to make your team's (and customers') lives easier by:

1. Making data access instantaneous and seamless

Now your systems can be in sync, at all times. No more silos, and no more delays. With Braze Currents, brands can automatically move data between Braze and other layers of their tech stack. That makes data more accessible in the technologies your brand is already using (e.g. data warehouses, BI/analytics tools, customer data platforms, etc.). Plus, it can help you manage and evolve your marketing strategies and processes. All teams within a given organization can have open access to any Braze data they need, on the platforms they use, at any time.

2. Powering Advanced Campaign Analysis and Iteration

Currents makes it possible for brands to derive key insights from both customer behavior events (how customers are engaging with your brand’s digital platforms) and message engagement events (how customers are engaging with the messages you send them), including:

• Purchases
• Conversions
• Sessions
• Location data
• Uninstall activity
• Message clicks/opens
• ...and more

With Currents, it’s possible to automatically stream this type of Braze customer engagement data to an analytics platform to support large-scale analysis of data. If you identify previously hidden magic moments in your product experience, you can then leverage these insights within future Braze-powered campaigns, supporting better outcomes and better customer experiences.

3. Handling High Volume at Scale

Customer engagement today is a high-volume business. At Braze, all our systems are architected to support marketing needs at a truly epic scale—during Black Friday 2019, for instance, our platform sent 10 million messages per minute at peak times and delivered nearly 3 billion messages within a single day—and that focus on scalability is just as true when it comes to Currents. Braze Currents has sent 2.5 trillion events to date, including over 200 billion events during May 2020, showcasing the massive scale it makes possible.

Even better, Currents is designed to minimize data latency, allowing you to make use of your Braze engagement data across your larger marketing technology ecosystem faster and more effectively. Braze research found that 93% of all Currents events are processed within five minutes and that user device-specific issues (for instance, poor WiFi or cell service) accounted for 84% of all Currents latency.

4. Delivering Actionable Insights

What's the good of having access to billions of data points if you can't interpret them, detect patterns, and understand what steps to take next? We’ve taken care to ensure our clients can not only have access to in-the-moment data, but also have what they need to manage it effectively, by gaining actionable insights moment by moment.

With the assistance of Currents, brands can more easily create dashboards, reports, and visualizations highlighting key aspects of their customer engagement activities, including:

• Customized retention and funnel reports
• Predictive models based on engagement/behavioral data
• Deliverability monitoring visuals
• Top campaigns over time by engagement rate visualizations
• Uninstall tracking reports
• And the list goes on...

Plus, with our Braze Alloys technology partner and data visualization and analytics platform Looker, brands can take advantage of Looker Blocks, a first-party solution that leverages the data collection and data export capabilities built into Braze to provide key insights, fast. With Braze Looker Block support, marketers can get easy access to pre-built data visualizations or performance dashboards.

To learn more about Braze Looker Blocks, read our overview or check them out in action.

Currents in Action: How Deliveroo Used Currents and Looker to Drive True Data Democratization

Leading global delivery brand Deliveroo is an exemplar of what’s possible with the right technology. Early on in its history, the company established a goal of building a strong, global, cross-functional team across its CRM, Data, and Engineering departments. To ensure that customers in every market were receiving rich, relevant, cross-channel messages, the company’s CRM team in its Central London headquarters was tasked with supporting Deliveroo’s marketing data and analytics needs across 12 other European markets.

The CRM team worked to test out new marketing tools, channels, and campaigns in the London market and then used their learnings to help roll out new technologies and approaches in other regions. To make sure that they were accessing accurate campaign data in as it was generated, Deliveroo began using Braze Currents in conjunction with Looker, allowing their teams to easily join Braze campaign information with other important data sets—such as average order time—then visualize the data or access subsets of the combined information to identify actionable insights that support more effective marketing efforts.

By using Currents in tandem with Looker, Deliveroo was able to break down silos, improve time-to-value, and democratize data access. All of the company’s global teams are now able to explore data and identify insights for their specific regions and share findings with the company as a whole, supporting more frequent experimentation and reducing the amount of time the CRM team spent fielding data requests by 8x.

Final Thoughts

Your customers, your employees—everyone benefits when all of the layers of your marketing stack are able to communicate with each other in real time. Data agility and flexibility are within reach. To learn more about Braze Currents and how it can support stronger data agility and a more holistic approach to customer engagement, visit our Currents Product Page.