With Braze’s landing pages, marketers can quickly build low or no-code lead capture tools, opt-in forms, and campaign-specific experiences that are seamlessly integrated with user profiles and Braze Canvases.
In this episode of Thread the Needle, Micheal Smoot, Solution Architect at Stitch, walks through how to build and deploy Braze landing pages that power smarter customer engagement, including:
Transcript:
Hey everyone, my name is Micheal Smoot. I'm a Solution Architect here at Stitch. And today we're going to talk about Braze landing pages — something you may be familiar with, the capability within Braze. Being able to create no code landing pages for a variety of use cases. And today I want to walk through a couple of those ideal use cases that I've personally been, part of in creating for our clients and want to show some of the more nuanced examples and also draw attention to some of the some of the limitations that currently exist within that, but how to work around that and ultimately integrate Braze landing pages within your Braze powered campaigns, but also externally as well.
To start, what are Braze landing pages? Basically, they are an out of the box tool within Braze to allow marketers to create mostly no code to completely no code, solutions to create a landing page that you can then include as CTA endpoints in your side, your campaigns or externally through paid media sites.
Yeah, so I want to dive right in and show you within the platform where that is, how to get started. And then again, I want to go through some use cases and talk about limitations and then ultimately how we bring out the power of the landing pages themselves through the editor. I'm starting out here within the landing pages section of messages. So if you go to messaging within Braze you'll have the ability to access landing pages. And here I actually have two landing pages already created. So the first one I want to go through is relatively a very native example of using Braze landing pages, and that's lead capture.
So if we go into the example that I created now, I created this from a template inside of Braze. This may look a little bit familiar if you're accessing this video at the time of recording shortly after. You may see this actually in your account if you have landing pages available to you, within your workspace. But what this example is demonstrating is to me, like a native use case of the lead capture idea.
So say for example, we want to prompt for say, here's some additional reading material that's common in like the financial vertical. Find out more about your reverse mortgage for example. Or if we want to, sign you up and ingest you as a new profile within Braze to capture those new leads for really any reason, learn more about our brand, about our products, et cetera.
You can very easily create that branded as a landing page. And then also the form elements as well are very native in inside the editor. So you'll see this is, this example page is created with a lot of distinct boxes and elements going on. But I want to highlight the central part here where we have a CTA sign me up, and then this box where it'll allow the user to enter an email address.
So creating this page and you'll see in this tab, the final version of what that looks like to the end user. Is this fake brand Flash and Thread, and you can simply enter your email and hit click sign me up. And what that'll do is it'll create a brand new profile within Braze with any other custom attributes that you want.
In our case say, "Hey, learn more about our product or our brand." Sign up for our newsletter is a popular one. We can actually set an event or a custom attribute to be set on that user profile within Braze to inform marketers to say, "Hey this individual has actually went through the flow and signed up for our newsletter."
So in a way it's like a campaign opt-in tool, which we'll dive more into that, specifically in our second use case. But I think the takeaway from this first one is how do we ingest new leads through this landing page that we can not only tie into our existing campaigns within Braze, but also for example, serve it up in paid media or some other external site. We can link to this and Braze will just handle the rest, creating this form within the editor.
Now I will say by default using the URL if we dove into the settings of this in the beginning page. So I'll show if I click cancel and then quickly go to edit. We'll see the full URL that is fully customizable by the end user, so we don't have to have this weird URL at the top here. You can not only customize the subdomain for your brand, so something dot your brand.com for example. You have the ability to have more flexibility around that. But also if you go to the settings here, you'll see that you can actually control the endpoint as well, the actual URL. So that will allow you to brand a little easier.
For this example, I just created it as a simple default. This is the default’s jumbled letters and numbers that it creates for you. But I just want to highlight that there. But that's optional. Creating that, modifying that would make it more user friendly if you're putting this on external sites, but maybe less less noticeable if you have it in the CTA.
So if you do serve this up within a Braze Canvas or campaign or some other communication outside of Braze, what you can also do is allow the landing page to write data to an existing profile. So one trick that customers sometimes run into is that they treat this as a lead capture. But what happens if we already know you, say for example, I'm a customer, but I'm entering my email that you already know of.
Then if I were to access this via the URL, what it's going to do is create a new profile for me in Braze. And that's not usually ideal if we serve this up through, a personalization string in Liquid, and actually have the ability to serve this up within Braze Canvases campaigns and even SMS, there is the landing page URL personalization string that we can actually use to make sure that the person accessing this is actually tied back to their user profile that accessed this to begin with. So in this example it's pulling up, if you go to Personalization here, and then you can drive it, dive into the landing page, and then the specific landing page that we have in our case, lead capture.
If we copy this and paste it in, then anywhere this is presented inside of your content, then it will resolve the URL to be specific to that individual that user profile within Braze. So any submission with that individual will be tied back to their External ID, which is very useful. So that way we can capture data not only about people that we don't know, AKA leads, or we can record custom data, attributes, or events based on that form you create to an existing profile within Braze.
So that's an important call out and relatively new feature if you're a longtime Braze user. That's great when we talk about capturing leads or writing a specific single attribute to a profile, expanding on that idea is what I like to call campaign specific opt-ins. So something I've done personally for a Braze customer is creating a landing page that allows a user to or rather allows a customer to be invited to a specific campaign.
So think of a certain promotion that you want to offer to a segment of your users or, in the example of gaming and hospitality is a certain segment of their players say, "Hey, we recognize you as a certain valuation, and we want to offer, say, our high value or MVPs, VIPs, whatever the segment is that's meaningful for your business, we want to offer a, a discrete offer specifically to that cohort." And what that looks like is creating not only a campaign that targets them, but also a landing page that allows those users to opt in specifically and using the same borrowed concepts from what we talked about for say, for example, using that personalization string to make sure it's specific to that user.
And then creating an example landing page to plug into your emails coming out of Braze. So this is a less fancy version of what you saw before, but a little bit more nuanced where we have a very simple, call to action with an SMS opt-in checkbox here, and it's very easy to create something like this within Braze landing pages where we can record this as a custom event or custom attribute.
I would recommend an event because to me that makes more sense to say, "Hey, this user actually performed this action rather than just having an attribute flipped on or off somewhere." But you could do it either way and, we can configure the form within the landing page to auto write that data back to the profile.
So if you look at edit landing page on this specific one, we can see the available options that allow us to power that. So once a user actually goes through that flow, we can then take it even a step further now that we've captured that data and then act upon it, we'll talk about at the tail end of this. So you'll see that with this, with these CTA buttons within the landing pages, you can define the action to submit the form, which means taking all the input elements and submitting it as profile attributes or events to that known profile. If it's known otherwise, again, it'll create a new profile.
And then the button click itself. We can actually say, "Hey, let's log a custom event." So not only are we saying, "Hey, if they check this box, let's toggle a Boolean value on user profile," but the actual action of clicking this button we'll also on top of that, record an event saying they completed this form. And that's very useful for something like retargeting. Say, if you want to understand if someone's actually responded to the form. It's very easy to retarget within Braze. As an example, if you go to Canvases, which I love using Braze Canvases because there, there's a lot of power behind them for not just messaging, but there's a lot of power behind them for for example, reacting to data that has changed for users.
So if we go to say, this is a brand new Canvas, this is just a blank one that I created for demo purposes, but as part of the entry criteria, the action to push someone into a Canvas. One of the options is to submit a landing page form all the way at the bottom. So if you click this, you can actually retarget users to say who actually, of those that access the form and clicked that button, who has actually gone through that flow?
Now there's, this is possible, I would say in practice, what ends up happening is using the user data instead. So for example, that custom event. Or even wanting to act upon this. In this example, this checkbox, when they submit the form overwrites, a custom attribute that says is subscribed.So if we go back to this and look at the checkbox, it's actually writing an attribute called is subscribed and it'll write to that Boolean value.
So oftentimes either that or the custom event as a result of submitting that form, I would say is usually more useful to then act upon that. And what I mean is using custom events and selecting the right event, or if your custom attribute value has changed, it really depends on your use cases and your business requirements on what all sources are updating that data. But you can do it either way. There's a lot of ways to retarget users based on their form submission.
And I bring that up for that, this example because one use case that we're already talking about is campaign imitation. So again, I'm sending this campaign to a very specific cohort of individuals that I want to give exclusive access to. And then once they click on that form, this form is already tied to that to their user profile data and then once they submit to that, their profile data is updated with an event or an attribute or both in this case. And then based on those reactions, we can then create our Canvas appropriately. And then once we have that tied to, say, for example, the custom event that we set up, then the sky's the limit.
So we can then say tell the Braze Canvas to update a subscription group. We can have it, send follow up messaging basically as a trigger. This is relatively real time. Do a lot of different things, not just messaging, but we can also react to that data and perform, again, sky's the limit. So that's really powerful.
When we pair action-based Canvases to the landing page submissions, you can imagine the user flow of starting with an email, getting invited, they click a link, they access the landing page, which is our bridge, to then allow the user to access that. And then go to a Canvas to then do all sorts of data manipulation, follow up messaging, set our whole Canvas appropriately, and then we have one cohesive flow all within the Braze ecosystem, which is really cool. That's one of the more complex examples that we've demonstrated for customers with relatively high success.
Some call outs for landing pages. Something that we haven't really discussed is personalization, so we can use that this example here, where when we include this in emails, in this example, using this Braze default endpoint here for the name of the landing page, this will tie it to that very specific individual user profile, dynamic based on who receives it. However, within landing pages, there's not too much room for personalization. So that's one call out.
There are ways, roundabout ways of doing, so I've seen customers try to pin it as URL attributes, for example. So inside the URL itself, they will append, say like first name and last name and make it more friendly there, which you can do. But I would warn that there are some security concerns doing that. For example, like spoofing, like if it's in the URL, anybody can change those values and then if the page requires those to behave appropriately, then, that, that may be a concern. So just something to look out for. I would say something as a lead capture is a classic example because you don't know a lot about a customer or anything at all.
So having to ingest that simply just to get their email, get their, whatever details they want to provide, and then write that as a new profile. That's an absolute default piece of functionality that the landing pages provide. You can get deeper with that. You can write custom attributes. We talked about the campaign opt-in such as this example. But one other example too is this is prominent in retail where we have sensitive holidays. So for Mother's Day, Father's Day or others, that more and more companies are adopting the strategy of saying, "Hey we know this is a tough time ahead of those sensitive holiday dates. Do you want to opt out of the emails?" This would be a perfect way to execute something like that, to build a landing page within Braze. You just go in and drag and drop and the form elements are effectively no code.
That way you could write an example attribute to the user profile to say, opted out of certain emails or opted out of certain campaigns, something like that, that you would then use for your segmentation for future campaigns of that type, whether it's Mother's Day, Father's Day, other examples or just specific campaigns not related to holidays. Really it's entirely up to you and how you want to use that.
That's really what I wanted to walk through. Again, important nuances are the fact that you can make this personalized to individual user profiles within Braze, using the landing page URL tag and just to call out for the personalization, that there are limitations to personalization. There are ways around it, but we'd have to really strongly consider how that's brought in and concerns for some of the security aspects like that. So again, it really depends on the use cases for your individual business and campaigns and whatnot.
So that's about it. If you have any more questions, you can reach us at stitch.cx/contact and we look forward to hearing more. Thank you.
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