Braze, the comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today announced a series of new products and enhancements called Braze for Commerce, aimed at allowing retail and eCommerce marketers to increase sales through highly personalized campaigns driven by first-party data.

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“We’re happy to welcome Braze to the Shopify App Store, bringing its insight and experience in customer engagement to Shopify’s millions of merchants.”

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Today, retailers face the acceleration of hybrid shopping behaviors, heightened customer expectations, and a privacy-driven shift towards first-party data. Recent Braze research found that 90% of retail and eCommerce brands expect to increase marketing budgets partially in response to third-party cookie deprecation and recent privacy-related changes, such as iOS 15 which allows users to have more control over what information reaches them. While this presents a big challenge, it also provides brands with an opportunity to rethink what data matters. In the absence of third-party data, marketers need to continuously experiment to uncover deep customer preferences and deliver personalized, relevant experiences across all consumer touchpoints and channels.

Enabling retailers to face market challenges through dynamic personalization
As part of Braze for Commerce, Braze is unveiling a new product and significant enhancements to others, all aimed at helping marketers create impactful, personalized campaigns faster than ever.

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With Braze for Commerce, marketers can:

• Personalize meaningful experiences: As consumer expectations for personalization continue to reach new heights, marketers can tap into the new Braze Catalogs to seamlessly infuse product data into cross-channel messages for greater personalization. With Braze Catalog, marketers can streamline message personalization by seamlessly infusing product data into messages across any campaign on any channel. Beautifully branded recommendations can be quickly built from catalog data reused across multiple campaigns using our new Braze Content Blocks for Drag and Drop Editor. This allows brands to quickly pair individual shoppers with the most relevant products, offers, and updates with a no code approach. Lastly, Braze Surveys allows retailers to collect zero-party data on shopper preferences to inform campaign personalization.
• Understand shoppers: The shift to first-party data has marketers racing to collect and activate customer preferences and behaviors to inform targeting. Marketers can use Braze to capture new kinds of data in innovative yet compliant ways with existing tools like Braze Surveys and new SMS click tracking, an enhancement of SMS performance metrics, which allows marketers to retarget users based on their actions. Brands can also use Braze to build a deeper customer understanding based on behavioral data with Segment Extensions, an advanced segmentation tool. Marketers also benefit from machine learning tools like the Braze Predictive Suite to identify customers who are more or less likely to make a purchase or churn in the moment.
• Unify customer journeys: As digital touchpoints and hybrid shopping behaviors accelerate, brands can use the newly enhanced Braze Audience Sync feature to unite owned and paid channels. Linking native Braze email, two-way SMS, mobile, and web, with paid social channels enables brands to reduce ad spend by immediately shutting off Facebook or Google ad campaigns the moment a shopper converts elsewhere.

“As an omni-channel retail brand, customer communication and digital presence is critical to both growth and retention,” said Georgia Price, Director, Digital and CRM at Pressed. “Braze has played a key role in our customer engagement strategies as we’ve seen a 10% increase in engagement and almost 40% increase in open rates year over year since onboarding with Braze. We’re excited about the personalization potential the new Braze for Commerce offerings will provide.”

Unlocking the power of personalization for small and medium businesses through Shopify
As part of the launch, Braze has also announced general availability of its Shopify integration available in the Shopify App Store, allowing Shopify’s millions of merchants to create a real-time sync of their customer and purchase data with a simple click – no coding necessary.

“At the core of Shopify’s Ecosystem is our community of developers who give merchants access to critical commerce technology,” said Fatima Yusuf, Director of Commercial at Shopify. “We’re happy to welcome Braze to the Shopify App Store, bringing its insight and experience in customer engagement to Shopify’s millions of merchants.”

“Retail brands must reimagine traditional shopping experiences,” said Kevin Wang, Senior Vice President, Product at Braze. “Our portfolio of retail and eCommerce solutions helps retailers unlock the full potential of their first-party data, delivering contextually relevant experiences that empower shoppers to quickly find and buy what they need, when they need it, from wherever they are. Braze for Commerce combines turnkey eCommerce integrations with the flexibility to orchestrate retail journeys across an array of native channels, allowing customers to create new and effective buying experiences.”

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