CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

WOW! What an amazing event Braze City X City was!

This year’s London event gathered numerous companies who are avid Braze users to share their future strategies, gauge customer engagement trends and learn how to harness the power of AI.  

The morning was dedicated to thought leadership and was an amazing opportunity to chat with likeminded members of the CRM community, as well as hear from Braze’s CEO Bill Magnusson. We spent the afternoon hearing from some inspirational speakers who shared their experiences with areas like Sage AI and networking with friends and colleagues in the industry.

Key highlights of Braze City x City 2023

As Platinum sponsors, we were delighted to spend the day having brilliant conversations with multiple brands about their MarTech stack and digital maturity and run them through our Braze maturity assessment (which was a big hit!). Some of our personal highlights were seeing our colleagues Sam Obafemi, Account Director and Elena Hughes, Managing Consultant, sharing their amazing work helping MAC Cosmetics to create cut-through on Black Friday and achieve new customer experience highs, as well as hearing from Amy Clark, Head of CRM at ASOS, on the impact that this platform has had on their brand – an implementation we are proud to have supported the ASOS team with.  

Challenges & themes addressed at Braze City x City 2023

While companies consistently expressed their positive sentiments about the platform, a prominent theme of the day was around the challenges in harnessing customer data. Specifically, determining how to ensure data is integrated to Braze in an optimal way to deliver campaigns and automated use cases while maintaining efficient data point consumption. This is a fundamentally critical point, as the true potential of the Braze platform can only be unlocked when your data is configured correctly. 

Braze themselves have recognised this and have developed a number of features to help brands tap into their existing data, including: 

1. Cloud Data Ingestion: This feature enables Braze to read data directly from Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. 
2. SQL Segment Extensions: Brands can create more advanced/complex segments through a new SQL Editor interface.  
3. Data Transformations: Braze enables direct integration with other platforms that can call webhooks through building the necessary data transformations logic directly in Braze. This ensures that incoming webhook data can be directly mapped into the required data structures within Braze. 
4. Catalogs Enhancements: With enhancements such as Shopify integration and plans for future integration with Cloud Data Ingestion, enabling brands to automatically keep data in sync with their data warehouse. [Jon Hyman, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer of Braze, hinted at additional announcements around Catalogs features to be announced at Braze’s upcoming Forge event. We expect this will prove a significant step forward in helping clients integrate more complex data sources]

Our partnership with Braze

We’ve supported many brands on their journey with Braze, with a particular focus on ensuring optimised data integration and setup. Along with our experience in implementing the aforementioned Braze features, we’ve designed and built bespoke solutions to support clients needing additional tooling to aggregate, clean and transform data for integration with Braze. 

To find out how CACI can help you get the most out of the Braze platform or understand the changes and enhancements you can make to your existing data infrastructure to ensure its seamless integration with Braze, please reach out to us.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys