One (Non-Fictional) Marketer’s Journey: Behind the Scenes of Jenny Adventure

We hope you enjoyed spending time with Jenny Adventure and experiencing the ups and downs of her role at Politer Weekly. The final outcome of this story and, more importantly, this Canvas, was the result of an early pandemic fever dream, my three years spent at an international news organization, the hard work of a cross-section of the Braze marketing team, and the realization that sometimes simple truly works best.

Our goal for this project was to show off the many different ways our Braze Canvas customer journey management feature can be used to create not just promotions, onboarding flows, and winback journeys, but to truly tell your brand’s story. After all, what is a journey besides a series of choices we make along the way? And what is marketing if not the art of telling stories that resonate with customers, influence their behaviors, and inspire loyalty.

So let’s take a look behind the curtain of this Braze-original series, as it came together in Canvas.

Who Gets What, When

Since this Canvas was all about a marketer’s experience with Braze, we made sure to target it toward marketing-related roles. So no analysts or engineers were harmed in the deployment of this Canvas. The Canvas itself was triggered by a Session Start, and that Session Start trigger window was open for a full workday in each dashboard user’s local time. The story itself was slightly tied to the day of the week, so we wanted to make sure that everybody got each message on the right weekday. We also added some custom conversion events, to track how this story actually impacts your use of Braze.

Opting In

If you were a marketer and you started a Braze session within our entry time frame, you received an In-Browser Message inviting you to opt-in to this Braze-original series featuring Jenny Adventure. To opt in, all you had to do was click the right Call To Action. (Note: Just like any good marketing team, we’ve been iterating as we go, so what you experienced may actually be slightly different than what you’ll see below!)

The Story Begins

Ten minutes after you bravely clicked that in-browser message call to action, you receive your first email and are given your first choice. That email includes two options for how Jenny could solve her current conundrum, and each option linked off to a different reaction for Jenny.

Expanding our Reach

Along with an email, we also deployed each story prompt as a webhook to our Bonfire community Slack group. If you’re not familiar, Braze Bonfire is a community by and for professionals representing the world’s top brands who are committed to creating genuine and brilliant human connections with their customers. Within this Slack group, marketers ask each other questions like “have you used provisional push and did it make a difference?” or “do you have any Canvas testing best practices?” and things like that.

This Braze-specific story about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs associated with customer engagement marketing felt like the perfect fit for this community resource. So we repurposed the email content and connected this Canvas to Bonfire via webhooks.

The Story Continues

Every day after that first email, a new part of the story deployed, both as an email and as a Bonfire-destined webhook. This is where we opted to keep things simple. While we could have made a complex set of branches based on how you engaged with each and every email, we felt that, this time, the content stood on its own. We put the choice in your hands, as opposed to directing things behind the scenes through Canvas orchestration.

What Comes Next

Jenny’s story has reached its end...for now. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this series! Feel free to reach out to me (Ashley Christiano) on Bonfire to share feedback, ideas, and praise (kidding!). As our world continues to change and so much feels like SO MUCH, we hope this fun, light-hearted story about the power of Braze helped brighten your week. And gave you some inspiration for new campaigns and Canvases along the way.