Braze,  the comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today introduced new product innovations at its annual customer conference, FORGE, including Braze Cloud Data Ingestion and expanding messaging capabilities with native support for WhatsApp. Both innovations reflect expanded partnerships with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, and Meta, and aim to help brands future-proof customer engagement strategies against a backdrop of shifting consumer expectations, preferences, and behaviors.

Maximize the Value of Data With Braze Data
In today’s digital-first world, brands must have a deep understanding of customer preferences and behaviors to ensure long-term loyalty. This becomes increasingly difficult as the amount of global data produced increases to an estimated 181ZB by 2025. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of relevant customer data goes unused. Braze Data helps solve for this by providing what is designed to be the world’s most flexible customer engagement platform for data activation. Now, customers can unlock the value of any data at any time from any source in any format with the following new features and enhancements:

• Reduce Time-to-Value with New Cloud Data Ingestion and Data Modeling: With the launch of Cloud Data Ingestion, brands will be able to activate data directly from their data platforms. This turnkey data integration empowers teams to ingest, process, and activate data faster and at scale. Starting with the Snowflake Data Cloud at launch, Braze plans to expand to a number of other data platform partners in Q4 and beyond. The Braze data model has also been updated to support arrays and nested objects, so brands can sync structured and unstructured data from any source without requiring cumbersome data transformations.
• Gain Deeper Customer Understanding With Extended Data Retention: All of a brand’s customer data, such as custom attributes, custom events, and purchases are now stored indefinitely for active users to maintain an accurate, historical 360-degree view of their customers.
• Reach the Right Audience with Segment Extensions: Marketers can now create and add multiple customer event properties and message interaction data to their Segment Extensions, enabling deeper personalization. Customer segments are updated continuously based on purchases, custom events, and interactions with other channels.
• Reinforce Security with Customizable Personally Identifiable Information (PII): Customers can now define which fields in Braze should be treated as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This allows brands, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, to classify more information as PII for further data privacy and protection.

“We’re excited for Snowflake Data Cloud to be the inaugural partner for the Braze Cloud Data Ingestion to help customers to unlock more value from their data,” said Scott Schilling, Senior Director, Global Partner Development at Snowflake. “Data should be the solution, not the problem. Deepening our relationship with partners like Braze can provide teams the valuable tools they need to build and maintain a modern data framework without requiring extensive time from engineers, allowing resources to be more effectively deployed to support customer experience efforts.”

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Engage Global Audiences Through WhatsApp Channel Support
In early 2023, Braze will be launching native channel support for messaging platform WhatsApp. Fast, simple, and convenient messaging options have become increasingly important to customers as messaging becomes the preferred way of communicating with the brands they love. WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular messaging platforms with more than 2 billion users in 180 countries. Through the integration with Braze, marketers will be able to create, orchestrate, and send WhatsApp campaigns directly from the Braze dashboard to strengthen customer relationships with context-rich conversational messaging.

“Messaging is quickly becoming the best way for people and businesses to communicate and get business done. This shift presents a big opportunity in the way businesses engage with customers and offer support,” said Kyle Jenke, Business Messaging, Director of Partnerships at Meta. “We’re excited to work with Braze to offer WhatsApp as a new channel for brands to better manage interactions across the entire customer journey.”

“In today’s crowded landscape, competition for consumer attention is at an all-time high. Customer retention and loyalty hinges on brands’ access to accurate, real-time customer data they can activate across any channel, with no room for siloes,” said Kevin Wang, SVP, Product at Braze. “The introduction of these new integrations and capabilities empower brands to let data be the solution instead of the problem, as well as develop simple campaign strategies for complex campaigns with ease to meet the needs of today’s digital-first consumer.”

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