What we're talking about this month — spring cleaning tips for your Braze instance, using AI to automate your processes, the best new Braze features, and more! ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the March edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! Each month, we share our knowledge and insights to help you get the most out of Braze and beyond. The warmer weather, this past weekend’s Selection Sunday for March Madness, and the return of Daylight Savings can only mean one thing: Spring is coming. Now is the perfect time to dust off your Braze instance and give it the same spring cleaning treatment you might be considering for your home (or not, we won’t judge your home hygiene habits). What we're talking about this month: 🤖 Using AI to help clean up your marketing operations 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ The most relevant updates from Braze’s March release 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft STITCH IN TIME A(i)tomation. Or is it AI-tomation? 🍅🥔 If finding a spot for AI in your workflows is on your spring to-do list, taking a look at your marketing ops/campaign processes is a great place to start. We’ve noticed that marketing teams are often fast adopters of AI since it promises to help them move faster — especially when weaving together AI and automation (hence my newly-coined term, AI-tomation… yes, it’s a Nick Burggraf original). Here’s what this looks like IRL for cleaning up the campaign process: Practical use cases include: Code QA with AI: Use ChatGPT or similar LLM models to set up code that can be applied to enhance QA for email, in-app messages, etc. Where we’ve seen it: A marketing team was feeling the pain of a very manual and cumbersome QA process coupled with a high volume of campaigns being deployed every week. We helped them leverage AI-tomation to scan recently-edited Braze Canvases and Campaigns to identify outgoing messages and extract key elements for validation. It applies Liquid logic to do a first pass for common errors and flag anything that needs additional review. The marketers responsible for QA receive an automated email showing key content and the preliminary Pass/Fail information, helping them QA more efficiently & effectively. Subject Line Analysis: Use an LLM to analyze historical subject lines to more accurately view trends, habits, and understand potential market reception. Where we’ve seen it: One brand we work with shared the last 12 months of subject lines with an LLM, which helped them realize that 60%+ of their emails sent in the last 8 months contained “XX% off” promotional language. They hypothesized that the consistency was likely making their promotions less effective and strategized on how to refresh their approach to subject lines to re-introduce a sense of urgency — rather than their customers thinking there will always be a major discount available. Gamification: Explore different development tools to help take creative gamification ideas to market faster. Where we’ve seen it: Cursor, an AI-integrated development environment (IDE), is being utilized by marketing teams to accelerate the development of more code-heavy messaging. This reduces their reliance on front-end dev teams to create In-App Messages and Custom Content Cards — allowing them to be more self-sufficient and get cool ideas out the door faster. A team we work with created an entire paginated quiz experience using an In-App Message template and Cursor prompts. Their front-end team reviewed and approved it without having to get engaged in the development process. - Nick Burggraf Solution Lead & Aspiring Stitch Marketer/Graphic Designer PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 Spring is in the air, and the warmer days have me thinking about (dreading?) spring cleaning. That fresh-air-induced cleaning inspiration should extend to your Braze account too — it’s time to think about your Tags. Let’s be honest: Tags get overlooked in the rush of getting campaigns out the door. It feels minor in the moment, but then a few months go by, and you’ve realized that your Braze account can be best described as beautiful chaos. Or worse — you don’t have a tagging structure and strategy and have never used Tags (please lie to me and tell me this isn’t the case). Tagging is your secret weapon for efficient Braze management. It’s an easy way to keep your account organized across segments, content, and messaging, and it just got even better with the addition of tagging on Custom Attributes and Custom Events (new in the February release). Create a new attribute or event and then click on ‘Edit’ — you’ll be able to add a new Tag or select an existing tag from your tag library. Now you can add Tags and filter based on: 🌎 The source of this data 💡 The use case for this data 👥 The team that owns this data Spring is also the perfect time to refresh your data dictionary and add Tags to your custom data. An organized Braze workspace = a happy Braze workspace. - Jake Davis Solution Lead & Fan of Marie Kondo’s Decluttering Tips (Yes, Braze Tags spark joy.) PATCHWORK Decoding Braze Product Updates 🛠️ Here's what caught our team's eye this month. General Access Gold ☘️ Deferrals - Braze updated their definition for soft bounces and is sending a new event called deferrals. When an email is not immediately delivered, Braze will retry the email for up to 72 hours after this temporary delivery failure to maximize the chances of successful delivery before attempts for that specific campaign are stopped. Why it matters: Get more insights into how your emails are performing with better visibility & transparency for delivery metrics. Android Live Updates - While these won’t be officially available until Android 16 goes live, Braze’s guide shows you how to emulate their behavior, so you can display interactive lock-screen notifications similar to Live Activities for iOS devices. Why it matters: Hooray for parity between Android & iOS devices…iOS users no longer get to have all the fun! This creates opportunities to deliver dynamic push notifications that drive engagement (think live score updates, delivery progress, etc.) to Android users. Plus, unlike iOS live updates, this will be compatible with older Android versions. P.S. While you’re in spring cleaning mode, now is a great time to dust off your cross-department communication skills! Check in with your development partners to make sure your SDKs are regularly updated (even better: make sure they’re automatically updated). Braze is consistently changing and updating its offerings — React Native updates were highlighted in the March release, Web updates were highlighted in February, and there are always new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements — so it can be hard to keep up. . This way, you’ll always be in sync with the latest offerings without having to manually track every change. - Wendy Bombardi Consultant Business Strategist & Walt Disney World Expert Early Bird Gets the Worm 🐥 Context Steps in Canvas [EARLY ACCESS] Context Steps allow you to create or update a set of variables that provide context about a user as they move through a Canvas. In the Context component, you can define multiple variables based on custom attributes, custom event properties or canvas entry properties. To set it up, choose a name, data type, and Liquid expression for your variable. Pro Tip: Use Connected Content to insert external information accessible via API into your variable definition. Why it matters: Context Steps allow you to define variables that you can use to delay messages, filter users, or incorporate into Liquid within message steps. This provides flexibility and control over data flowing through your Canvas, unlocking powerful personalization and deeper decisioning capabilities. You can also use Context variables anywhere you can use Liquid, such as in Message and User Update steps. Delay Updates [EARLY ACCESS] Braze has also made some key updates to Delays that are available in early access: Delays can now be extended for up to two years. Delays can be personalized based on Context variables (described above). Why it matters: Delays help you strategically orchestrate the timing of your messages within a customer journey, ensuring communications are sent at the most relevant and effective moments. Extended & personalized delays are two more tools in your optimization toolkit. These two updates, used together, allow you to power more personalized and effective messaging. An example of how this could work: A multi-region non-profit organization wants to push for spring clothing donations as the season begins to change. The team creates the Context variable spring_cleaning_reminder with the data type Time. The value is defined by accessing a Weather API via Connected Content to find the next sunny day in the forecast of the user’s area. The nonprofit uses their ‘spring_cleaning_reminder’ variable and a personalized delay to hold messaging until the next sunny day in the upcoming forecast, hoping that the nice weather paired with a highly-relevant nudge will encourage clothing donations. If they wanted to give users a little more time to get inspired to clean out their closets, they could choose to offset from a dynamic date (ex: ‘spring_cleaning_reminder’ + 3 days). Important Note: Context Steps, personalized delays, and extended delays are in early access. Contact your Braze account manager if you’re interested in participating in this early access. - Gabi Weimerskirch Consultant Solution Architect & Certified Pilates Instructor HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 Here are some things to add to your toolkit: 🌷 Spring has sprung. Ready to grow. Braze launched their annual Customer Engagement Review — filled with research-backed insights on what's top of mind for the modern marketer. We took these insights and created a quiz that provides actionable recommendations on how you can use Braze to power marketing growth. Campaign process clean-up. Check out Multi-Thread, our Braze Amplifiers solution focused on helping you launch better campaigns faster. Reorganize your internal processes. Check out our Thread The Needle video, ‘How to Optimize Your Feedback & Revision Cycle’ by Stitch Business Strategist, Brittany Watson. 📚 What we're reading How to Audit a Marketing Automation Platform in a Matter of Hours - Sara McNamara Even the Best Tech Stack Can’t Save You - Kirsten Schlau   LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences