Introducing the Braze Data Platform

Customer engagement relies on data—and that's true across every region, every industry, and for companies of any size. The rise of mobile and the growth of modern cloud platforms have opened up major opportunities for marketers to deliver highly relevant, personalized experiences at scale. The challenge? With so much data held in so many different places, brands often struggle to get a hold of the information they need in order to take effective action and build stronger customer relationships.

At Braze, we've continued to build out a series of products and integrations across the data ecosystem that makes it easier for brands to unify and activate both zero- and first-party data—but today, we see an opportunity to take it all a step further. That’s why we’re introducing the Braze Data Platform: A comprehensive, composable set of new and existing Braze capabilities and partner integrations available in our customer engagement solution, designed to help marketers leverage data to deliver more impactful, scalable customer experiences powered by Braze.

Deepening our investment in direct data warehouse and CDP integrations

The sheer volume of data that companies are handling today can make it challenging to deliver memorable, tailored experiences to their customers. Sometimes that's due to technical barriers that hinder access to the data marketers need; sometimes it's the disorganized and disjointed way the data is structured that causes issues.

To avoid these pitfalls and achieve their goals, brands may take different approaches based on their unique business needs and preferred workflows. Some brands leverage direct integrations between a cloud data warehouse and a customer engagement solution like Braze, to streamline their tech stack and minimize latency in data flows connected with their customer engagement efforts. Other brands have advanced use cases that extend beyond the marketing sphere, requiring them to integrate Braze with a customer data platform (CDP) in order to offer a comprehensive approach that covers additional data-related needs.

In either case, our goal is to make it easier for brands to optimize workflows across their marketing technology stacks and drive value for themselves and their customers. The Braze Data Platform helps marketers and technical teams integrate Braze with other technologies, derive insights, and take action across the entire data lifecycle—without sacrificing flexibility, interoperability, or modularity. Here’s what the Braze Data Platform makes possible:

1. Data unification: Bring together your customer’s evolving preferences and behaviors in real time

Braze is built to make it easy for brands to unify first-party data—with an emphasis on speed and agility. The Braze SDKs and APIs have always allowed marketers to take advantage of first-party information gathered from brands’ apps, websites, or other digital properties, but the Braze Data Platform amplifies what’s possible by supporting direct connections with leading data warehouses, digital properties, and their own backend systems.

That's made possible through Braze features like:

• Braze SDKs: Our SDKs allow brands to automatically collect essential and custom app or web data to enable communication with Braze services.
• Braze APIs: Our APIs record custom events, user attributes, and purchases for users with the /users/track API endpoint.
• Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI): This feature allows brands to directly connect, sync, and delete user data (user attributes, events, purchases) and Catalog data from the leading data warehouses. Leverage CDI Segments to build and activate segments directly, with zero-copy data access.
• Braze Data Transformation: This tool lets companies build and manage webhook integrations with external systems, powering automated data flows that can power more sophisticated marketing use cases.
• Braze Catalogs: This feature allows companies to import, store, update, and access brand-specific data (e.g. information on products, services, content, etc.) directly within Braze using CSVs and APIs.
• Braze Alloys Partner integrations: These partnerships make it possible to directly ingest data into Braze from your CDPs, marketing analytics, or other platforms with 150+ pre-built integrations.

No matter the source, the Braze Data Platform streamlines the connection between Braze and data sources of truth (e.g. cloud data warehouses, CDPs, SaaS applications) and empowers marketing teams to deliver exceptional customer engagement while reducing the associated burden on technical teams.

2. Data activation: Turn data into meaningful insights that drive personalized, relevant experiences

Many brands clean, organize, and prepare their data with identity management tools, which supports precise targeting and segmentation. The Braze Data Platform offers turnkey integrations that enable companies to combine their insights with information from other data sources to act on user behavior in the moment. It also allows brands to leverage reporting and analytics to deliver iterative campaigns for nearly any use case.

To help marketers activate external data within Braze, we’re expanding our zero-copy audience building with Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI) Segments, which is now in Early Access for all Braze Cloud Data Ingestion partners (Amazon Redshift from Amazon Web Services (AWS), DataBricks, and Snowflake). This feature gives marketers zero-copy access to their data warehouse to create new segments, and build and tailor new audiences within Braze—supporting a more streamlined, efficient use of data to power targeted messaging and responsive experiences.

Beyond segmentation, Braze helps marketers harness the power of their data to experiment and deliver customized experiences at scale—strengthening customer relationships and delivering improved ROI. Marketers can easily bring customer data into our solution via the Braze Data Platform, then leverage Sage AI by Brazeᵀᴹ to get more out of that first-party information. It also allows brands to take advantage of outputs or components of their in-house or third-party machine learning models within Braze, providing flexible support for a range of different AI/ML approaches in connection with customer engagement.

Braze has also recently launched new capabilities for enhanced data management, supporting better ongoing performance and efficiency. With new data tagging and reporting functionality, we expect marketers to be able to monitor and optimize their data collection, utilization, and health in connection with Braze Catalogs, and other aspects of Braze.

3. Data Distribution: Optimize your business workflows and drive continuous innovation with data sharing

It's no longer enough to just ingest data—brands need to be able to easily derive insights, both within their customer engagement platform and in their preferred third-party systems. The Braze Data Platform helps to address this key need by making it easy to quickly and securely send product, engagement, and customer data wherever it needs to go (e.g. a data warehouse, CDP, or other preferred tools for deeper analysis). Braze provides flexible export options, including our Braze Currents high-volume data export feature, Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, or via the Braze solution's enterprise-grade APIs.

Because different brands have different needs when it comes to their data technology and workflows, Braze continuously engages with our customers to understand and prioritize ecosystem integrations that map to their preferred data sources and destinations. Building out these turnkey partner integrations provides brands with easy access and streamlined workflows to access the tools that work best for them. That makes it possible for companies to unearth actionable insights and strategic trends within Braze via cloud data platforms and data warehouses (e.g.Amazon Redshift from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Databricks and Snowflake), CDPs (e.g. Amperity, Amplitude, Census, Hightouch, mParticle, Rudderstack, Simon Data, Tealium, Treasure Data and Twilio Segment), and analytics technologies (e.g. Amplitude, Contentsquare, Mixpanel, and Snowplow), then take action in Braze or other parts of their marketing tech stack.

Braze is meeting brands wherever they are on their data journeys

Every brand is on a journey to better collect, understand, and act on their data—and each one is at a different place on that journey. No matter where your company falls, Braze is committed to providing the tools you need to thrive in today’s increasingly data-driven marketing landscape.

The Braze Data Platform's composable design makes it easier to use the products and features you need to support seamless marketing workflows and take advantage of a unified data ecosystem. By blending powerful, extensible APIs with out-of-the-box integrations with leading data and marketing technology solutions, Braze helps brands consistently deliver meaningful, contextually relevant experiences to their customers.

To learn more about how the Braze Data Platform can enhance your customer engagement efforts, talk to your Braze Customer Success Manager or contact our sales team.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products, including the Braze Data Platform. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 7, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this press release, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.