Braze Reviews

At Fox, we send a lot of communication to our customers, who are also our subscribers. We have Fox One where we offer subscription-based services. We send emails, in-app messages, and push notifications about any particular show or particular sports. We also send communications regarding upcoming sport events or upcoming shows on Fox Nation and anything content-related. Additionally, we have different use cases for transactional emails.

There are plenty of campaigns I have executed. I will take an example of a recent event that took place for the World Cup. We conducted many campaigns for the World Cup, including push notifications, emails, and highlights of the game. We have sent many in-app messages whenever the game was starting, such as 10 minutes or 15 minutes before the game. We deployed many push notifications using Campaigns and Canvas.

All campaigns I executed were done very well. Braze was instrumental in configuring and delivering communications in time with very few incidents. My experience has been great.

Braze offers great features including inbuilt in-apps that do not require installation or additional packages. You can use cross channels including webhooks, Content Cards, push notifications, and in-app messages, which are great features that Braze provides.

In terms of Braze features, I find it easy to coordinate campaigns across channels. I see room for more improvements regarding those features.

Braze has had a positive impact on my organization that is significant. I really appreciate the platform's flexibility. Our biggest advantage is managing multiple channels from one place, whether it is email, push, in-app messages, content cards, or webhooks. I also appreciate Canvas, which allows us to build more complex, multiple-step customer journeys and trigger communication based on customer behavior. The segmentation and personalization capabilities are very useful as we can target customers based on their subscription engagement or content preferences. I find valuable the ability to test different messages and channels through A/B testing and optimize based on performance. Overall, the combination of cross-channel orchestration, real-time triggers, personalization, and experimentation makes Braze very powerful for our marketing use cases and positively fits our organization.

Overall, my experience with Braze has been very positive. If I had to mention areas for improvement, I would say the number of campaigns, canvas segments, and channel growth can become challenging to manage and organize. I would also like to see more flexibility around reporting and analytics, especially being able to easily combine cross-channel data and customize reports without relying on additional data from outside of Braze or data platform teams. Braze has been improving its reporting capabilities, and new reporting and dashboard features are definitely moving in the right direction. Additionally, making complex journeys easier to troubleshoot and maintain would be beneficial. When large canvases have multiple branches and conditions, having strong visibility into why a customer took a particular path would ease things for engineering and marketing teams. There is also a limitation regarding making the platform easier to manage at an enterprise scale, especially with a growing number of campaigns since Braze does not have features such as folders for organization.

Regarding improvements, Braze's technical support is excellent, but I see areas where the experience could be smoother. On integration, Braze has a strong set of pre-built integrations and APIs; however, for some complex enterprise systems, integration can require engineering effort. More out-of-the-box connectors and simpler configurations would definitely help. From a UI perspective, while the platform is powerful, navigating and troubleshooting can take time with a large number of campaigns and complex canvases. Apart from that, I find the support extremely helpful overall, so I would not say there are major gaps, just opportunities for making this already strong platform easier to manage at scale.

One area I would like to see improvement in is the visibility and troubleshooting experience. When running large-scale campaigns across multiple channels, more detailed end-to-end visibility on user interactions would be helpful, such as tracking when a particular user enters or exits a canvas or whether an issue occurs. I would also like to see ongoing improvements in reporting, particularly making it easier to connect campaign performance to our broader business metrics without extra engineering work. As Braze adds more AI capabilities, I see an opportunity to leverage AI not just for content creation but also for troubleshooting, identifying campaign issues, and explaining performance trends. This would save a significant amount of time for both the marketing and engineering teams.

I have been using Braze for four years.

Braze is stable, and I have not experienced any downtime or reliability issues.

Braze handles growth and increased workloads well in terms of scalability.

The customer support from Braze is responsive and very supportive. They provide 24/7 customer support, offering immediate answers. Each business also has their own account executive who is responsive and helpful when assistance is necessary.

We previously used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but the pricing became a pain as the licensing costs significantly increased, which prompted our decision to transition to Braze.

We did a trial-and-error process exclusively with Braze, and that was the only platform we tested.

Braze fits into our existing marketing stack through API, SDK, and webhooks integration with our backend and data systems. We utilize customer and subscription data from our existing system to build audience segments and trigger personalized communication in Braze. Braze also supports bidirectional data movements, so engagement data can be sent back to other systems for reporting and analysis.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide that information due to our internal policies, but I can definitely say that Braze will yield a good return on investment. It certainly saves a lot of time and requires fewer engineers to manage things, as Braze has all the capabilities.

I was not involved in the pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

We did a trial-and-error process exclusively with Braze, and that was the only platform we tested.

I would rate the customer support as an 8 out of 10.

Braze's personalization and segmentation features are great. We use segments for audience segmentation, and Braze provides controls around personalization. At Fox, we have various types of subscribers with different content interests, so we do not want to send the same communication to everyone. We can segment users based on subscription engagement, content preference, and previous interactions, then personalize communication according to their attributes or behaviors. Braze supports dynamic segmentation using real-time events and user attributes, making targeting much more relevant. Segmentation and personalization are very helpful as they allow us to make communication even more relevant while providing the marketing team with substantial flexibility without requiring engineering effort for every audience change.

We handle training and onboarding for new users on Braze by providing extensive documentation. Any new member on the team goes through knowledge transfer and Braze platform training. We only bring on team members who have experience using Braze. With every new release, Braze offers training on the updated features.

I advise others looking into using Braze to consider it as a better option compared to other marketing tools, especially regarding pricing and cross-functional effectiveness. I would strongly suggest exploring it before making any purchase decisions.

I think Braze is great, and I definitely recommend that people do their homework before making any purchase decisions. However, with the experience we have had, especially considering the complexity of projects we have handled, Braze has been incredibly helpful and has supported us in the ways we needed. I have rated this review an 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for Braze is as a CRM strategist and previously a CRM campaign manager, where we had a team, so it was basically just quality assuring everything, occasionally using Canvas, building out SMS journeys, and handling audiences.

I built an onboarding journey using Braze that required multiple Canvas because there was a mix of email, SMS, as well as app messages that needed to be triggered at certain times and based on certain customer actions that we were able to record.

The best features Braze offers include being very intuitive, allowing everything to be brought in-house, which enabled us to get off a couple of different tools by having email, SMS, and app messages in one. There is great connectivity to other applications such as Twilio and Snowflake, which we had as our CDP. I really appreciated Canvas because it made app messaging really easy, whether it was an inbox message within our app, a pop-up, or a push notification.

Canvas made everything easier, allowing us to integrate everything. We previously used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which was really difficult when using app messages and making sure we could tie it all into a customer journey, so having that with Braze was excellent.

Braze has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to save money. I believe we saved around $800,000 by switching from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze. We were also able to see our customer journeys in an easier way, and it was easier for our producers to set up things. Liquid logic has been easier than AMPscript.

I did not find anything significant that needed to be improved about Braze, but perhaps making it easier to have linear journeys instead of building just three or four would be beneficial. Anything is better than Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Reporting in Braze was quite satisfactory. I wish there was a little better heat mapping when reporting on emails, just a better understanding of where people are clicking. Other than that, reporting in Braze was adequate.

I have been working in this field for around eight years now.

The transition was fairly easy, as setting everything up in Braze felt like a more modern tool than Salesforce Marketing Cloud. IP warming was straightforward, and the Braze customer account manager really helped us and walked us through everything. Braze has excellent documentation, which also helped.

Regarding Braze's AI capabilities, I have not tested this feature too extensively, and I have not seen any concerning issues.

Regarding Braze's AI capabilities, I am somewhat skeptical, but I have seen some positives in using it, such as being able to use AI to determine when people are clicking or opening emails at the best time and using that as a send time indicator, thus having that level of personalization.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Braze is to definitely ask about all the features because there are many, and definitely use the account managers that you receive. I would rate Braze an eight out of ten overall.

My main use case for Braze is sending all of our push notifications, emails, and content cards.

I also use Braze for reporting, optimizing, and building our emails using their custom drag and drop email editor, which doesn't require any HTML experience.

Regarding how I use Braze, I really appreciate their Canvas feature. You can use a bunch of different channels to achieve one goal, and it all is very easy to use and buildable as a marketer without the need of a developer.

Braze has positively impacted my organization with the ability to send all of these communications across multiple games.

This autonomy has impacted productivity and team workload by allowing us to move quickly.

The best features Braze offers include Canvas, which is probably the best one. I also really appreciate their drag and drop editor, given we're a small team and I need to be able to build independently.

Regarding features including reporting and analytics, I mainly use the campaign report. Once the campaign or the piece of content has gone out, there's a page where you can see analytics right there without really needing to do anything.

Braze has positively impacted my organization with the ability to send all of these communications across multiple games.

Braze can be improved, but honestly, I feel it's a pretty perfect tool. I have done discovery calls with a bunch of different CRM platforms and found Braze to be the most complete and the one that feels the most intuitive to use as a nontechnical person. I think it's an expensive tool, so from a business standpoint, a lot of people might not be able to justify the cost given how expensive it is.

I have been using Braze since twenty sixteen across four different companies.

Braze is stable.

Braze's scalability is impressive. If you are a small company, you can use Braze. If you are a large company, you can use Braze. They have different tiers in terms of customer support.

I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as phenomenal. I feel it's one of the best parts of Braze. They are very knowledgeable.

I have always had very good customer support representatives.

I have not previously used a different solution; I have always used Braze. I was hired at this company to be the expert on Braze, and across the four companies that I worked in my career, we have always used Braze.

I have seen a return on investment, but it's hard to say an exact return. There are definitely fewer employees needed.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Braze is that pricing is expensive.

You get a dedicated onboarding team, and they assist you with everything that you might need.

My organization evaluated other options before choosing Braze and did discovery calls for Leanplum, Sailthru, Iterable, and I think Customer.io.

I'd rate it a 9 (docking a point because of the high price). The advice I would give to others looking into using Braze is that I love Braze, and I'm a huge supporter of using it. I think it has made my life as a marketer a lot easier. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Braze is automation, as I have always been interested in automation. Braze was the tool we used to send customer lifecycle journeys, trigger and run one-off campaign sends, mostly for automation, segmentation, and all the different connected channels it offers.

I found the platform excellent for having unified customer profiles, which I believe is one of the biggest selling points of Braze because it allows you to know your customer in a single profile card. The ease with which you can add new attributes and events and neatly package values underneath is impressive. In banking, we pushed clients towards different types of banking rates and tiers, which has me always wanting to return, leading to a lot of qualifications and certificates because I enjoy the platform so much and want to engage with it further down my career.

Braze's best features, for me, are the unified profile cards, along with the ease of connecting different channels, including email as a focus, plus push notifications and extending that to things to in-app messages, content cards, and SMS. That connection is felt immediately upon onboarding with Braze, as the ease of use and the sophisticated UI design allows marketers or automation specialists such as me to do amazing things quickly and intuitively.

Braze's analytics side is another interesting part, as it allows you to slice campaigns and different tests that you were running very easily, unlike other platforms I have used, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which often requires workarounds for information. With Braze, the friendly UI enables you to download large volumes of data about your customers and understand campaign performance and why people reacted as they did. Braze's campaign feature is also essential for experts using automation or large-scale segmentation, and the campaign execution side is very intuitive, allowing for slick A/B testing and accurate conversion goal setup.

I think Braze could probably be improved by having more access options for users who have previously engaged with the platform to keep them invested and wanting to return.

I do not have too much to comment at this point, as my last experience with Braze was purely positive. However, I think it would be great if Braze offered training, certificates, and module training accessible outside the gated community aspect, as I am very interested in new features and AI courses they are developing and want opportunities for warm and engaged Braze users.

I have been working in my current field for ten years, mostly in various CRM-focused roles across financial services and financial trading, mainly for the past seven or eight years.

I have used Braze for approximately three years in different roles and experiences, and most recently, I was using it just last year at Monument Bank in the banking industry to develop strategies for bankers.

Overall, I think Braze handles data well, with instant connected data observed. There was a slight scaling issue during the initial onboarding of many clients, as some records might have been duplicated due to setup issues, but thereafter I did not notice any problems.

I encountered no noteworthy downtime with Braze.

I found Braze's scalability easy to manage, as our user base grew steadily, and our initial deployment aimed to double that number within the first year of my time.

Braze's customer support was helpful and responsive, always within twenty-four hours, often much quicker. They prioritized higher alert cases, and I experienced effective resolutions, such as when they built a complex landing page for us, which was incredible.

I previously used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but I switched because it is a challenging platform for day-to-day users and those not as experienced in the field, leading many to make the switch to Braze.

My last use of Braze was at my last company, where I was hired to migrate to the Braze platform and teach users across the business how to use it. The best impact we had was neatly designing how the banking product infrastructure should look within Braze, including different current accounts, saving accounts, and new products such as ISA accounts and different portfolios. We utilized customized attributes to accurately market products to clients, creating great opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling based on what properties we had in their profiles.

During the migration, a lot of our data streamed from Salesforce Sales Cloud, which was a critical integration at the time. We also had plans to connect to a future data warehouse. Braze mostly hosted the analytics, and there were plans to connect it to Tableau, but I was not around long enough to see the future development.

Time saved is a key metric from using Braze, as I was at Monument for a short contract. They trained users quickly under tight time constraints, developing strategic plans to build client bases and convert customers. At the time I left, there were four active users organized into audience segments who could build campaigns, and the time saved was significant during my tenure.

Overall, the pricing structure and licensing for Braze were positive, as it is cheaper than some competitors while providing greater value. There was some back and forth around legal sign-off regarding service cancellation, but getting information considered and corrected appeared straightforward.

In my experience, I had considered other solutions such as Adobe, MoEngage, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud before choosing Braze.

I believe Braze is compliant with regulations such as GDPR, as I remember many privacy questions were asked about PII data during the initial integration to ensure data privacy and protection. Access to personal details was limited, meaning only certain users could see names or emails for testing purposes, with protections in place for client data.

Braze's training programs on display are very intelligent, featuring a learning academy and online certificates I completed. I received feedback from other users that it was easy to pick up compared to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, even for those with less invested time, allowing them to design and create materials effectively.

I recall we ran initial tests on different cross-sell campaigns without a benchmark, as we had never cross-sold or up-sold before in client communications, and the instant conversion results were very promising. Although I was only there for the migration and for some training, the early signs showed we could accurately detail clients' products and banking tiers, pushing them towards more favorable rates to increase their lifetime value, especially around their banking rates' expiration.

I would recommend the Braze platform to other companies, as it seems particularly suited for financial services due to the smart nesting of attributes and customer data, so I am a big fan. I would give this platform a rating of nine out of ten.

Braze has been in use for over seven months, and the implementation phase is still ongoing, with proactive tool usage having recently commenced.

The main use case for Braze involves transferring previous ESP data to Braze, which is related to email sending and newsletter sending, along with automated communications. In the future, push and in-app communications will also be developed.

The most distinctive aspect of the main use case for Braze is the development of a translation system within Braze. Automated translation sheets have been created to help upload content for all languages and create campaigns much faster than the default solutions from Braze would allow.

The best features Braze offers are the modern and intuitive UI, which stands out because extensive learning resources are available on the web, and the full-view of the customer is also quite valuable.

The UI is modern and intuitive for the team because many non-technical people are involved, so having something that is very intuitive and well-explained helps them develop campaigns autonomously. The customer view helps identify which customers received which communications, enabling troubleshooting and verification of their opt-ins along with all relevant information regarding them.

While the biggest impact of Braze will come in later phases since implementation is still ongoing, it does help enhance the speed of go-to-market for all communications, allowing more to be sent per week. However, there has not been a significant change so far since the other channels have not been fully explored, which represents the largest potential benefit from Braze.

Regarding the speed of go-to-market, before using Braze, it took at least one full week to create the template and manage it within responses, and it was much more technical, requiring someone with HTML knowledge. With Braze, it is now really more drag and drop, and marketing managers have the autonomy to create all these campaigns, reducing the time needed from a full week to just two to three days, which makes the work much easier.

The drag-and-drop function was expected to be more understandable and easier to implement, but it turns out to be quite technical, making it difficult for marketing managers to develop components by themselves. The limitations regarding HTML are also somewhat disappointing, and earlier knowledge of this would have allowed for building another solution or continuing with a previous platform that was easier to drag and drop and had more options for creating components.

Improvement to Braze would include adding more components that enhance the drag-and-drop feature, making it more modern and providing more options for emails to appear better and less rigid, as currently it heavily relies on HTML for any customization.

Transitioning from a relational ESP with tables that allowed matching and merging values was simpler compared to Braze, as Braze requires the use of catalogs, and the setup is less straightforward when it comes to segmentation. A more relational approach to creating campaigns and segmentations would make the process easier.

Work in this field has spanned around eight years.

There have been no reliability issues or downtimes encountered with Braze so far.

Multi-channel marketing using Braze has not been fully explored as of now, but the goal is to develop multi-channel campaigns that merge all available channels.

The customer support has been slower than expected. Assistance was requested for some features that are not functioning correctly, such as the click map for email, and discussions are still ongoing regarding how to proceed. Customer support would be rated at a seven since the response times have been quite slow.

Oracle Responsys was used previously, but the switch occurred because the contract was ending soon, and Oracle Responsys lacked good support for their marketing and ESP solutions. Additionally, the platform felt outdated and overly technical.

Braze's onboarding and training resources were quite nice and straightforward. Two certifications were received during the onboarding process—one in deliverability and the other for practitionership—and consultancy support was also provided for understanding some features.

Braze integrates with the existing tech stack primarily through API requests on a case-by-case basis.

User segmentation and personalization in Braze are managed using a CDP along with the standard features from Braze and Liquid.

At least 20 hours per week have been saved on campaign creation and deployment. Currently, there is a lack of any concrete ROI since the same functions as with the previous ESP are still being performed, although using Braze is significantly easier.

Before choosing Braze, other options were evaluated such as Marigold, MoEngage, and Microsoft's solutions.

For others looking into using Braze, it is advisable to ensure that all intended use cases align with what Braze can offer and how those capabilities match, because tools are often marketed as all-encompassing, yet many features may require additional development or are not as straightforward as initially claimed.

Braze is deployed through a private cloud setup. Currently, Braze's AI capabilities are only utilized for inquiries directly related to the tool since the data security program is very stringent, preventing the sharing of user data. Braze has met all required certifications upon purchase, and it is managing data privacy and compliance quite well. Braze has given good results thus far in terms of its AI capabilities.

The review rating for this experience with Braze is eight.

My main use case for Braze is B2C communication to patients at a pharmaceutical company, specifically for diabetes and diabetes products.

A quick, specific example of how I used Braze to communicate with patients includes sending mostly in-app notifications about their blood sugar measuring equipment.

In addition to what I mentioned, I could add that we were sometimes sending emails, and in some cases, in-app notifications in other cases.

The best features Braze offers, in my experience, include the multi-channel attitude, and I appreciated that the Canvases were expandable.

When I say the Canvases were expandable, it helped my campaigns or workflow because I am used to Eloqua, Oracle Eloqua, where there is a predefined size of Canvases. If you reach an edge, you need to traverse the flow to a different place, making it less digestible, and you might still run out of space or room. In the case of Braze, I didn't have this challenge. I could expand it immediately in any direction, which is really useful. The scalability is really there. The multi-channel approach benefits my communication because compared to Eloqua, which is designed solely for email, with Braze, I could also use my company's apps as well, such as in-app notifications and pop-ups. Moreover, I can make decisions on who to approach on which channel, which is great.

I would add that, comparing again to Eloqua, the variety of steps that I could use in Braze Canvas was lacking, so it was only a handful, and I expected significantly more.

Braze can be improved in areas where I felt it was lacking. I emphasize that this was four years ago, so perhaps it has changed in the meantime. However, the short list of potential steps that you could use was a concern. I also wasn't aware whether it could utilize beneficial features such as custom objects or custom data tables.

Regarding needed improvements, I would add that I was not an administrator, so I don't know how the administration works for Braze. I would be curious whether the integration with Salesforce or other downstream systems is robust enough. I would also mention that I don't know what the maturity level of AI features is at the moment.

I have been using Braze for four years.

The best advice I would give to others looking into using Braze is that the human factor is key. Braze's customer service was really eager to help and listen to the pain points that we were providing. I didn't see this level of service anywhere else, not at Salesforce or Oracle, so this was amazing. Braze's customer service really is a selling point.

Braze has impacted my organization positively, but not to its full potential. I mean, we didn't fully explore, for example, the usage of Liquid, but that could be a really powerful tool in personalization.

If we had explored more features such as Liquid for personalization, I think it might have brought more positive outcomes or value. I feel that there is potential there, and I don't know why it wasn't fully used. I think we were in an early stage, in an interim phase, and we did not really have time and energy to deal with it. Eventually, that would have been a kind of low-hanging fruit in developing our communication strategy, allowing for more personalization.

Regarding Braze's AI capabilities, I honestly don't know anything about its governance and security.

On the topic of Braze's AI capabilities, I think about its accuracy and reliability of output, but my thoughts are more about wishful thinking from back in the day. I don't know that it has developed in the meantime.

My overall review rating for Braze is 8.

I build campaigns and advise our CRM team in building campaigns. We typically tell them the type of logic needed, and they build the campaigns within Braze.

Retention logic, win-back campaigns, and welcome campaigns are examples of the campaigns I have worked on or advised using Braze. For the welcome campaign, it was a campaign that we had just launched for new users that had just signed up with us.

We use Braze for SMS campaigns as well, which adds another dimension to our main use case.

Segmentation is one of the best features Braze offers in my opinion, along with the ability to utilize the tool in building drip campaigns, drip campaigns off of existing campaigns, and then being able to leverage or pull levers based on real-time metrics.

Using real-time metrics stands out for me because that is what we report on to our executive VPs. From a reporting standpoint, Braze has positively impacted my organization incrementally. Email is a channel where we are able to see that incrementality annually. Given the vertical that you use it for, you are able to pull different levers. If you use it in the right way and you segment and test and learn, then you are off to a great start.

Braze can be improved from a reporting standpoint to include AI, where we are able to integrate it to provide us with real-time insights.

Needed improvements include integrations within other tech stacks, not just other ESPs.

I have been working in my current field for about ten plus years.

My advice to others looking into using Braze is to utilize the product to its full capability. Utilize the resources that you have within Braze's organization as it is a full-service agency and its users. I rate Braze an eight overall.

My main use case for Braze is sending emails. For sending emails with Braze, I managed all email and app communications for CrossFit. Anytime they wanted to promote anything about the CrossFit HQ portion, which included training credentials, health and fitness, and workout of the day, I would send emails to our subscribers, of which there were two million. I also sent emails for anything related to the sports division of CrossFit, which included competitions such as the open semifinals and the CrossFit Games. I would send regular emails to sports fans about the competition, specific emails to ticket holders with details about what they could do on-site, and different communications for those who would watch online.

For Blumhouse, I send campaigns primarily, and I have managed a Canvas, which is mostly used for tagging behaviors and custom attributes, but also at least a couple of canvases for welcome series and evergreen type content. Most of my campaigns are one-off campaigns for film releases or new trailer announcements.

Regarding my main use case for Braze, I have taken classes to specialize in Liquid Logic, which is something that is very intriguing to me. I have used Liquid Logic and catalogs as often as possible to personalize campaigns to the fullest extent.

When I think about the best features Braze offers, I believe it has a lot more capabilities than other platforms. Although it lacks somewhat in reporting, I do a lot of manual reporting based on certain exports. I have used Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot, along with many different email platforms. Now that I am very versed in Braze, I would definitely lean towards Braze as my preferred tool for its design capabilities, personalization features, ease of use, A/B testing, intelligent timing, and real-time engagement testing. I have used Liquid Logic in Klaviyo, but it does not feel as robust or straightforward as it is in Braze.

Braze has positively impacted my organization, but I do not think the tool itself is the sole reason for our increased followers and open rates. Being able to provide guidance on Braze, which is not always straightforward, is crucial. As a contractor, I understand the intricacies of the platform and serve as the go-to person for the marketing team that may not be as knowledgeable about technical terminology or how things operate. I think that is useful.

I wish Braze could improve in a couple of ways. I use link aliases for every link in every campaign I do, and when creating a variant for an A/B subject line test, all the link aliases that existed in version A are no longer in version B, which means I have to retype every link alias with each variant. I have gotten efficient at it, but it is somewhat of a pain.

More improvements I wish Braze could make include the ability to create a dashboard that exactly meets my client's needs. Currently, I end up exporting data and maintaining my own Google Sheet. My client is very interested in historical trending, but there is not a default way to do that. I have looked at extensions and other third-party tools, but we do not need a massive lift to resolve this. For example, determining how many people opened an email by twenty percent is easy, but finding out how many of our subscribers opened twenty percent or more of our emails over time is a significant hurdle. However, using custom events for tracking email receipt versus opens, I have been able to collect some valuable data, though I still have to export it to demonstrate to my client how many of our three hundred thousand subscribers never opened a single email or how many opened five of every twenty emails they received.

I have been working in marketing for probably more than fifteen years, but I have used Braze for two years at CrossFit HQ, and I am going on a year and a half with Braze for Blumhouse. So specifically, my experience with Braze is probably three and a half to four years.

I find Braze to be stable.

Customer support used to be amazing, but now it requires going through a portal, which means I often speak to different representatives who do not fully understand the specifics of my organization, and that is challenging. When I worked at CrossFit HQ in 2022-2023, I had a dedicated rep I could contact via Slack for help. After he got promoted, we were pushed to use the support ticket system, which causes delays in responses and requires continuous re-explanation of our issues. It often feels like they do not fully read or understand the context of our requests, which leads to disappointment compared to how it used to be.

I have personally used many different email suppliers as a freelance consultant, including Klaviyo, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp. Specifically, Blumhouse used Mailchimp before transitioning to Braze.

I have not seen a return on investment with Braze since my work has primarily been with clients where it has never been for sales or e-commerce. It has always been a marketing tool to raise awareness. I do not have clear metrics, but I recall years ago coming up with ways to automate emails that people were previously sending one at a time with their personal emails. I utilized a catalog to streamline that process, but I do not have concrete examples beyond that. I have shown organizations how using all of Braze's capabilities, such as catalogs, Liquid Logic, campaigns, and canvases, can save time and money.

I do not have much to say about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing, except that it was not a decision-maker for me. However, I know that both Braze and CrossFit spent a significant amount on Braze.

I do not recall if I evaluated other options before choosing Braze, but it was part of that decision-making process.

Regarding Braze's AI capabilities, I have not been using them. To me, it feels as though they are still new, and I would not trust that they are as knowledgeable as I am personally. I do not use the AI capabilities because I presume they are not accurate or reliable, but I cannot say for sure.

For others considering Braze, my advice is that while I believe it is the best solution compared to others I have used, the decision depends on the budget. If someone finds it would be a significant financial commitment, I would advise against using Braze, especially compared to a solution such as Klaviyo. Therefore, my recommendation hinges on several other factors, such as their budget, specific goals, types of messages they wish to send, and the desired capabilities. I would rate Braze a nine out of ten overall.

Braze serves as our primary platform for orchestrating diverse activities and actions across multiple channels, including push notifications, in-app messages, content cards, web push messages, email marketing, and SMS campaigns. We implemented different triggers based on behavioral messages and actions that our clients would perform, such as completing a form, abandoning a form, and during the onboarding process. We required both client and server-side features to flag different parts of the app where updates occurred and ensure target messaging aligned with active feature states without requiring App Store approval.

Using the visual journey builder, we created a complex interface with different multi-step journeys for users coming from various digital campaigns. Users landed on our landing page, filled out the form, and based on different actions, we were able to send them a web push or an SMS if they left the onboarding process for obtaining a credit card online.

We aimed to use several specific features for this solution. It was important for us to understand our objectives upfront, and the personalization and liquid templating that Braze offers brought our attention and proved very helpful for our acquisition decision.

The best features Braze offers in my opinion are the cross-channel messaging infrastructure, including push notifications, in-app messages, and content cards, which are persistent feed items, as well as direct messages for newsletter campaigns or SMS campaigns. Another valuable feature was the real-time dynamic audience segmentation, which provides instant segmentation based on real-time viewers, user attributes, location, device types, and historical interaction behaviors with our website or mobile app. Braze also offered high throughput streaming, which is a real-time data export layer that streams granular user interactions data directly into external data warehouse or event stream tools.

Automation significantly helped my team because instant segmentation based on real-time event triggers expedited our processes. Otherwise, we would have had to reach two different teams handling the database and audiences exported from our CRM. This ability allowed us to segment audiences faster. Another benefit was the server-side feature that provided better control, allowing our teams to perform feature rollouts for the mobile application, which proved more efficient and less time consuming than creating the entire business case and workflows we had previously.

For business impact, we achieved a 28% increase in credit card sales, driven by contextual targeting, in-app messages, and onboarding flows triggered immediately after specific users' touch points in the in-app application and on the forms on our website. We also achieved a 21% uplift in the number of qualified sales leads coming from different campaigns.

There are several things that would be worth optimizing by implementing strict SDK level event batching, addressing duplicate static user attributes, and leveraging Braze's consumption alerts to set up automated budget thresholds. This would help companies prevent billing spikes during high volume campaigns, which we also encountered.

The pricing is tied directly to data points volume, and unoptimized telemetry or redundant attribute tracking can quickly consume contracted allocations, leading to unexpected overage costs.

I have been using Braze for six months, and I used it at previous jobs for a few years already.

In my experience, Braze is stable and we did not encounter any issues. Downtime is non-existent in our processes and day-to-day activities.

Braze's scalability for our needs is excellent and has handled our growth and campaign volumes effectively. It eliminated some of the manual processes that team members were performing. Additionally, there were increases in the number of leads generated and the number of cards provided to end customers.

I received great support from both the technical and business sides of Braze. My experience was friendly, straightforward, and without any complications.

We did not have a different solution before Braze, but we conducted pitch interviews with other vendors when the selection process began.

Braze is stable and we did not encounter any issues with downtime affecting our processes. We measured business impact and improvements using A/B tests compared to previous periods, which showed significant enhancements in campaign latency due to transitioning from batch schedule marketing to sub-content behavioral event triggers.

We conducted pitch interviews with other vendors when the selection process began.

We achieved a 21% uplift in digital lead generation and a significant reduction in campaign latency implementation.

Before choosing Braze, we evaluated other options, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which we evaluated for legacy enterprise ecosystem capabilities, CleverTap for its combination of mobile engagement tools and integration real-time behavior analytics, and MoEngage for its mobile-first customer engagement and AI-driven insights.

Braze has positively impacted my organization overall by improving the efficiency of collaboration within our marketing team and with the operational, credit card, and loan teams, since some of the streams were created based on different procedures that every team had established. This created an efficient way of working, and the automation helped us reduce the time spent on delivering and creating digital campaigns throughout the company.

With regards to Braze's governance and security, there are no negative aspects I would mention. The platform is very secure, and we had an analysis and audit conducted by the security team, which went great with perfect results.

Based on what we have seen regarding Braze's AI capabilities, the reliability and accuracy of data is quite high. We do need to compare the outcomes from the orchestrations and workflows we have created, and this requires more time for data to settle, so we would have more data to compare.

I would suggest evaluating multiple options. In the end, you would see that the features, pricing, and overall process and implementation are better with Braze than with other competitors. However, this really depends on specific needs and the way any organization plans to work with any solutions available.

I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

I am responsible for all email marketing push notifications, in-app messages, and building out landing pages, so I am in the platform one hundred percent of my time at work.

We set up campaigns for our weekly newsletters and set up canvases for journeys specifically with our game zone notifications dependent on a fan's custom events. If fans have opted into certain games, they will receive certain emails depending on that selection. When it comes to in-app messaging, we promote that on our site. We are also building out a new app, so we are in the beginning stages of sending out push notifications. When it comes to landing pages, we have partnered promotions with our clients that we typically build out contest pages.

Day to day specifically, I am creating the emails. We have an internal design team that will help me build out the creative, but I will be using content blocks to pull in certain modules. If we are pulling in a fan's favorite team and if they have that data field in their profile, I create content blocks that will change depending on a fan's data profile. I only have to build out one email, but within that one email, there are multiple content blocks to use different dynamic content as well as pulling in personalization in the first name of the subject line. We also do AB testing creatively as well as time of day testing, and our send time optimization per fan.

For me, the ease of Braze is valuable. It is very user friendly, so anyone like myself can pick it up and learn quite quickly. I personally appreciate that I can do everything relatively quickly, and Braze can have the checks of whether or not my email is applicable for all devices. They have their own litmus testing equivalent, and then it flags any accessibility issues as well, which is good to note before sending out.

I am the sole proprietor on Braze, so I do not really collaborate with anyone else on my team when it comes to accessibility and those checks. It is helpful because as someone that is not a front end or full-stack developer, these are things that I definitely need to make note of and change in order to have our email render properly on every device, whether that is mobile or desktop. I have learned that some of our brand guidelines, fonts, and colors do not render on light and dark mode, and these are things that I have had to make note of moving forward with our emails in the present and in the future.

One of my biggest drawbacks with Braze, coming from someone with experience in Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe Campaign, and Pardot, is that I am very well versed in the data world and knowing that the data is the most important thing when it comes to sending out emails. If your data is not proper, then that causes problems with you sending out correct information. Having to use a third party data asset management tool such as Snowflake in order to have our data stream through Ticketmaster, then go through Snowflake, and then go into Braze has become more complicated than having a platform that has the data built in, such as Salesforce, where you can access the data via SQL query. With Braze, you have to open Snowflake in order to then create a table and then have that table. There are multiple tables, and it is just becoming not one master table where all the data lives and then creating segments off of that.

My biggest complaint for the most part is how complicated it tends to be with Ticketmaster specifically. Ticketmaster will ingest data directly into Braze, but it will also ingest data into Snowflake, meaning that there is double the amount of information going into Braze. I do not know if that is something that was told by my data team internally, but that is something that is not best case. It would be great for someone in my role to be able to go in, check out the entire master data, and see if there is anything in terms of an outlier or if there are data field names that need to be improved. It is just not as simple as what Braze ought to be. The platform should be very user friendly, and it is not.

I would probably give it a six out of ten, seeing how I have had experience in other CRM platforms. It is definitely not my favorite, but it is definitely easy for people that are not technical.

The reason I would rate it this way is because it does not have that technical layer that Salesforce does when you can go into the master table and look at all the data. You essentially have to have multiple connections for the data itself. For me, what is most important is the data, and that is what is lacking with Braze.

I have been using Braze since the beginning of April with this new job, so five months.

I have not experienced any stability issues. Everything has been smooth sailing. I have not had any of my emails break. The only thing would be that Braze's litmus equivalent is not actually litmus, and so when you view an email in their litmus equivalent, it does not actually look like that, which I find concerning. When you send an email and you are seeing the preview in Braze, in Outlook for mobile for example, and then I send myself an email in Outlook and look at it on mobile, it does not render how it is showing me on screen. This is a big concern if someone is just going off of the preview feature that they have.

We do not have a large volume. Our biggest audience size that we send to is about two hundred and fifty thousand. Some of the other clubs have about a million in terms of audience size, but from our volume, we have not experienced any issues. I know some clubs when it comes to their sends are having issues with their Hotmail and seeing that it is considered spam and that they will not send to Hotmail users, and then they have to warm the IP. I do not know why one team is experiencing that or whether their club was not set up correctly, but that is something that I have noticed.

I do not particularly like our support team. I find that they are very salesy, and that is not what I am looking for. I am looking for technical answers, and all I am getting is questions about whether I want to come to events that they have a conference for and whether there is anything that they can add to my account to improve my budget, which discourages and upsets me. When our support representative cannot answer the questions, they ask us to put in a ticket, so it feels that I have this person when they cannot even answer any of my questions, and I have to submit a ticket. It feels that the need or the ask that I am searching for, they cannot even answer.

So far, I think things are fine. I have not experienced any issues with regards to not following compliance. I think we are good on that front, but I find that our designated support representative is not well versed in the technical or compliance capabilities, so that makes things complicated. I feel that I am talking to a sales rep and I am not actually talking to someone that has that level of detail that I am looking for.

I have used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Adobe Campaign, and HubSpot, as well as Mailchimp. Working at an agency, I was able to work on different CRM platforms.

The issue with me starting five months ago and looking back at some of the metrics from the previous person is that this role was not filled for an entire year, which means that we were not sending emails and I cannot base my changes that I am making in Braze on previous data. I know that what I am doing is impacting because I can see that we are at about a hundred percent increase overall in fan engagement or unique click-through rate when it comes to contest pages or just being able to segment our audiences based off of province and send out emails for those. I think internally, the company has seen a surplus of engagement, but I cannot justify that from previous numbers because there are no numbers that I can go off of.

I am somewhat of an outlier because year over year, obviously, the numbers have improved significantly because we were not pushing through any emails as of last year. I can tell you from when I started until now that we have seen stagnant numbers of about an industry average of three percent click-through rate and a forty percent open rate. I do not know if those metrics are a result of me including first name personalization in the subject line or adding a CFL logo to Gmail so fans can see that CFL is an identified domain and that it is trusted. I am just doing what I know from past experiences in email marketing and applying them to this role.

My only thought is that Braze is not my first choice in CRM platform. One that has stood out to me, which I still have not used to this day, is Klaviyo. That could be because of how it is being sold to me, but from a technicality aspect, that is something that I am more leaning towards when it comes to our renewal if that is a possibility. I do not want to be hopping from one CRM platform to another. I want to stick with one that has all of the use cases that we need and then we are set to go. I just find that our biggest weakness is the data and then our Braze support team, which feels very sales-like. The conversations go on and on, and I am looking for someone with more technical experience when we have to have monthly conversations with our Braze support representative. I do not want to be talking about the Forge conference that is happening in Las Vegas.

From my previous experience working at an agency, I was only focused on the deployment and data side as well as reporting. Being in this new role, I feel that I am doing six people's jobs in one in terms of designing, deploying, reporting, and building landing pages as a full stack developer. I am assuming the company is very happy with me being in this new role. Instead of hiring six different employees, they can have me. But it is still not ideal, especially if you are sending out large volumes of emails and it is only one singular person.

I cannot answer what other options were available because the contract was submitted in twenty twenty-five, and it was a three-year contract. I do not know what other options were available. All I do know is that they needed to look at easier options that can be implemented across all of the clubs, especially from their marketing side that may not have the technical background. If I am assuming correctly, I am sure it was between Braze, Klaviyo, and potentially HubSpot. But I do not have that information.

My advice would be for organizations that do not want a heavy data aspect. If they are just looking for something easy to use and a teachable platform, then Braze is a good choice. However, if you are looking for something more complex, I do not think that Braze is the solution. In terms of design and ease of use, it is great, but from a technical data aspect, that is where it is lacking. I would rate Braze a six out of ten based on my experience.