What we're talking about this month — how strategy takes your gamification from game over to game on, the best Braze features from recent releases, our top resources, and more! ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the March edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! Happy St. Patrick's Day! 🍀 March has a way of making people think about luck. Four-leaf clovers, lucky charms, maybe even a spin of the wheel. And in marketing, it can sometimes feel the same way — launch the campaign, add a game mechanic, cross your fingers, and hope engagement follows. But the best-performing programs aren’t built on luck. They’re built on intention. From strategic frameworks for gamification to practical Braze updates and resources to sharpen your craft, this edition is all about making engagement more deliberate, measurable, and repeatable. What we're talking about this month: 🍀 Great gamification doesn't rely on chance 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ The most relevant updates from Braze’s recent releases 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft STITCH IN TIME Game on, or game over? Strategy decides your fate. 🤔 Gamification is everywhere in marketing right now. Almost every brand wants a spin-to-win wheel, a quiz, streak mechanics, or some kind of interactive game. The appeal is clear — games boost engagement, spark moments of delight, and give customers a reason to come back. But the question marketers need to ask isn’t just “How do we add gamification?” It’s “Why does gamification make sense for our strategy?” Too often, gamification is a tactic in search of a purpose. Brands launch a game because it looks exciting or because a competitor did something similar. But without a clear business objective, these efforts usually lead to a brief spike in engagement followed by a sharp drop-off. Customers play once, claim a reward, then move on. What was meant to build a lasting connection ends up feeling like a one-time novelty. Effective gamification starts with a business problem. Are you aiming to increase purchase frequency? Educate customers about your loyalty program? Encourage product discovery? Capture valuable first-party data? The best games reinforce behaviors that benefit both your business and your customers. Alignment with your brand is crucial, too. A sports brand might lean into competition with leaderboards and challenges. A grocery retailer could focus on discovery games that highlight new ingredients. Streaming services might reward binge streaks or fan trivia. When the mechanics feel true to your brand and audience, the experience is authentic, not forced. When planning for gamification, brands need to consider the full development cycle—not just the game itself, but strategy, creative, development, testing, and deployment. Proper budgeting across all these stages is essential to build a solid design system and deliver an enjoyable user experience. Without this, a gamified feature risks falling short—either by feeling disjointed or by giving away too many loyalty points or free items, which can hurt your bottom line. Successful gamification is a carefully organized effort that connects every element to your business goals while creating experiences that genuinely build customer loyalty. This kind of strategic, end-to-end planning ensures your gamification efforts are both engaging and financially sustainable, aligned with the bigger picture of customer engagement and growth. Finally, gamification shouldn’t be a one-off. The most successful programs embed games into a broader lifecycle strategy, using progression, rewards, and repeat engagement to build lasting relationships. Gamification is powerful — but its real value isn’t the game itself. It’s the strategy behind it that drives real business impact and ROI. P.S. If this got your wheels turning, we have resources that can help! Check out our blog, "10 Things to Ask Yourself Before Building a Gamified Experience," or watch our on-demand gamification webinar for a deeper dive into how to build a good gamification strategy. - Scott Harrison Marketing Strategist & Gaming Expert (he's got 4440.8 hours in steam) PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 SMS is a high-value channel, but this value comes with a known cost. Constructing your SMS messages carefully can help you maximize engagement impact while minimizing the impact to your bottom line. Braze's SMS Segment Calculator can help you see exactly what your message will cost, giving you key information to help shape your copy strategy. For example, did you know that just one emoji could double your SMS bill? Standard text uses GSM-7 encoding, giving you 160 characters per segment. But the moment you drop in a single emoji or any non-standard character, your entire message switches to UCS-2 encoding, and your segment limit drops to 70 characters. Not just for that character. The whole message. So, a perfectly crafted 130-character message that fits neatly in one GSM-7 segment? Add one emoji, and it's now two UCS-2 segments. Multiply that across a million-user send and you've just doubled your SMS spend. To test your messages for character encoding ahead of time, go to Braze's SMS Segment Calculator, check "Display Character Encoding" and look for any red UCS-2 tags. Those are your costly culprits. - Jenny Rodriguez Creative Specialist & Coffee Shop Connoisseur PATCHWORK Decoding Braze product updates 🛠️ Context Variables Context variables give marketers another powerful tool to create data-driven, personalized canvas experiences without having to create or update user profile data. Unlike custom attributes or event properties, context variables live only inside the Canvas where they're created. They won't show up on a user's profile, carry over to other Canvases, or stick around after the journey completes. Why it matters: Imagine a user adds an item to their cart but doesn't purchase. You can use a context variable to capture the item's price as they enter the Canvas, then personalize the discount in your follow-up message based on that price without ever touching their profile. Braze Agents in Agent Console Braze Agents are AI-powered helpers you configure inside Braze and deploy directly in Canvas steps or catalog fields. You give them instructions and data, and they handle the rest. They can create message copy, enrich catalog data, and make routing decisions so every user gets the most relevant experience. Why it matters: Historically, setting up personalization and testing in Canvases has been a time-intensive process. Braze Agents change that by handling content creation, data enrichment, and routing decisions automatically. This frees up marketers to focus on the strategy that drives customer engagement. Picture this: a customer just made their first purchase. Rather than blasting the same message to your entire list, a Braze Agent pulls their purchase details and crafts a personalized follow-up automatically, no manual variants or Liquid logic required. Granular Permissions Not everyone on your team needs access to everything in Braze. Granular permissions give admins more precise control over what each user can see and do, so you can make sure the right people have the right access. Why it matters: Previously, workspace access bundled everything together. Now each part of the platform has its own view, edit, and archive controls, so you can give each user exactly the access they need and nothing more. Channel-based Rate Limiting When running a multi-channel campaign or Canvas, you can now choose between a shared rate limit across all channels or a channel-based rate limit that applies to each one. Why it matters: Before channel-based rate limiting, a single rate limit applied across all channels in a campaign or Canvas. If emails were sent faster than expected, it could eat into the message volume allocated for SMS or push. Channel-based rate limiting gives each channel its own limit, so your sends stay predictable across the board. - Mike Brazitis Solution Architect - Associate Director & Ballroom Dance Enthusiast GOING TO SHOPTALK? Time to swing into Shoptalk with Braze & Stitch ⛳ There's still time to sign up for our pre-Shoptalk event with Braze! Kick off Shoptalk 2026 with a special evening at Swingers Golf at Mandalay Bay, hosted the night before the show officially begins. Join a curated group of senior marketing and growth leaders for a casual, high-energy night of mini golf, elevated carnival games, great food, and sharp conversation — all designed to spark meaningful connections before the conference rush starts. When: Monday, March 23, 6:00–8:00 PM Where: Swingers Golf, Mandalay Bay Register with your work email to apply for attendance. Spots are limited. Secure yours and tee up Shoptalk 2026 the right way. We'd love to see you there! Register for pre-Shoptalk event > HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 🚧 Under construction. Our team recently ran this very newsletter through a full accessibility audit! Over the next few months, you may notice us making some changes as we work with Stitch's very own accessibility expert, Sarah Gallardo, to improve our emails. Sarah reviewed 10 of our existing emails against WCAG 2.2 standards to identify accessibility gaps and usability barriers. We got: A facilitated strategy workshop to review findings A prioritized list of fixes A custom remediation roadmap + level-of-effort estimate In under an hour, our team learned how to confidently update templates, reduce risk, and create more inclusive email experiences. 10/10, would recommend. Interested in how Stitch can help your team create more inclusive experiences? Drop us a line and let us know how we can help. Learn more about our accessibility audit >   🕴️Not so secret agent. Braze Agents in Agent Console are now GA, just in time for the final installment in our Braze Innovation Series. On March 24th, we’re hosting a webinar to cut through the AI noise to bring you tangible use cases for Braze Agents. We’ll walk through challenges, goals, and in-depth solution dives for cool sh*t that we've helped marketers build in Braze that has moved the needle in changing the way marketing gets done. Register for Agent Console webinar > 📚 What we're reading/watching Databricks + Braze = The Future of Smart Marketing - Kirsten Schlau The Best Onboarding Email Examples in 2026 - Really Good Emails   LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences