How Braze Helps You Prepare for the Cookieless Future

In the marketing space, we’ve been hearing about the “Cookieless Future” for a long time. Despite the delay of many long-awaited updates to 2023 and beyond, time moves fast and we are again approaching the end of cookies’ protracted reign. With Google announcing plans to retire third-party cookies and Apple launching a suite of new consumer-centric data privacy features, digital marketers are beginning to feel the decline in accessibility (and granularity) of third-party data as customer acquisition costs continue to rise.

But before you go ahead and funnel additional dollars into new campaigns and broad targeting mechanisms, you should take a look at all of the tools and data that already exist within Braze. With Braze, you can successfully engage anonymous users by leveraging zero-party data that enables a new layer of personalization, while also syncing opted-in first-party data for ad retargeting and suppressions.

Anonymous Users Present an Untapped Opportunity

At Braze, we’ve emphasized the power of anonymous users, or those who engage with a brand without logging in. These users are often overlooked but extremely valuable—86% of retail users are anonymous, and up to 80% of all anonymous users receive zero marketing outreach.

Our SDKs allow brands to collect information on the preferences and behaviors associated with these anonymous users and then reach them through owned channels (think in-app messages), often with greater personalization than what you get from traditional retargeting cookie-reliant avenues. Whether you’re reminding users to revisit items added-to-cart, sharing a specialized offer, or nudging them to “make it official” by helping them create an account, this approach helps showcase the value of establishing a deeper relationship with your brand, even if the user in question hasn’t shared their name or email address.

Collect and Activate Zero-Party Data With Out of the Box Templates

If your first-party data well is looking a bit dry, you may be searching to fill in the gaps with a complementary data strategy. Before jumping to often costly third-party data solutions, subtract a few digits and look no further than the zero-party data (i.e. data intentionally shared by users) collection features that are built into Braze.

Email capture forms can be used to bring anonymous users into the fold, while Simple Survey In-App Message templates can encourage users to provide additional data—for instance, their product and communication preferences—as part of their regular engagement with your app or website. Want to use these tools effectively? Make sure that you provide transparency and highlight your value prop by explaining to customers why you want this information and how you plan to use it to improve their experience of your brand.

You can use this newly collected data for future retargeting campaigns and better personalization, or you can take it a step further and extend your reach across paid channels using Braze Audience Sync.

Sync Data to Ad Platforms to Expand Your Reach

Does all this have you saying, “That’s great—but I want more!”? Well, you can get more with Audience Sync. This feature dynamically syncs user data from Braze directly to the Google and Facebook networks, opening up the door for retargeting, audience suppression and lookalike modeling across these ad partners.

For example, if you are a retailer promoting your new holiday collection, you could send an email message introducing the collection, followed by a push notification to drive users to make a purchase. You can then evaluate which users made a purchase based on these messages and which users need a little more convincing. You can then choose to sync the users who did not engage with the email or push to an ad platform like Facebook and serve them an ad on Instagram to increase the likelihood of purchase.

As behavior targeting strategies are interrupted due to limited access to cookies, Audience Sync can close the gap by providing strong seed audiences that can be used to scale lookalikes across these major ad platforms.

Final Thoughts

We may be fast approaching a cookieless future, but don’t worry—there’s still plenty to snack on with Braze. With our platform’s zero-party data collection capabilities and Audience Sync feature, brands are well-positioned to replace their traditional, third-party data-powered programs with new strategies that embrace thoughtful, consensual customer data collection.