Powering Marketing Sophistication at a Massive Scale: How Braze Made Just-in-Time, Just-For-You Messaging Possible in 2023

Today's consumers expect meaningful experiences from companies in exchange for their attention (and dollars). In order to meet their needs, brands need to embrace the craft of customer engagement to be able to deliver relevant experiences in the moments that matter, and at scale. To do that, marketers must truly understand consumers and their ever-changing needs while also reaching each person with tailored messages when and where they prefer them.

Brands need the right partner to make that possible. That's why Braze prioritizes reliability, security, and performance at scale, helping marketers build trust and provide exceptional, tailored experiences throughout the user journey. You can see that dynamic in our 2023 numbers, highlighting our support for sophisticated customer engagement that doesn't sacrifice reliability, performance, or data privacy.

Braze scalability and performance: Enormous scale paired with growing sophistication

Consumers today engage across a growing range of channels—and they expect brands to connect with them on the ones they care about. Because Braze has been natively cross-channel and channel agnostic since day one, marketers can easily map channel usage to each customer's preferences and spin up valuable experiences across the right mix of channels.

You can see that in the numbers for calendar year 2023:

• 2023 messaging and other Canvas actions: Over 2.6 trillion
• 2023 API calls: Over 7.5 trillion
• 2023 global reach (MAU): 6.0 billion (as of October 31, 2023)

That record-setting output is significantly higher than last year and represents an average of over 4.9 million messaging and other Canvas actions per minute. But while the scale is impressive, the real story is around sophistication and reach.

Braze customers used our messaging capabilities to engage six billion monthly active users as of October 31, 2023. In the process, they made over 7.5 trillion API calls to Braze, which is an average of 14.3 million per minute. These calls deliver context about users and their actions to Braze in order to trigger messages and drive personalization strategies, showcasing the growing sophistication among Braze customers and as they tailor their communications to each individual recipient.

During 2023, Braze saw over 60% year-over-year growth in messages sent directly from our visual development tool, Braze Canvas, which can be used for no-code, drag-and-drop journey orchestration. That reflects a rise in multi-step, cross-channel messaging flows, something that becomes more impactful as more brands embrace personalization.

What’s more, these messages are being delivered across different channels and touchpoints, making it possible for brands to reach users wherever they are:

• 2023 push notification volume: 1.15 trillion
• 2023 channel message volume: 709.5 billion
• 2023 other Canvas actions: 743.9 billion

As the number of channels has grown, marketers see more opportunities to reach users and drive value and impact. That dynamic is playing out across our customer base today—among brands that have used Braze for more than a year, the median number of channels they've adopted is four. And because Braze supports such a wide array of both established and emerging messaging channels, our customers can curate their channel mix to fit their strategy and their audience's specific needs.

Braze reliability and security: Privacy-driven, secure, and exceptionally dependable

While the Braze platform's ability to power sophisticated cross-channel messaging at scale is well-documented, those capabilities are made possible by a streaming data architecture that supports swift, ongoing processing. After all, you can't have in-the-moment message triggers, segmentation, and personalization without true real-time data processing.

Braze is built for precisely that use case. Behind the trillions of messages Braze sent last year is an architecture that supports reliable sophistication at speed. That architecture allowed luxury fitness brand Equinox to unlock advanced, in-the-moment personalization: “Braze has allowed us to take a more data-driven approach to serving our customers," said Juliana Lam, Manager of Analytics at Equinox. "We can trigger campaigns in real time through API-triggered campaigns, leverage aggregated data that we send from [our data warehouse and customer data platform], and bring in content from other services to create cohesive and relevant messaging.”

Speed is of little value without resilience and Braze is extremely robust. Designed from the ground up to scale with demand, support massive scale at speed, and minimize true outages, our system is exceptionally reliable. Across all of our products and customers, our platform was rock-solid in 2023, with 99.99% average system-wide uptime across all customers and products.

That's true even during the year's busiest marketing days. During the 2023 Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, brands used Braze to send more than 37 billion messages, including 11.3 billion on Black Friday alone, breaking our previous records for sending volumes. That's an average of more than 6.4 million messages per minute over that period, with a single-minute peak of 21 million messages, all while maintaining 99.99% uptime averaged across all Braze customers and service offerings.

It's not enough for Braze customers to be able to trust that the platform will be there for them on the biggest days and in the moments that matter—they also need to know that the customer data processed via Braze will stay protected and secure. Thankfully, Braze embraces privacy and security by design, integrating safeguards at every level of our operation. That’s reflected in our privacy processes and in our security certifications, which you can learn about below:

• ISO 27001 certification
• SOC 2 Type II compliance
• GDPR compliance
• CCPA compliance
• HIPAA compliance

“Our approach to security and data privacy issues has always been deliberate and geared toward the long term,” said Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO at Braze. “We are constantly evaluating security at Braze and looking for additional ways to showcase the high level of commitment to security and data privacy that our company is known for, and our customers have come to expect.”

Final thoughts

For marketers, trust is both their greatest asset and their most fragile bond. Braze is an essential partner in a world where customer relationships are built over periods of years—and can be undermined in an instant. The Braze platform empowers marketers to navigate the engagement landscape with confidence, giving them a solution that's robust and reliable not just at peak times, but consistently all year long.

Interested in learning more about the Braze platform and how it’s built to support exceptional scale, performance, and reliability? Check out these resources:

• How AWS Auto Scaling Enables Braze to Efficiently Send Billions of Messages Each Day
• Achieving Resiliency With Queues: Building a System That Never Skips a Beat in a Billion
• Scaling Quality: How Braze Ensures True Personalization for Massive Volumes of Email—and Does It Fast
• Marketing Campaigns Grow More Sophisticated (and More Cross-Channel) as Black Friday and Cyber Monday Volumes Break Braze Records
• Reinventing Orchestration: How Braze Built Our Canvas Customer Journey Tool

*Other Canvas actions include Audience Syncs to ad networks and webhooks to other messaging touchpoints and systems.