What we're talking about this month — shifting gears to smarter marketing, the best new Braze features, and more! ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the May edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! May in Indianapolis (Stitch's hometown!) means one thing: the Indianapolis 500. In honor of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing”, we’re shifting gears this month to focus on efficiency: fewer detours, tighter turns, and messages that actually move the needle. This newsletter is your Braze pit stop — refuel, reset, and take the tools/tactics to get back to building smarter, faster campaigns. (No tire change or milk required.) 🏎️ 🏁 What we're talking about this month: 🏎️ Starting your efficiency engines 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ The most relevant updates from Braze’s late April release 🪡 Webinars, programs & resources you can use to hone your craft ✈️ P.S. Learn how you can go to Forge on our dime with our new Innovators Grant! STITCH IN TIME Life in the Fast Lane ⏩ Don’t let slow processes put the brakes on strong ideas. The best campaigns don’t always win — the fastest ones do. In today’s martech landscape, speed isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive advantage. We work with enterprise marketing teams every day who are trying to move faster, but the bottleneck isn’t usually their tech stack. It’s the processes around it. Braze is built for speed and productivity with features like reusable templates, content blocks, and AI-recommended timing/copy/channels designed to eliminate manual work. But most teams aren’t set up to take full advantage of them. We’ve seen teams cut their campaign build times from weeks to days by making a few smart changes — building better campaign briefs, templatizing common workflows, automating approvals, or using AI to draft content. That kind of speed unlocks more testing, faster feedback loops, and better performance. A QSR brand we support decided to stop building every local campaign from scratch. They centralized their messaging, used templates to handle variations, and added dynamic content for menu and pricing based on user preferences. Now, they can launch a dozen personalized campaigns in the time it used to take to build one, and adapt on the fly based on real-time results. We’ve helped several brands integrate their project management tools with Braze to automatically deliver campaign briefs and key assets (like imagery and translations) directly to Catalogs. This eliminates time-consuming copy-paste workflows, minimizing headaches and human error, and saving teams hours of valuable time. Another brand was bogged down by manual, error-prone QA workflows that took hours each day. We helped them develop an automated QA solution that scans campaigns for key issues — like broken links, UTM errors, and formatting problems — and delivers pre-screened results directly to reviewers’ inboxes. This gives reviewers a head start and an added layer of quality control, helping them maintain their high send volumes without sacrificing accuracy. As you can see from these examples, speed isn't about cutting corners. It’s about building the systems that let your team spend less time wrangling assets and more time doing the work that moves the needle. - Katie Spence Practice Lead & Pro Hula Dancer PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 Scheduled campaigns in Braze don't have a native 'quiet hours' feature, but a combination of send volume limits, rate limits, and smart campaign scheduling can prevent those accidental 2:00 am sends. Example: You have a campaign with an audience of 100,000 and a rate limit of 100 per minute. At this rate, these messages would take approximately 17 hours to send, putting you at risk for late-night sends. You can set guardrails with the send volume and send rate to ensure that emails don't go out overnight. Schedule the campaign for a reasonable send time (ex. 8:00 am) Limit the send volume to 50,000 Limit the send rate to 100 messages/minute. This ensures that Braze will send the emails over multiple days to prevent emails from going out overnight. - Michael Cook Solution Architect & Pacers Super Fan (Eastern Conference Finals!!!) PATCHWORK Decoding Braze Product Updates 🛠️ Here's what caught our team's eye this month. Anonymous User Management - Braze has updated and expanded guidance on managing anonymous users and assigning User Aliases so brands can better engage users before they are formally identified (e.g signing up or logging in). Why it matters: Marketers can now more confidently personalize their campaigns and Canvases for anonymous users which can increase early engagement and conversions while experiencing smoother profile transitions from anonymous to identified. Example: A user browses or abandons their cart, but never logs in. With User Aliases you can track that user and retarget more effectively…and when they do log in, Braze can automatically merge the anonymous user activity into their existing or new profile — win/win! User Merging - There are a few new release notes on merging users. You can now leverage the least_recently_updated parameter to prioritize and preserve the newer, fresher user record. Additionally, user merging can now be scheduled on a daily basis with admin notifications 24 hours in advance of an upcoming merge. Why it matters: A clean Braze instance is an efficient Braze instance. These updates make it easier for companies to maintain clean, unified user profiles, which is critical for personalization, analytics, and effective cross-channel messaging. They also reduce the manual work and risk of having outdated/duplicate profiles persisting in your Braze instance. Landing Page Updates - Landing Pages continue to see regular updates, unlocking it as a new channel for brands. This month’s updates focus on templates & form fields. You can now create and manage templates from both the landing page editor and Templates sections. Braze has also added a highly requested required/optional feature for form fields, which gives you more flexibility when capturing user information. Why it matters: Templates make it faster and easier to build consistent landing pages across campaigns, creating an improved user experience and easier marketer experience. Required form fields ensure you don’t miss out on critical user info you want to collect. - Brendan Foerster Senior Solution Architect & James Bond Enthusiast HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 Here are some things to add to your toolkit: 🏁 The Winner's Circle Off to the races. Stitch wants to send YOU to Forge 2025 in Las Vegas! Our Innovators Grant will cover flights, accommodations at the Virgin Hotel, and full conference passes for selected recipients. This is your chance to connect, learn, and lead at Forge. Apply now — applications close June 30th. Time for an oil change. Do you know someone who is thinking about moving to Braze? Send them the link to sign up for our upcoming webinar, “Everything You Need to Know about Migrating to Braze,” on June 11th. They’ll hear directly from marketers at Belk and Papa John’s about why they made the switch — and exactly how they did it. Bring home some hardware. Don’t miss your moment to shine — apply for the 2025 Torchie Awards! The Torchie Awards celebrate the best and boldest in customer engagement, and we want to see you in the spotlight. Submit your application by May 27 to be considered across customer categories like: Rising Marketing Star Marketing Leader of the Year Creative Excellence Collaborative Team of the Year Campaign of the Year Braze for Impact Winners will be celebrated at Forge 2025. If the Stitch team can do anything to help your submission shine, let us know! 📚 What we're reading 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic - Scott Brinker, Chief Martec Braze Melting Points: Locking in Loyalty Guide - Our friends at the Braze 427 Innovation Lab launched their loyalty guide to inspire marketers everywhere with unique ideas for how to engage their most loyal customers. Bonus? Our very own Michelle Ohlson shared some insights into how to actually *build* one of their ideas — a year-in-review campaign.   LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences