Oh the Humanity! How Human Communication Can Increase Campaign Conversion Rates by 900%.

1. INTRODUCTION

If you’re familiar with Braze, you know that our mission is to create strong bonds between people and the brands they love, joining people, technology and teams together to deliver brilliant experiences at every turn. We believe human beings want to be spoken to like human beings, and that technology like ours can help brands do that at scale.

We had this hypothesis: Brands that communicate with consumers in a way that feels more human will have better engagement that will lead to improved business results. This was truly born from some combination of intuition as human beings ourselves and from customer engagement data from Braze systems that seemed to support the idea. We shopped this idea around, and were thrilled when we met the folks at Forrester Consulting, a team just as passionate about the intersection between brands and emotion as we were. So we decided it was time to make it official and commissioned a study with Forrester to (hopefully) validate our hypothesis and, ultimately, our mission as a company. We called this study the Braze Brand Humanity Index.

Honestly, we were worried that we would discover that consumers didn’t really get human communication as we understand it. Or that snappy copy and creative elements like voice and TV spots were the only things resonating with them. As it turns out, consumers are on the same page as we are (whew!). They’re looking for supportive, authoritative, helpful communication from brands. Better yet, we learned that connecting with them on an emotional level is not only one of the strongest drivers of whether consumers perceive a brand as human, it also has the strongest impact on purchase intent and overall satisfaction.

We’ll break that down a little bit more later on in this piece, but what’s important to take away is that this is the data we’ve been waiting for. Driving human connections between consumers and brands is what our mission has been pretty much since the beginning. It’s what the Braze platform is built to do, what our teams are trained to do, and it is at the core of every decision we make as a company.

Now, we’re able to lean in. We’ve heard from more than 3,000 consumers around the world that human communication from brands will impact their relationships with those brands for the better. And, we’ve heard through in-depth interviews with leaders at top brands around the world that, while they are striving for this type of communication, they haven’t been able to operationalize it just yet. It’s an investment. An inside-out shift in thinking about everything from people to partners to technology that brands need to embrace to truly transform their relationships with customers.

We’re a part of that shift.

In this piece, we’ll break down some of the emotional attributes, functional attributes, and other insights that we gleaned from the Braze Brand Humanity Index. Then, we’ll show you how technology like ours can have real, tangible impact for you and your business. Let’s dive in.

2. EXPLORING THE EMOTIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL ATTRIBUTES OF BRAND HUMANITY

In the Braze Brand Humanity Index consumer survey, consumers were asked to recall a recent experience with a brand, note whether or not this experience felt like there was human communication, and indicate which of 30 emotional attributes and 18 functional attributes applied to their interaction. Emotional attributes included terms like “helpful,” “friendly,” “thoughtful,” “fun,” “surprising,” “quirky,” to name a few. Functional attributes included thoughts and phrases like “values my time and business,” “understands my likes and dislikes,” among others.

The figures below illustrate the emotional and functional attributes that were the most likely to drive perception of human communication from brands, in rank order. Forrester summarizes the emotional attributes as “supportive, authoritative, and helpful.” The functional attributes were separated into three groups: Natural Communication, Considerate Communication, and Personal Communication.

What can we learn immediately from these results? Let’s start with the emotional attributes. From these, we may actually learn most from the attributes that fell to the bottom of the barrel—things like “quirky,” “fun,” “surprising,” and “amusing.” That tells us that brand humanity isn’t saved for the quirky, millennial-focused disruptors of the world. If your brand’s personality lends itself to this kind of communication, that’s great—keep at it. But be sure to ground that communication with helpful, thoughtful, valuable messaging. Similarly, if you’re a traditional bank, insurance company, or some other business whose nature doesn’t lend itself to “cute”—don’t sweat it. You’re tasked with the same challenge as the Grubhub’s and Spotify’s of the world: you must add value with every interaction.

As for the functional attributes, the action items are pretty clear. We need to speak to customers like a regular person would, show we value their time and business, be responsive, take their preferences into account, and communicate at convenient times and on the right channel. The list goes on.

In order to create an evaluation system for brands derived from the Brand Humanity Index, Forrester identified four levers that, together, make up an ultimate score of 0-100. They are: the Emotional Lever (determined by how a brand showcases those emotional attributes proven to drive perceptions of humanity), the Natural Communication Lever, the Considerate Lever, and the Personal Lever (these determined by a brand’s exhibition of those functional attributes and their corresponding labels in Figure 1). The Emotional Lever was found to be the second strongest driver of consumer perception of Brand Humanity, and the strongest driver of purchase intent and overall satisfaction. Of the functional attributes, the Natural and Considerate Levers were the stronger predictors of perception of humanity, but the Personal Lever pulls ahead as the strongest indicator of purchase intent and overall satisfaction.

3. PUTTING IT TO THE TEST

We decided to look at tools Braze supports that we think lend themselves to putting into action the attributes presented by Forrester. Particularly, we looked at the impact of different types of campaign scheduling (time-based, action-based, API-triggered), and different personalization tools like Connected Content, the dynamic content tool from Braze, and Liquid, an advanced business logic used to personalize messages at scale. We looked at Braze customer data drawn from 211,382 campaigns first sent between January 1, 2018 and August 15, 2018. The results? Massive.

CONNECTED CONTENT & OPEN RATES

Connected content can be used to make your brand interactions more personal, helpful, and considerate by providing great recommendations based on a user’s previous behavior or interests and linking out to them. This demonstrates that you know the user and understand what they care about, and are prepared to be helpful to them as a brand. An increase in engagement with Connected Content supports the idea that brand experiences that are perceived as helpful, personal, and considerate are more effective than campaigns that do not have any personalization.

• Android push open rates see an 85% increase in push open rates which is especially important for marketers to know as we await the arrival of Android Pie
• In emails, brands see a 25% increase in conversion rates. We’ve seen great results from Connected Content in email in action—like FanExchange who saw a 114% increase in conversion rates when using Connected Content in their email campaign.
• Web messaging saw a 37% increase in open rates when using Connected Content. Though this channel has been around since 2015, a lot of brands still haven’t adopted web push. This is your chance to lead from the front. When introducing a new channel to your roster, make your messages count!

LIQUID PERSONALIZATION & OPEN RATES

This supports the idea that brand experiences that are perceived as personal and use natural communication (such as campaigns that use name or gender filters, rather than, for example, a more automated “Hello, user”) are preferred by users over less personalized, less relevant campaigns, even if they are cute or fun. Liquid also allows you to use tags to incorporate intelligent programming logic, include custom attributes and custom event properties for more accurate responsive campaigns, or use targeted device information to communicate with the user using their current device or preferred communication method.

• Campaigns that use Liquid templating such as objects, tags, or filters display a 119% increase in mobile push open rates compared to messages without personalization.
• Android saw 95% lift, iOS saw 165% lift
• Email saw a 28% increase in open rates when using Liquid.

SCHEDULE TYPES: OPEN RATES & CONVERSION RATES

There are three main types of scheduling that marketers can use for their campaigns and messaging. The first is time based, which is simply scheduling a message to go out at a certain time. If you’re an “HQ Trivia” fan, for example, their pushes are more than likely timed to go out about 5 minutes before scheduled shows. Then we have action-based scheduling. These will go to customers if and when they complete some sort of action, like putting an item in their cart. Lastly, there’s API-triggered scheduling. This sort of scheduling is conditional, and allows marketers to take actions based on their own information or that of an external API like a weather app. For example, a food delivery app might send an “Order in tonight!” message to users in areas where it’s raining.

Action-based and API-triggered campaigns personalize messaging to 1) be responsive, 2) communicate at the right/most convenient times, and 3) provide great recommendations based on the user’s prior actions (e.g., leaving an item in cart), echoing Forrester’s findings about positive consumer response to more “human” brand communications.

• Campaigns using action-based (event-triggered) delivery have a 331% lift in overall mobile push open rates compared to campaigns with basic time-based delivery, and campaigns using API-triggered delivery have a 681% lift compared to campaigns with basic time-based delivery.
• For Email and web push, we actually see that action-based scheduling has the greatest impact, with a 250% increase for Email and 346% increase for web push opens, respectively.

Open rates are important—critical, actually—but at the end of the day, we’re often looking for conversions to hit our goals as marketers. Those conversions translate to major ROI for your business. Think of all the abandoned carts that become checkouts, the profiles that get completed, stories that get read because of sophisticated campaigns like these. That’s impactful.

• Campaigns using action-based (event-triggered) delivery have an 888% increase in conversion rates vs. basic time-based campaigns, and campaigns using api-triggered delivery have an 897% increase vs. basic time-based campaigns.

4. FINAL THOUGHTS:

At the end of the day, the Braze Brand Humanity Index acts as a reminder that successful marketing takes good, clean data; the right technology; and, of course, your teams—talented people with the empathy, creativity, and collaboration that it takes to make these campaigns happen. After all, who better to understand the emotional and functional attributes that resonate with humans than other humans? If you’re ready to learn more about the Braze Brand Humanity Index and how to start (or further) your journey toward human communication, download the full thought leadership paper by Forrester.