Building Nuanced Customer Audiences in Braze with Flexible Segmentation

Today's customers expect personalized, relevant interactions at every turn—and the rise of modern data collection and sophisticated customer engagement technologies has made that possible for brands with the right approach. Segmentation generally plays a key role in meeting those consumer expectations, but to truly stand out in a crowded marketplace, brands need tools for targeting that are every bit as dynamic and adaptable as their audience.

Braze is built to make that possible. The Braze platform's segmentation capabilities empower brands to act in the moment on real-time behaviors, harness historical data, and deliver dynamic, tailored campaigns that resonate with each recipient. Let's explore the role that segmentation can play in creating impactful marketing, how the Braze platform can support effective audience building, and the real-world results that our customers have been able to achieve.

The power of nuanced, real-time segmentation

At the core, segmentation is about creating specific audiences—which could be millions of users or a single customer—based on real-time data, allowing marketers to adapt to customer behaviors as they happen. By leveraging segmentation, brands can build deeper, more meaningful relationships via timely, impactful campaigns that deliver relevance and value at every interaction.

At Braze, our segmentation philosophy zeros in on three key areas:

1. Avoid irrelevant or out-of-date messaging

Few things erode a customer’s trust faster than receiving messages that feel disconnected from their overall experience. Imagine being reminded to “complete your purchase” for an item you’ve already bought or receiving a welcome email even though you’re a long-time user. Real-time segmentation is designed to ensure that campaigns reflect the most current customer actions, keeping messaging accurate and on point.

2. Keep current with shifting customer preferences

Customer preferences are anything but fixed—they often shift in connection with trends, personal experiences, and changes in context. Dynamic segmentation keeps pace with these changes, ensuring that every campaign remains relevant. For example, recommending products based on a customer’s recent browsing or purchase history (and auto-sunsetting ads when someone buys a given product) can strengthen engagement and loyalty, compared to sending campaigns based on what they engaged with last year.

3. Improve the impact of your marketing efforts

Tailored campaigns don’t just prevent errors—they drive results. By targeting specific customer behaviors and preferences, marketers can see significant improvements in engagement and conversions. Precision in segmentation turns generic outreach into meaningful interactions that resonate with customers.

Understanding segmentation in Braze

Real-time data provides the foundation for delivering relevant, immediate messaging, but effective segmentation goes further. The tools in Braze combine live interaction insights with historical data, enabling brands to create campaigns that are both timely and informed. Here’s what Braze makes possible:

Easy segmentation using events, attributes, and more

With Braze, it’s possible to leverage a wide array of different data types—including events (e.g. made a purchase, browsed a product page), attributes (e.g. name, preferred language), nested properties (e.g. the color of a favorited item), and more—to create segments. Because marketers can easily match their segments to their goals and business needs, this makes it possible to support highly targeted, nuanced messaging and brand experiences.

Segments that continuously update for in-the-moment accuracy

Real-time data provides the foundation for delivering relevant, immediate messaging. Braze dynamic segmentation allows segments to automatically update as users meet or exit criteria, ensuring campaigns stay relevant. For instance, a segment of lapsing users might include customers who haven’t engaged in seven days but will exclude an individual as soon as they return.

In-depth lookbacks to support segmentation based on historical data

While live-updating segments are a powerful tool for brands looking to reach their customers with real-time, highly relevant campaigns, there are times that marketers need the ability to segment their users based on specific time-based snapshots. Braze Segment Extensions allow marketers to build these sorts of campaigns, which are often constructed around fixed parameters like shopping holidays or event reminders.

For example, a retailer looking to get rid of lapsing inventory could build a highly specific audience that targeted only customers who purchased an exact color of a product at least twice in the past two years and who also engaged with the previous final sale promotion. That opens up highly nuanced targeting opportunities, giving marketers more control over who receives what message.

Campaigns powered by segments created in other tools

While Braze is built with robust in-house segmentation tools and capabilities, it’s also designed to allow marketers to take advantage of segments created in other solutions to effectively identify and reach users. Brands can easily import externally created segments into Braze via our APIs, and even send messages to users based on zero-copy segments held within their data warehouse using our Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI) Segments feature. That gives marketers the flexibility to create and leverage segments across their stack without sacrificing relevance and impact.

How Braze supports flexible audience segmentation

The combination of real-time and fixed segmentation capabilities allows marketers to craft precise, personalized campaigns that evolve alongside their customers’ behaviors and needs. Here’s how Braze makes flexible segmentation possible:

Integration with data ecosystems

Braze integrates seamlessly with platforms like Snowflake, Azure, and Amazon, enabling brands to combine first-party data with external sources. This capability allows marketers to dynamically update audience criteria and craft campaigns based on the most relevant and actionable insights. In addition, our Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI) Segments feature allows brands to directly query their data warehouse to create new segments—and do it without copying any of the underlying data to Braze.

Built for speed and scale

From processing billions of data points to updating audience lists in seconds, the Braze platform delivers unparalleled performance. This drives campaigns to remain timely and responsive, even under heavy usage.

Visualizing and testing campaigns

Canvas, the Braze journey orchestration tool, empowers marketers to visualize user journeys, experiment with different approaches, and refine campaigns in real time. This ability to iterate and optimize is designed to ensure that every touchpoint maximizes impact.

One powerful tool for segmentation within Canvas is audience paths, which allow marketers to intuitively filter and segment users on a large scale. The feature functions like a sorting funnel, making it possible for brands to set ranking criteria and then automatically use that criteria to evaluate what subsequent journey path they’ll be sent down. That means that Braze customers can easily understand where each user will go, providing transparency and making it easier to understand the full user journey and its implications.

Case studies: Segmentation in action

Segmentation is more than a technical tool—it’s a powerful driver of positive business outcomes. Brands across industries have used the segmentation tools in Braze to tackle unique challenges, deepen customer relationships, and achieve measurable success. Here’s how segmentation transformed their campaigns:

• Showmax: Lifecycle segmentation and dynamic updates helped Showmax increase subscribers by 204% and achieve a 12% boost in win-back rates.
• Wyze: Behavioral segmentation during onboarding led to a 56% increase in conversions for Wyze’s Cam Plus subscription.
• Lifesum: Weekly activity summaries based on behavioral segmentation kept 74% of users engaged over a 30-day period.

Final thoughts

Segmentation isn’t just about organizing audiences—it’s the cornerstone of meaningful customer engagement. The tools in Braze enable brands to go beyond fixed lists, creating dynamic, data-driven campaigns that adapt to their audiences in real time. By combining flexibility, precision, and scalability, the platform helps marketers deliver personalized experiences that drive measurable results.

To learn more about how Braze can elevate your segmentation strategy, visit Braze documentation on segments.

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 and features. 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 the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 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 blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.