Braze is one of the fastest growing CRM tools on the market. It enables brands to be truly app-first and deliver enhanced and personalised real-time customer experiences without complex and bulky ETL or batch processes which often involve painful and delayed overnight data loads.
Leveraging effective marketing technology is now critical for a business’ long-term success. It allows businesses to stay ahead of the competition by understanding and adapting to everchanging consumer behaviours and tailoring experiences that best reflect their needs.
Braze is a leading platform in the CRM space, having recently been scored as ‘leader’ within The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs in Q1 of 2023. Its innovative approach to connecting with customers has been a gamechanger. With a particular focus on digital messaging, it has established itself as an accessible, customisable and specialised tool on a global scale.
In this blog series, my multidisciplined team will lift the lid on Braze and uncover the key features we see within the platform that are certain to deliver growth and take your use of Braze to new heights.
Our partnership with Braze
As a trusted Braze partner, we help brands get the most from theplatform by supporting in all areas, from platform integration and audit to campaign management and optimisation.Our Campaign Operations team is well versed in the platform, with each member who interacts with Braze being certified in the platform. We invest in our partnership with Braze by further upskilling our team to a high standard,with multiple team members holding more than three different certificationsranging from the marketer exam to the digital strategist, enabling us to support brandsin getting the most out of this amazing platform.
Our experiences and certifications have enabled our development of a set of Braze Accelerators specifically designed for CRM teams striving to achieve better results in a shortertimeframe.They havealso contributed to our team being awarded Agency Partner of the Year in 2022 for our work with Domino’s in assessing their campaigns, enhancing their understanding of their customers’behavioursand identifying personalisation opportunities that bolstered their testing capabilities and paved the way for more effective outcomes.
If you’re interested in learning more about Braze, and how CACI can help you in driving the most value from your Braze investment, be sure to get in touch with us.
In our previous post, we explained the role of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) in modern marketing architecture. Now, we turn our attention to another critical component of the marketing stack – the Single Customer View (SCV). If you’d like to read all the blogs right away, you canregister here to access the complete series.
What is the difference between a CDP and a SCV?
While the CDP and SCV are often confused with each other, they serve different purposes and have distinct characteristics. In this post, we will explore the benefits of having an SCV in the foundation layer and how it differs from the CDP.
Having a Single Customer View (SCV) in the foundation layer provides several benefits for businesses. Firstly, it enables businesses to build a comprehensive understanding of their customers by providing a unified and persistent view of customer data across all touchpoints. Secondly, it allows businesses to implement governance for enterprise-wide data management, ensuring data quality and consistency. Thirdly, it supplies a reliable source of customer data for analytics, reporting and decision-making. Finally, it lays the foundation for personalised experiences by providing a complete picture of the customer that can be used by marketers to deliver targeted and relevant experiences.
The SCV is where your customer data is mastered and where your business logic and definitions are applied. The output is a clean set of validated data that is presented in a useful way for your business and is ready for use in your engagement and activation layers. The SCV is where your business can address some common and critical issues with data, such as:
Validating and cleansing your data
Standardising of output and definitions
Consistent application of common business definitions and logic
Curation and presentation of data based on business application, making the data easy to use
On the other hand, the CDP is a more marketer-centric tool that empowers marketers with the ability to activate omni-channel personalised customer experiences. It is designed to make it easier for marketers to access and use customer data without relying on data engineers or IT teams. The CDP enables companies to use customer data to deliver targeted and personalised experiences across all channels.
While both the SCV and CDP are valuable tools, they are not interchangeable but instead play complementary roles.
Failing to have both an SCV and a CDP can lead to significant risks and negative impacts. For example, without an SCV, companies may struggle to make sense of their customer data, leading to missed opportunities for personalisation and engagement. Without a CDP, companies may struggle to activate that data and deliver personalised experiences, leading to lower customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Ultimately, businesses that want to improve their customer experience should have both an SCV and a CDP. While the SCV provides a foundation layer of customer data, the CDP empowers marketers to activate that data and create personalised experiences.
How can CACI help?
As subject matter experts at CACI, we can tell you that a well-implemented CDP can be a game-changer for businesses of all sizes and we have hands on experience with many brands including ASOS, Kingfisher, L&G, PlayStation, Telegraph, EasyJet and DFS. If you’re interested in learning more about CDPs and how they can help your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our experts.
In the next post, we’ll consider how the CDP pairs with another key component of the modern marketing stack, the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP). Or if you’d like to download the full blog series in advance, click here to download.
Want to speak more about CDP and it can help you elevate your customer and marketing strategy? You can contact us here to speak to one of our experts.
This is the first post from our new series on Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). From debunking common misconceptions to exploring the power of combining CDPs with other cutting-edge technologies, we’ll be diving deep into all things CDP – and showing you how to make the most of this game-changing technology. If you’d like to read all the blogs right away, you canregister here to access the complete series.
What is a customer experience architecture?
If you’re in the world of marketing, you’ve probably heard of CDPs. But what exactly are they, and how do they fit into a modern marketing architecture?
Marketers can find CDP vendor websites confusing due to their use of language that may make CDPs sound like other components in your architecture. For example, they may claim that CDPs bring together all your customer data in one place (like an SCV) or can deliver highly personalised customer experiences (similar to other marketing platforms). However, despite this confusion, CDPs play a critical role in modern technology stacks. In this blog post, we will provide a fresh perspective on the topic to help explain the role of the CDP and its place in modern marketing architecture.
Where do CDPs fit into modern marketing architecture?
At CACI, we view modern marketing architecture as a framework with five layers:
For many vendors, CDPs typically belong in the activation layer of this framework. It takes data from the foundation layer and then feeds marketing technology in the engagement layer with data in the format that marketers need to deliver highly personalised experiences.
Some CDPs may, however, offer more foundational layer capabilities whilst others can be more engagement focused. For simplicity, our framework defines the primary purpose of the CDP is to activate marketing data, which is why we put it at the heart of the activation layer.
How can a CDP enhance your customer experience architecture?
It’s important to note that a CDP should be thought of as marketing technology, rather than data technology. Its role is to empower marketers with data, removing their reliance on data engineering and allowing them to focus on strategy and campaign execution. A CDP brings a lot to the party, providing marketers with the tools they need to create effective campaigns and drive business results, such as:
A CDP can natively capture digital data, making it easier for marketers to activate audiences across a variety of MarTech and AdTech channels in real-time.
By enabling the delivery of highly personalised experiences across channels, a well-implemented CDP can help businesses improve customer engagement and increase conversions.
How can CACI help?
As subject matter experts at CACI, we can tell you that a well-implemented CDP can be a game-changer for businesses of all sizes and we have hands on experience with many brands including ASOS, Kingfisher, L&G, PlayStation, Telegraph, EasyJet and DFS. If you’re interested in learning more about CDPs and how they can help your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our experts.
In our next post, we’ll explain why businesses should not choose between a CDP and a Single Customer View (SCV). If you can’t wait until then, you canregister here to download the whitepaper which contains the full blog series.
Interested in learning more about how CDP an support your customer strategy? Contact us to speak to one of our experts today.
London – 20th March 2023 – CACI is proud to announce that we have been awarded Adobe’s Digital Experience Emerging Partner of the Year 2023. Adobe’s Digital Experience partner awards acknowledge companies that have made significant contributions to Adobe’s business and have had a significant impact on customer success.
To secure this award, the team at CACI has demonstrated a strong level of investment and engagement in the Adobe partnership. This is measured through solution licensing, services, and the number of certifications and specializations held. We have also worked closely with Adobe to ensure that our relationship is of the highest quality and that we are working together to drive value for our clients.
We are thrilled to have received this recognition, and it highlights our commitment to providing exceptional services to our clients. The award was announced at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and we are excited to share this news with our clients and partners. CACI will be present at Adobe Summit UK this June and we look forward to seeing you there. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to meet at the event.
David Sealey, Director of Strategy and Growth at CACI, said,
“Adobe’s solutions to deliver enhanced customer experiences are an essential part of our market offering. I’m delighted that this award recognizes the hard work of CACI’s commercial and delivery team as they implement, optimize, and support brands with Adobe. It’s also important to acknowledge the importance of our clients who have the vision and determination to deliver better experiences to their customers.”
CACI’s expertise with Adobe extends across Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and the Adobe Experience Platform. Our focus for 2023 and 2024 is to help organizations evolve their Adobe stack in pursuit of greater performance, reliability, and the ability to launch new use cases.
Should you wish to find out more about CACI’s services for Adobe products, please feel free to get in touch.
In today’s competitive market, understanding how best to engage with your customers and reacting to their behaviours is critical to success.
Following the launch of Braze’s third instalment of the Global Customer Engagement report, I explored the three key customer engagement trends within the report. I also considered how brands impacted by these trends should respond to these familiar challenges.
CACI is an award-winning partner of Braze. We know consumers better than anyone else. Our breadth of demographic data combined with our expertise in marketing and data technology and campaign delivery makes us a key partner for brands looking to deliver innovative customer journeys.
Trend 1: Retention-focused strategies
The first trend identified in the report is how brands are increasingly focused on retention to combat the unsustainably high acquisition costs. The report highlights that brands increased their marketing budget on retention from 33% in 2020 to 45% in 2022. This enables marketers to invest in their customers and design solutions to keep them coming back to their brand.
The challenge is that a sub-optimal strategy can end up costing you time and money. A strong retention strategy delivering value to your customers is worth its weight in gold, as not only are acquisition costs high, retaining customers today is becoming increasingly harder with the breadth of touchpoints available for your competitors to interact with existing customers.
Identifying and combatting these behaviours while understanding how to add value throughout the customer lifecycle is vital. While Braze has a variety of channels and techniques that enable you to deliver your retention campaigns, the hard work happens outside of the platform.
To help brands develop the right strategy to maximise value, CACI’s CRM Strategy team are first focused on getting to the heart of what makes or breaks customers’ interest in your brand. We use our breadth of skills across customer data and campaign delivery to help develop and deliver award-winning retention strategies across a variety of sectors. We recognise that every strategy is different depending on your organisation’s needs, goals and customer behaviours. That is why we take the time to innately understand and ensure each strategy is bespoke to cover each of these areas.
Trend 2: Data management
The 2023 report highlighted two main data management challenges that we also see when working with brands:
Brands have too much data
The days of batch imports and overnight data loads for campaigning are slipping away, and real-time data is becoming increasingly prevalent. With more real-time touchpoints comes more data needing to be categorised, organised, refined and adapted.
This is where having a strong alignment between your tech stack components becomes crucial. The ability to process this data at speed and understand the quality of the data– not the quantity of the data– is paramount.
However, not all brands have an aligned tech stack suited to this influx of data. CACI’s Marketing Technology Solutions team help brands see the wood from the trees regarding their overall data architecture by delivering gap analyses that find and prioritise the gaps to plug.
We’ve recently completed an extensive Braze and architecture audit for a global retail brand which assessed four key areas: Architecture, Usage, Process and Data. The results of this have helped fuel this brand’s understanding of their existing data structure, what gaps are present and then supply a roadmap of priority actions across the next 6 months. This work will enhance the customer experience and deepen customer understanding.
There is a capability gap
The report is correct when it says: “Data management doesn’t end with technology—teams need to be set up to effectively use data.” Skills within CRM are ever-growing, and with more emphasis on data, there are desires to analyse this data immediately and understand how your brand can leverage this within the customer strategy.
Our Campaign Operations team enable and elevate brands daily to unlock key features of Braze such as Conversion Events and Funnel Reports to inform campaign performance. Beyond Braze, utilising the power of Currents has helped brands understand macro and micro campaign performances, resulting in changes to customer strategies and optimised test and learn processes.
Our team of Certified Braze Consultants are a blend of operationally and data-focused power users who bridge capability gaps by working with you to unlock the untapped potential of Braze. Additionally, the team supports our Data Scientists to identify micro customer behaviours that affect campaign performance.
Trend 3: Siloed teams
Like the capability gap, siloed teams can be incredibly detrimental and limiting to a brand’s CRM programme. According to the report, 16% to 28% of marketers in small to large scale companies reported that customer engagement was owned by either marketing in collaboration with other teams, or by cross-functional digital teams. Collaboration between Data, Tech and CRM has become increasingly vital to build out relevant testing strategies and evolve customer experiences.
The report explained that this is not just a regional or even an EMEA issue, but a global one. At CACI, we have the knowledge and tools to drive and manage successful transitions in a company to help increase adoption and enablement of new business processes and technology solutions. Our Operational Change consultants will work with a cross-functional team of experts in-house to create end-to-end solutions to real-life business problems.
How CACI can help
The Braze report provides an excellent overview of the challenges we are all facing in creating and executing effective customer engagement initiatives through the trends of retention-focused strategies, data management and siloed teams.
CACI can supply end-to-end support along the customer engagement journey and help turn observations into strategic and tactical solutions through our powerful combination of data and technology, ensuring customers remain at the heart of any engagement strategies.
To learn more about how CACI can support your business’ customer engagement strategies and initiatives, get in touch with our team of experts today.
Change within the financial services sector is complex. There are multiple stakeholders, regulatory needs, and often a base of legacy data and technology to unpick.
From our work with major brands, we know that the change is achievable and worthwhile. Investing in customer centricity will pay dividends in the long-term by reducing competitive threats, winning new customers, and ensuring retention of base customers.
To succeed in an increasingly competitive market, financial services brands need to establish change that encompasses:
A coherent data-driven strategy – where customer data is of a high quality and securely democratised to enable meaningful messaging to the individual
Establishing the right business targets and success measures – moving from short-term outcomes to long-term value for the customer and the organisation
A focus on your customers and the market context – understanding the needs and behaviours of both customers and prospects to better engage them
Maximising data and tech ROI – having the right tools to deliver the outcomes the business needs and then sweating the technology assets to deliver long-term ROI
Measure and optimise what matters – ensuring accurate reporting is fed through the business and that teams are empowered to act on those insights to optimise performance
Our challenge to leaders within financial services is to create a vision and become an agent of change. We want to work with brands who care about their customers and are making changes to show it. Therefore, our catalogue of services is developed to do amazing things with data and connect your brand with the individual.
At CACI, we can improve marketing ROI through detailed attribution modelling. Our customer demographics and bespoke segmentations provide a more accurate profile of customer needs, market size, and even financial vulnerability. Technical decisions around investment in AI, decisioning or identity resolution are made by defining clear use cases for technology and designing future technical architectures.
This work led to CACI developing a framework for customer personalisation at scale. Working with leading vendors Tealium, Braze and Snowflake, we created a technology blueprint that can achieve full integration between enterprise data and the omnichannel experience.
To find out more about the CACI Customer Personalisation Platform or to discuss issues related to customer transformation, please get in touch.
You may also be interested in downloading this report which uncovers a surprising disconnect between what banks think and how customers feel about the customer experience, with statistics and insight gathered from 1,500 marketing leaders and 5,000 consumers.
You can also check out the previous parts of this blog series below:
In a world of multiple channels and differing formats, is it really possible to deliver brand-consistent flawless campaigns whilst communicating on an individual level?
Everyone loves pizza, right? Meet the Taylor family. Three generations of pizza-enthusiasts. Louisa is 15, obsessed with manga, baking, and social media. Her mum, Ellen, 44, loves running, and uses apps to manage her busy life, and her running times. Louisa’s granddad Mick, 71, is never happier than when fishing, and likes to catch up with his pals via email or text. As self-confessed pizza fanatics, loyal to their number one brand, they all want to know when the latest pizza has landed, or about a great deal on their go-to favourite. But should their beloved brand communicate this information in the same way, on the same channel? In short, no. Because which channel could possibly reach them all? And even if there was a single, magic channel, what single message would get them all interested?
Making sure matching luggage doesn’t become lost luggage
The beauty of the digital customer marketing evolution is that products or services with mass appeal can now speak to the masses, individually. Meeting them where they are, and talking their language, so to speak. It’s now eminently possible to make the biggest splash with each interaction by delivering the right message, on the right channel, at the right time.
Whilst it’s crucial to have brand consistency and content to be optimised across channels, we mustn’t forget the nuance that ensures your communication isn’t just a shot in the dark. Receiving generic content that doesn’t fit with your own lived experience or lifestyle is going to be a miss every time. If we start to shift the focus to making an emotional connection, we begin to reframe the expectation that communications can be as unique as the individual receiving them.
To hit the mark requires a level of understanding. You’ve got to know who you’re talking to, you’ve got to appreciate their motivations, and understand the channels you’re working with, to make the message work. Fed by data-led customer insight, a comprehension of your audience enables dynamic content to work at its hardest and humanise the communication. Personalisation can permeate far beyond their name, it can be their latest purchase, their location, even the weather at their location. Analysis of consumer behaviour not only leads to the most appropriate channel, but also aids an understanding of the most effective incentives, that inform the tone and language that will trigger the desired emotion and ultimately create a connection.
Making the connection, one slice at a time
The explosion of digital data makes a connection with customers, in theory, more possible than ever, but is dependent on having the right approach and using tools that are up to the job. Using a data platform such as Tealium to blend data sources, can layer an understanding of each customer. As a result, the creative can be tailored using platforms such as Moveable Ink, to leverage messaging for maximum impact. Harnessing the power of a cross-channel solution such as Braze, will ensure each individual receives a compelling, real-time, personalised experience on each channel.
So, what does an individualised approach look like in practice? Let’s take the example of Louisa’s family and a brand-new meal deal. Reaching Louisa on Snapchat, using localised references to create resonance, and quirky, interactive content that compels her to share, helping get the word out that it’s that time of the week. For Ellen, a rich push notification encouraging her to ditch cooking in favour of a takeaway is positioned as the solution she needs after a busy day. And for Mick, a text to remind him of the tasty pizza he had last week and nudging him to share another with a friend, could be enough to down his fishing rod and place an order.
Of course, the family are most likely to engage with the brand over several channels, necessitating a seamless omnichannel experience. The building of intelligent data profiles through CACI’s consumer segmentation tool, Acorn, can make it easy to recognise your customers, so they can feel seen, making it more about the customer than about the channel.
What can we ‘takeaway’ from the example of the Taylors? As we become ever more saturated in media and our methods of communication diversify, the need for consumers to feel they are the only person in the room becomes ever more pronounced. Moreover, with the right tools and understanding, it is infinitely possible.
Braze’s recently published 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review is a report worth reading for customer-oriented marketers. Through research and in-depth analysis of customer experience data, Braze has gleaned vital insights into what separates brands that deliver a poor experience with those that excel (Braze titles these the “Ace” brands).
One stat that particularly caught my eye was that Ace brands are 56% more likely to exceed their revenue targets. And this is across all areas of customer activation, conversion, monetization and retention. They are leveraging all the features of Braze’s real-time customer engagement platform to improve the customer’s experience which in turn leads to more customers spending with the brand.
Set out below are the differences between brands delivering legacy customer experiences, and how Braze’s Ace brands are performing. It’s clear that Braze is enabling customer focussed organisations to create experiences and communications that resonate and connect with the recipient.
At CACI we’re helping brands to get the most from Braze. We’re a trusted partner at implementing, optimising, integrating and running Braze for our mutual clients. The work we’re doing with brands who want to be classed as Ace has highlighted five areas where value realisation can be accelerated:
High quality implementation of Braze – without this there may be challenges accessing or relying on the data that Braze holds
Real-time data integration – to deliver meaningful in the moment experiences, Braze requires fresh data
Optimisation not migration – when migrating campaigns from your old platform, take the time to optimise them based on Braze’s capabilities
Accelerate personalisation and optimisation – change business practices to enable more continual improvements to your campaigns and comms
Have the right model of expert support – whether it’s for creative assets or execution of CRM activity; you need the right type of agency relationship
CACI has now developed a set of Braze Accelerators designed for CRM teams who need to achieve greater results in a reduced timeframe.
If you’d like to find out more about how we could enable your brand to achieve more with Braze, get in touch and I will send you a copy of the presentation on our accelerators.
