How Braze Raises the Bar for Customer Engagement Experimentation

Experimentation is both a powerful and creative force in marketing. At Braze, we take pride in offering a customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to fully embrace experimentation. Our platform handles the complex backend processes, enabling marketers to focus on generating innovative ideas and posing critical questions that drive campaign success and support future optimization.

When considering enhancing your engagement experimentation, it's essential to address both the "why" and the "how." The "why" is straightforward: Experimentation can save time and resources by testing new ideas and optimizing customer engagement strategies in real-time. Unlike traditional methods that rely on post-campaign analysis, Braze allows for real-time adjustments based on statistical analysis, so that you’re not left guessing or relying on instinct. This proactive approach removes the guesswork and transforms marketing from a game of chance into a data-driven strategy, which can maximize your chances of success and minimize the risk of missed opportunities.

Why Experimentation Matters for Customer Engagement

Experimentation is key to effective customer engagement, transforming guesswork into strategies that you know resonate with your audience. By testing new creative ideas, comparing variables, and adjusting campaigns in real time, marketers can uncover what truly drives engagement and automatically optimize their efforts accordingly.

The foundation of successful customer engagement lies in two critical elements: A robust engagement platform and a marketing culture that champions creativity through experimentation. The right engagement platform empowers marketers to experiment with confidence, providing the tools and insights needed to fine-tune their strategies. In turn, a culture that values and rewards creativity encourages experimentation to try new ideas, push the boundaries and foster innovation and continuous improvement.

Experimentation is not just a tactic—it's a mindset that, when supported by the right tools and culture, can elevate customer engagement to new heights.

How Braze is Built to Support Experimentation

The most effective customer engagement occurs through experiences that foster journeys with multiple messages and touchpoints. The key is watching where and how customers engage at all of these touchpoints so you can refine and enhance their experience. Here’s how Braze helps make it possible for brands to support true, ongoing experimentation across their customer engagement program.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is at its most useful when you want to test two versions of a message site, app, or feature, and compares users’ responses to multiple versions of the same marketing campaign. For example:

• When trying out a messaging type for the first time: Worried about sending an in-app message for the first time? A/B testing lets you experiment and learn what messages resonate with your users.
• When creating onboarding campaigns and other campaigns that are constantly sent out: Since most of your users will encounter such campaigns, why not ensure that you are sending the most effective campaign?
• When you have multiple ideas for messages to send: Learn which approach users prefer so you can make a data-driven decision.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate tests, or A/B/n tests, are experimenting with more than two variables for a campaign. For example, you could test the subject line of your email message, plus the image that accompanies your text, plus the color of the CTA button. The goal is to identify the best combination of these elements that leads to the highest conversion rate or desired user action.

This type of testing will likely be more time-consuming and complex to set up than A/B testing. However, it can provide more detailed insights into which elements of your marketing campaigns are driving the best results, supporting more nuanced optimization decisions going forward.

Control Groups

Control groups are essential in testing because they provide a baseline against which to

measure the impact of variations being tested. Generally, a control group in customer engagement will be a subset of a brand’s audience who doesn’t receive a given campaign or experience that’s being tested. By comparing the performance of the control group to that of the test group, you can determine whether a particular variation is actually driving the desired outcome or whether it is just due to chance or external factors.

But while control groups can be valuable on a campaign or customer journey level, it’s possible to use them in a more comprehensive way, too. Braze Global Control Groups allow you to compare the behaviors of users that receive messaging to users that don’t. It’s a good way to assess how marketing campaigns and customer journeys can move the needle for your customers—and then use those insights to support better experiences over time.

Canvas Experiment Paths

Braze users can use Experiment Paths to test different versions of a customer journey, or different sub-paths along the way. You can test multiple Canvas paths against each other and against a control group at any point in the user journey. Experiment Paths are best suited for testing delivery, cadence, message copy, and channel combinations.

When you include an Experiment Paths step, it will randomly assign users to different paths or an optional control group that you create. Portions of the audience will be assigned to different paths according to percentages you choose, allowing you to test different messages or paths against each other and determine which one is most effective. This feature also makes it possible to optimize your customer engagement efforts over time based on the paths that are driving positive outcomes overall, or to do so for each individual based on their specific behaviors and customer attributes.

Experiment in Real Time

Customers have high expectations for engagement from their brands. Marketers need to respond with creative engagement–and that comes combining your inspiration with ongoing experimentation. You need to be able to test different approaches across multiple touchpoints so you can decide with authority which will drive results.

Learn more about using Braze to boost the impact of innovative engagement strategies in this Fiverr case study.

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, 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 Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 6, 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.