February 2025 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: SkyShowtime’s Inês Pais

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Inês Pais, Retention & Monetization Manager, at SkyShowtime, a joint venture of Comcast and Paramount Global. SkyShowtime is Europe’s newest streaming service, bringing together the best of Hollywood and local entertainment in one place, including blockbuster movies and series from the iconic brands of Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, DreamWorks Animation, Paramount+, SHOWTIME®, Sky Studios, and Peacock. We spoke to Inês about her career path, the Braze community, and the exciting campaigns they’re working on at SkyShowtime. Let’s dive in.

Tell us about your background and the role you’re in now.

I’ve been working in Growth Marketing for over seven years. While I started in customer acquisition and performance marketing, I quickly developed a deep passion for the post-acquisition stages of the customer lifecycle, which led me to shift my focus to retention and monetization strategies.

Throughout my career—and especially during my time as a Senior Growth Consultant at Phiture (a Braze partner)—I’ve had the privilege of working with a wide variety of businesses and product categories, from Entertainment to Lifestyle and Nonprofits. These experiences taught me that customer engagement and retention are far from a “one-size-fits-all” approach and that simply piecing together CRM campaigns and journeys isn’t enough to drive meaningful growth. Instead, success comes from strategically leveraging data, technology, and growth tactics across the entire customer journey to create seamless, personalized experiences that foster retention, drive revenue, and build lasting brand success.

Entertainment, in particular, has been a category that really stood out in my journey. Having worked with major brands in the music and streaming industries, like Audacy and HBO Max, helped me refine both my strategic and technical expertise in CRM and in Braze. When the opportunity came up to join the SkyShowtime Retention team and help build their strategy from the ground up, it felt like the perfect fit. This role allows me to combine my technical expertise in customer engagement tools with innovative strategic thinking to tackle challenges like subscriber churn and monetization, all while enjoying epic entertainment on screen!

What is your favorite part of your job?

The people and the fun! Working for a streaming service really does come with a lot of fun. We live and breathe entertainment and work daily to provide our subscribers with the best experience possible, both inside and outside the product.

Next to that, diving deep into growth and customer behavior data to uncover gaps and opportunities that drive success in our KPIs. I love analyzing insights, usage trends, and customer patterns to identify where we can make the biggest impact. I also enjoy finding smarter, more efficient ways to work, so we can focus more time on building strong strategies and less time on repetitive operational tasks.

For example, at SkyShowtime, we’ve started leveraging Braze Catalogs to deliver scalable engagement and lifecycle campaigns across 22 markets by maintaining reusable copy libraries and enhancing them with dynamic elements like Liquid tags. Additionally, we’ve implemented personalized journey tracks based on subscriber traits like content affinity and tier, using a combination of webhooks, behavioral triggers, and intelligent content blocks. These solutions not only drive better results but also streamline our processes and allow us to work more creatively.

What has your experience been like working with the Braze team and community so far?

It’s been a fantastic and truly rewarding experience!

The dedicated Customer Success support has been invaluable, with weekly touchpoints to address questions, challenges, and opportunities, while also empowering us with early access to advanced features. It genuinely feels like a collaborative partnership focused on helping us succeed.

The Bonfire community has been an incredible resource from day one, offering a space to connect with and learn from other marketers, troubleshoot challenges, and draw inspiration from the community’s work.

I’ve also had the opportunity to attend several Braze events and even speak at Forge, arguably one of the best customer engagement events in the industry. These experiences have been unforgettable milestones in my career, enabling me to step away from my comfort zone, expand my network, gain new insights, and feel deeply inspired by how my peers challenge the status quo and innovate every day.

What is one campaign or initiative you have worked on in the last 1-4 months that you’re most proud of (please share screenshots here!)?

SkyShowtime has just launched its newest tier—Premium—in Q4 2024 across all of its 22 markets. To support the launch and the efforts of the remaining Marketing functions, the Retention Team was faced with executing one of the biggest and most ambitious projects to date: The go-to-market campaign required not only planning multi-channel campaigns to announce the new tier and its benefits to our entire contact base (including active subscribers, prospects, and churned members), but also adapting a significant portion of our existing lifecycle communications.

To ensure success, we needed to:

1. Review and update the majority of our always-on lifecycle journeys and automations to reflect SkyShowtime’s updated value proposition and plan options.
2. Maximize exposure for the launch promo across all engagement and lifecycle communications, from automated journeys to content newsletters.

Initially, this seemed daunting as it required us to review and update an overwhelming number of Canvases. We quickly realized that following our usual processes would exceed available resources and leave us halfway through the job. To tackle this, we developed a smart approach leveraging dynamic, standardized modules using Braze Content Blocks, Catalogs, and Liquid logic. This allowed us to surface the promo creative to eligible customers at every touchpoint while dynamically hiding it from non-eligible or already-converted customers. Additionally, the creative refreshed automatically at different campaign stages based on a pre-uploaded library of assets and embedded calendar logic.

This was a true cross-functional effort, involving collaboration between our team, our agency, and various internal departments (Brand, Marketing, Legal, Analytics, etc.). The result was staggering: We successfully prepared and delivered over 175 unique touchpoints and over 1,900 message variations in less than two months—a record timeline! The campaign not only drove awareness and adoption of the new tier, but also demonstrated the power of smart planning, collaboration, and innovative use of Braze’s features to scale efficiently.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.