Will we see you at Forge in Vegas? Plus: why we strive for more than just a successful migration, and Braze product updates you should know. ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the September edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! Football is back. Weekends have their soundtrack again, and if you're anything like us, you've already got opinions about a team that hasn't played a real tough opponent yet. The thing about football is while the offseason work is critical — the recruiting, the film study, the new playbook installs — it doesn't show up on a scoreboard. Preparation matters, but only if it turns into execution. CRM works the same way. You can spend months getting your data house in order, mapping out the perfect segmentation strategy, sitting in on every Braze release webinar. None of it counts until you ship the campaign. The teams having a good season are the ones calling plays, adjusting at halftime, and getting better week over week. Speaking of big games, Forge is coming up fast — Braze's biggest event of the year, and typically where they save their headline product releases. We'll be there, and we'll keep you posted on what's new. If you're making the trip to Vegas, check out our three sessions — we'd love to see you there. This month, we've got the plays worth running: why migrating to Braze isn't the same as modernizing your lifecycle strategy, an Audience Sync tip that's more about team alignment than tech setup, and the product updates worth actually building into your workflow. Let's get you ready for kickoff. 🏈🏆💪 What we're talking about this month: 💻 Why we strive for more than just a successful migration 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ The most relevant updates from Braze’s recent releases 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft STITCH IN TIME Don’t teach your new platform old tricks A pattern we see across brands: migration gets treated as a finish line. Teams move fast to hit a launch date, replicate what already existed in the old platform, and call it done. The lifecycle program looks the same as it did two platforms ago — same journeys, same segments, same message cadence — just running on better infrastructure. But you’re leaving things unfinished. Because the strategy that got built was designed around what your old platform couldn't do. Batch-only sends. Rigid segments. No real-time triggers. Once you're on Braze, none of those constraints exist anymore — but if nobody goes back and asks "why does this rule exist," the constraints stay baked into the program anyway. You just paid for flexibility you're not using. If your team can explain every journey by pointing to customer behavior, you're in good shape. If your team explains journeys by pointing to what the platform used to allow, you're running a legacy program on modern rails. If that's where you are, here's what we recommend you do: Audit your highest-volume Canvases for leftover logic. Open the program that sends the most messages (usually welcome or post-purchase) and walk through it step by step. For each step, ask one question: does this exist because of what the customer did, or because that's just how it's always worked? Watch for: - Batch sends that could be real-time triggers - Broad segments that could be behavioral - Time delays that exist because the old platform needed a buffer — Braze doesn't If you can't tie a step to a tangible customer impact, flag it. Check whether you're using the triggers you're paying for. Braze can act on cart abandonment, browse behavior, app sessions, support resolution, loyalty tier changes, etc.. Pull up your live Canvases and count how many actually use event-based triggers versus time or list-based ones. Most teams find they're only using a fraction of what's available. Pick one moment you want to personalize and trace the data behind it. Personalization plans fail silently when the data isn't available at decision time — even if it exists somewhere in your stack. There's a difference between data that's collected (a dashboard, a nightly export) and data that's accessible to Braze in real time, at the moment it needs to make a decision. Choose one thing (send-time optimization, next-best-offer, a churn-risk flag) and trace it backward. Does it exist in Braze at decision time, or only in a dashboard your team checks the next day? If it's the dashboard, you can't truly personalize yet, and you need to get that data flowing into Braze first. None of this requires new tech spend. It requires treating "we're finally migrated to Braze" as a starting point, not an ending one. - Scott Harrison Senior Marketing Strategist and proud dad to a one-eyed orange cat named Toast PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 Get better ROI out of Audience Sync It's easy to think of Audience Sync as a technical feature: connect Braze to Google and Meta, and your first-party data starts flowing to your ad platforms. The real value shows up in the conversation it forces between teams that don't always talk enough. When retention and acquisition are working off the same synced audiences, paid spend and lifecycle messaging start reinforcing each other instead of operating in separate lanes. No more ad dollars targeting someone who already converted through email. No more retargeting a user who just churned. The technical setup is simple. The effort lies where it matters: getting lifecycle and paid media in a room together to agree on which audiences to prioritize and how to define the audiences. Start that conversation, build shared ownership, and the technical lift becomes the easy part of the process. - Cat Mears Principal Marketing Strategist and distant relative of Dr. Suess PATCHWORK Decoding Braze product updates 🛠️ Cloud Data Ingestion: SQL Editor The new way to build a CDI sync is here. The SQL editor lets you write a query against any warehouse table or view—Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks, Fabric—instead of standing up a dedicated Braze-only table. We've said this before, but it's still true: the data team owns the warehouse, marketing owns Braze, and getting anything from one to the other used to mean a ticket, a Slack thread, and three weeks of "just following up." This closes that gap. A sync can now live closer to how your data team already works, instead of forcing them into a Braze-shaped box. Tactical example: A subscription brand's data team maintains a churn-risk score in Databricks that blends purchase recency, support ticket volume, and app session drop-off—too much logic for a simple field mapping. They write it once in the SQL editor, and marketing builds win-back Canvases off a score that updates daily, with zero engineering tickets filed. Workspace Quiet Hours Quiet hours used to live at the campaign level, which meant it was only as good as whoever remembered to check the box that day. Cue a "quick" SMS blast landing at 6am because one person forgot one setting. Braze fixed the actual failure point here: human memory. There's now one default quiet-hours window per channel, applied workspace-wide, in each recipient's local time zone. Campaigns and Canvases can still override it when they genuinely need to. Tactical example: A retail brand runs SMS across three regional teams, each building their own sends. One team forgets to set quiet hours on a flash-sale text, and East Coast customers get pinged at 6am. With workspace quiet hours set once, every team's campaigns inherit the same protection by default—nobody has to remember anything. Canvas Threshold Alerts You know this one. You open a campaign you launched weeks ago, glance at the analytics tab, and think "huh, that's low." It's always a Friday. What should be a two-minute check turns into something you're untangling before the weekend. Now you can set an expected range for entries or sends on a Canvas, pick a check interval—every 3 to 12 hours, or daily—and get pinged by email or webhook the moment it drifts. Tactical example: A DTC brand's welcome series normally enrolls around 500 new users a day. A segment update accidentally excludes a chunk of new sign-ups, and entries quietly drop to 200 a day. With a threshold alert on that Canvas, the team gets a webhook notification within hours—not a surprise buried in a monthly report three weeks later. - Tatum Lynch Top Stitch Lead and IU Women's basketball’s biggest fan UPCOMING EVENTS Braze Forge 2026 We'll be at Forge 2026 in Las Vegas. Swing by the Stitch lounge in Alloys Alley and talk through what's actually working in CRM right now with our team. We're also running three sessions with clients like Exact Sciences and Purina, covering everything from turning 2-way SMS into real conversions to building an operating model that lets your team ship faster. If you're at Forge this year, stop by. The chairs are comfortable, the stickers are limited edition, and the conversation is always worth your time. Meet us at Forge > STITCH IN THE NEWS Stitch earns #2 spot on ADWEEK’s Fastest Growing Agency List Stitch debuted at #2 on ADWEEK's 2026 Fastest Growing Agencies in our first year of eligibility. It confirms something we've believed since we were founded in 2022: the traditional agency model wasn't built for how enterprise marketing actually works. Data sits in one place, campaigns run in another, and CMOs end up bridging the gap themselves. Stitch was built to close it — strategy, engineering, and campaign execution in one team, sitting at the intersection of data infrastructure and marketing activation. This one belongs to our team and the clients who push us to do our best work every day. Read the full release > HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 2026 Braze Innovation Lookbook. Our 2026 Braze Innovation Lookbook is out — and this year it's all about the work that actually moves programs forward. Inside you’ll find eight real case studies covering migrations, integrations, AI in production, and lifecycle fixes that most customers never see but every great CRM program depends on. No theory. No trend roundups. Just what Stitch built, how we built it, and the positive impacts it had on our clients. Get inspiration on what ‘good’ looks like with Braze. Read more > Stitch Helps RaceTrac Quench Customer Thirst with a Summer-Inspired Gamified Loyalty Experience. RaceTrac wanted to launch its first in-app gamified loyalty experience before summer. Stitch stepped in and designed, built, and launched the full experience in 11 weeks. Every qualifying drink purchase fired a real-time Braze event that advanced the player's position on the game board, triggered reward delivery through Punchh, and sent cross-channel messaging across push, email, and in-app. The results: 21% transaction growth, 7.1% more daily app sessions, 86% of earned moves played, and ~1,600 new players joining every day. Read more > The 4-Question Diagnosis to Run Before You Evaluate a CDP. Before evaluating a CDP, diagnose the actual problem first by asking these four questions: can marketers access data without IT tickets, is identity resolution a live issue or theoretical, do your CRM and paid teams need shared audiences, and whether you have any data foundation at all. Most teams don't need a standalone CDP, but a shorter path between the data they already have and the platform they already use. Read more > 📚 What we're reading/watching Disclosure Day: Do AI-generated emails need a disclaimer? - Really Good Emails A field guide to BrazeAITM - Bobby Tichy Churn prevention: How to identify and retain at-risk customers - Braze Stop Ignoring the $1.3 Trillion Gap with Stitch’s Sarah Gallardo - Making Sense of Martech LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Catch up on past editions of Cutting Edge > Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage Preferences