Braze Retention Marketing

Ramp Up Your Retention Marketing With Braze & Stitch

Stitch partners with your brand to ensure you’re using the right Braze features to enhance the effectiveness of your retention marketing efforts.

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Braze offers tools to help retention marketers capture data, segment audiences, personalize messaging, and optimize experiences based on customer engagement.

Braze is for marketers who want better solutions. Stitch is for marketers who use Braze.

How Braze Can Help With Retention Marketing

As a retention marketer, it's your job to make sure customers want to continue their journey with your brand. But what happens when your marketing tools don’t support this goal? You’re left without enough support to engage customers and reduce churn. Implementing a customer engagement platform (CEP) into your retention strategy can help you track and optimize your campaign performance among existing customers. Armed with a tool that's wholly focused on improving customer marketing experiences and the right know-how, you can build better campaigns that create long-lasting relationships with your customers.

With the right platform, businesses can leverage effective retention strategies to drive increased revenue. Retention programs are more profitable than acquisition efforts, as it costs much less to retain customers than to acquire new ones. In fact, it can be up to 25x cheaper. Given that information, it just makes sense to choose a marketing tool that focuses on existing customers.

Braze is an industry-leading retention marketing platform that has revolutionized the way companies engage with their customers. It provides a comprehensive suite of powerful tools designed to help marketers increase loyalty and build stronger relationships with existing customers. Braze enables organizations to target relevant audiences based on demographic factors such as age, location, gender, and interests. Additionally, Braze allows marketers to easily create customized campaigns to personalize messaging and tailor engagement strategies.

Braze also features powerful analytics tools that enable businesses to gain insights into customer behavior, engagement rates, and more. With Braze's advanced segmentation capabilities, marketers can easily target specific segments of customers and craft personalized messages for them. Marketers can send automated emails, mobile notifications, in-app messages, and other campaigns based on user behavior in order to increase engagement and loyalty.

Why Is Retention Marketing Important?

To ensure business success, it's important to prioritize retention marketing. This means putting effort into keeping current customers happy, rather than solely focusing on getting new ones. Braze's approach to retention marketing involves creating personalized experiences for customers across different channels, engaging with them at the right moments, and consistently delivering a great customer experience to build loyalty.

To improve your marketing efforts, you can use customer data to understand their behavior and preferences. Then, you can create customized campaigns, such as personalized emails, social media messages, or web experiences. It's important to think about the customer's journey from beginning to end when engaging with your brand. By understanding how customers interact with the brand over time, marketers can create content that meets their needs at different points in the journey

Keys to Retention Marketing Success

In addition to loyalty programs, Braze retention marketing strategies involve personalizing experiences across channels and engaging customers at the right time. Braze's platform allows marketers to collect data on customer behavior and preferences to send targeted personalized messages that are tailored to each individual customer. This helps create a more cohesive brand experience and increase engagement with your products or services.

Creating a personalized experience is also essential to ensure customer loyalty. Using data-driven insights and analytics can help marketers customize offers and messages that are most relevant to their customers' needs. This could involve sending out tailored emails with product recommendations based on previous purchase behavior or providing exclusive discounts for engaging in activities such as online reviews or surveys.

Building your brand goes hand in hand with creating a personalized experience; it should be consistent across all channels. This means having the same look and feel for your website, emails, app store pages, social media accounts, etc., ensuring that customers recognize your brand no matter how they come into contact with it. Additionally, having an active presence on social media can help build relationships with customers by engaging them in conversations and responding to their comments.

Engaging customers at the right time is essential for a successful retention marketing strategy. This means understanding when customers are most likely to interact with your brand, based on customer behavior such as purchase frequency or past interactions. Once you know this information, you can then tailor your campaigns accordingly - whether it's through personalized emails or content around special occasions (such as holidays).

Finally, delivering a consistently great customer experience across all channels is essential for successful retention marketing. Braze's platform provides tools for marketers to manage customer relationships, from collecting feedback and analyzing performance to developing customized experiences tailored specifically to each customer. By providing a seamless experience across all channels, you can ensure that customers keep coming back again and again.

Retention Marketing Examples

There are many successful retention marketing examples that Braze has helped power. Companies such as Shopify, Lululemon, and Tinder have seen significant success by leveraging Braze’s platform to optimize their customer engagement strategies. Braze success stories include the following:

  • Shopify embraced the ability to send thoughtful messaging campaigns with personalization capabilities like dynamic content and intelligent segmentation to increase retention rates for customers already on their site. Shopify also recognized the value of pushing notifications for key events such as abandoned shopping cart reminders or order confirmation messages in order to keep customers engaged throughout the entire customer journey.
  • Lululemon was able to identify trends in its user base and capitalize on them by using Braze’s analytics solutions. This allowed them to target customer segments and create a personalized in-app experience, which was key in retaining customers. Additionally, they leveraged automated messaging campaigns to personalize the customer experience even further by incorporating various content types such as images, GIFs, and videos into their messages.
  • Tinder used Braze’s platform to send targeted campaigns that focused on user onboarding. They also recognized the value of leveraging push notifications for key events such as reminders when someone wasn’t logging in after a period of time. This resulted in increased engagement with users on the app by providing them with an incentive to come back and continue using Tinder.
  • Luxury fashion brand Farfetch used Braze’s real-time messaging capabilities to create an automated “post-purchase communication journey” that seamlessly drove user engagement and increased conversions.
  • The world’s leading entertainment destination, Universal Studios Hollywood, used Braze to drive ticket sales and generate revenue through its loyalty program. Thanks to Braze’s automated messaging capabilities, Universal Studios was able to deliver personalized messages to each of its users.
  • Popular SaaS platform Intercom leveraged the power of Braze’s segmentation features to create highly targeted campaigns that delivered impressive results, including an increase in click-through rate and increase in activation rate for new customers.

Overall, there are many successful retention marketing examples that companies have been able to achieve thanks to Braze’s platform. These examples demonstrate the power of personalization, automation, and segmentation in creating an engaging customer experience that keeps customers coming back. With Braze at their side, companies can increase retention rates, maximize their customer lifetime value, and drive significant revenue growth.

By leveraging these features within the Braze platform, companies are able to gain a competitive edge in retention marketing and create stronger relationships with their customers. This ultimately leads to more successful businesses that see improved customer engagement and loyalty levels. 

Key Components of a Retention Marketing Strategy

Retention marketing managers are in charge of driving customer loyalty. They can achieve this goal through an extensive playbook of retention marketing tactics, including the following.

Customer Segmentation

At the start of any campaign, retention marketers need to properly identify and segment customer groups based on behaviors, demographics, and preferences. There are many ways to go about this, but leveraging well-organized data from past campaigns, purchasing preferences, and the like is by far the easiest.

When you’re deciding on the segmentation parameters for your next campaign, consider:

  • Re-engaging lapsed customers who haven’t bought from your brand in a certain time period
  • Targeting those who converted from a specific past campaign or piece of content and re-engaging them with similar messaging
  • Segmenting based on opt-in preferences or open rates for particular channels, to communicate with people in the way they prefer

Strategy Development

Retention marketing hinges on building strong customer relationships. Specific targeting and personalized messaging help these efforts by making customers feel like valued individuals to a brand, building up their loyalty and trust. When customers feel like a company notices and understands them, they're less likely to seek out alternatives and leave the brand behind.

For example, Peacock used Braze to create a year-end review campaign that reduced its subscriber churn by 20%. By reminding users of the great times they had and the awesome content they watched on Peacock over the past year, the platform was able to make more users feel attached enough to keep their subscriptions.

Campaign Planning and Execution

In planning and executing targeted marketing campaigns to retain existing customers, retention marketers utilize various channels like email, push notifications, and in-app messaging. Marketers can create an omnichannel experience for their customers by seamlessly moving them along a messaging journey as they access different channels throughout the day. For example, a customer may stop on an ad for your brand while they’re scrolling through their social media feed, then receive a follow-up email with a related piece of content.

Centralizing these efforts in Braze (versus using different platforms for scheduling communications across different channels) can help keep your messaging consistent and relevant. This is especially true with frequency-capping features, which make sure you’re not sending customers too many messages too close together across every channel they use.

Data Analysis

Customer data holds the key to understanding trends and identifying opportunities for improvement in your marketing efforts. In Braze, real-time reporting on Canvas Flows shows you which messages customers are engaging with and where they’re exiting a campaign. Use these tools to measure the effectiveness of your retention campaigns at regular intervals and identify any gaps in your strategy — then come up with a data-backed plan to fill them.

Feedback

Retention marketers are often in charge of collecting, analyzing, and presenting customer feedback to other leaders within the organization. Establishing a feedback loop to gather insights from customers can improve your retention efforts in the long run, especially if your organization is quick to respond to or implement suggestions.

Prioritizing the elements of customer feedback that need a product leader’s attention can be a tricky balancing act for retention marketers, who often have to balance the customer’s wants and organizational goals. Try setting up a system that does some of this job for you, like using AI tech to read reviews and count the instances of certain responses so you can see how often a suggestion is mentioned.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Retention marketing works best if the marketing team has positive collaborations in place with other departments. Regularly exchanging information with the product, sales, and customer support teams will help everyone involved align their strategies and efforts with your overall business goals.

Targeted Customer Communication

This is where a customer engagement platform really comes in handy — by helping you develop communication strategies that resonate with customers and enhance their overall experience. When communicating with customers, make them feel closer to your brand by:

  • Segmenting customers as specifically as possible
  • Delivering messaging with data-powered personalization
  • Getting the marketing channels and messaging frequency just right based on past preferences

Loyalty Programs

Managing loyalty programs to incentivize repeat business is the bread and butter of retention marketing. Creating loyalty programs that really connect to your customers' wants first involves deeply understanding who your customers are, what they like, and why they enjoy your brand.

Then, like Dairy Queen in this case study with Braze, you can enact rewards that your customers will be sure to love. In Dairy Queen’s case, after testing four different offerings, it landed on $0.85 Blizzards for a winning welcome campaign that ultimately contributed to a 138% increase in revenue.

Utilizing Braze for Retention Marketing

Braze is a customer engagement platform that provides tools for personalized messaging and marketing automation. Retention marketing teams can leverage Braze for the following:

Multi-Channel Messaging

As a retention marketer, you can easily use Braze to send targeted messages across various channels, including email, push notifications, and in-app messaging. Specifically, through its Canvas Flow customer journey mapping interface, you can launch campaigns with the following types of messages:

  • Android, iOS, and web push notifications
  • Content Cards, which show users targeted content or promotions while they browse your website or use your app
  • Emails
  • In-app messages
  • SMS messages
  • Webhooks
  • WhatsApp messages

Personalization

You can leverage Braze's personalization features to tailor your messages based on customer behaviors, preferences, and demographics. Braze’s personalization features include:

Dynamic Content

Dynamic content powers personalization within Braze. It’s how Braze tailors content to customers’ identities and preferences through the use of stored, or API-accessed, customer data. By implementing dynamic content strategies within the platform, you’ll be able to deliver a more personalized experience to individual customers.

Automation

Using the intuitive Canvas Flow interface, set up automated campaigns using Braze to engage customers at key touchpoints in their journey. Choose custom triggers from the deep well of customer behavior and preference data within Braze. Then, send these groups of customers down highly tailored messaging paths that align with the knowledge you already have on them.

Analytics and Insights

Utilize Braze's analytics tools to track campaign performance and gather insights for continuous improvement. This is made easy by in-message reporting, which shows you directly in Canvas Flows which messages are converting, which are common abandonment points for users, and which ones users aren’t engaging with at all.

A/B Testing

Like the Dairy Queen rewards program example we discussed earlier, conduct A/B testing within Braze to optimize your messaging and campaign elements. Auto-seed groups and test lists are also valuable tools within Braze for testing messages before they go out to the world, and making sure the right team members are seeing them as they do.

Activate Customer Data

One of Braze’s best features is its seamless integration with other marketing platforms and databases. When first implementing Braze, integrate it with other data sources to ensure you have a unified view of customer information and enhanced targeting capabilities.

Enhance Your Retention Marketing Efforts With A Partner

By effectively using the Braze platform, a retention marketing manager can enhance their ability to engage customers, reduce churn, and drive long-term loyalty. Power personalized retention campaigns with the help of Braze this year. For companies looking to maximize the impact of their retention efforts, partnering with a solutions provider like Stitch can make all the difference. Our experienced strategists and technical experts can assist you in maximizing your Braze account's potential. We will ensure that your campaigns reach your customers effectively and offer tips and best practices for optimizing your retention strategies. Stitch will work with you every step of the way to guarantee your campaigns are optimized and successful.And if you need an extra hand alongside you to plan, implement, or strategize, reach out to us!