April 2019 Product Update: Iterating, Archiving, and Expanding

At Braze, we’re focused on building the best customer engagement platform out there, supporting brilliant messaging experiences across devices, channels, and platforms. What does that mean for you? That we’re constantly innovating and improving our product so that you never miss out on an opportunity to connect with your customers.

We’ve been busy at work to ensure that we deliver the best new features to our loyal customers. Check out some of our recent releases:

Introducing A New Generation Of In-App Messages

Braze is proud to announce that we've refreshed the look and feel of our in-app messages! The improvements adhere to the latest UX and UI best practices and support greater flexibility, richer experiences, and more creativity. Choose between slideup, modal, or full screen messages that adapt to your customers’ screen to communicate important updates, offers, and more to your audience.

Slideups typically appear at the top and bottom of the app or web browser—you can set where they show up when you create your message. These are great for alerting your users about new terms of service, cookies, and other key snippets of information.

Modals appear in the center of the device’s screen with an overlay that helps it stand out from your app or website. These are perfect for not-so-subtly suggesting that your user take advantage of a sale or nudging them to take some other meaningful action.

Full-Screen messages are exactly what you’d expect—they take up the whole screen of your phone or browser! This message type is great when you really need your user’s attention, like for mandatory app updates, or if your message is rich and highly visual.

Excited to take advantage of this new functionality? Keep in mind that Braze customers need to update the latest Braze SDKs in order to see the full breadth of what’s possible with our in-app message updates.

Subscription Group Updates

In last month’s roundup, we highlighted some of our latest email updates, including Subscription Groups. Since then, we’ve released two updates to our Subscription Groups offering that provide expanded functionality:archivability for Subscription Groups; and Currents event logs for Subscription Group state changes.

As your segmentation and filtration needs adjust, you may want to sunset (AKA archive) certain Subscription Groups. Archived Subscription Groups cannot be edited and will no longer appear in Segment Filters or in the hosted preference center page. If you attempt to archive a group which is currently being used as a Segment Filter in any email, campaign, or canvas, you’ll receive an error message that will prevent you from archiving the Group until you remove all usages of it.

In order to provide more robust monitoring capabilities around Subscription Groups, we’re now able to send Subscription Group subscribe and unsubscribe events through Braze Currents, our high-volume data export tool. If a user’s Subscription Group state changes between “subscribed” and “unsubscribed”, we’ll send an event through Currents. This update allows Braze users to further analyze Subscription Group trends and better understand their audience.

Archiving Content Blocks

Content Blocks enable Braze users to create predefined assets that can be used across different channels to build messages with consistent information, look, and feel. With Content Blocks, you can create Headers and Footers for your email campaigns, distribute offer codes across channels, copy entire message bodies, and more!

If you have finished using a Content Block—think seasonally-branded email header/footers—you can archive it from the Braze dashboard’s Templates & Media page. While Archived Blocks will appear in a separate section from Active or drafted Blocks, messages using the archived Block will still perform as though it was there. We’ve recommended several best practices to ensure that outdated content is not included accidentally in your emails.

Partner Spotlight: Segment Events Update

Segment, one of our Braze Alloys technical partners, is a customer data platform (CDP) that collects and routes information from multiple sources to a variety of other locations in your technology ecosystem. To make it easier to track and understand your customers’ actions, new events have been added to the Segment Currents connector stream, including:

• Campaign Conversion
• Canvas Conversion
• Canvas Entry
• Campaign Control Enrollment
• Email Soft Bounce
• iOS Foreground Push
• Webhooks

We'll also begin streaming "send_id" as a field in all events (where applicable) in the Segment Currents connector. For more on Segment & Currents, check out our Documentation.

Anything else?

Keep checking back here to stay up to date on releases, updates, and announcements now, and throughout the rest of the year. In the meantime, subscribe to Braze Magazine for the latest on customer engagement trends, emerging tech, and marketing strategy and best practices.