What we're talking about this month — breathing new life into your lifecycle marketing, how to defend against duplicate profiles, the best new Braze features, and more! ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the September edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! Lifecycle marketing — the epitome of right message + right time + right channel — sounds like marketing 101, but ask any marketer juggling it today, and they'll say implementing a lifecycle marketing program is anything but basic. Building and executing a lifecycle program is a constant puzzle. How do you map the customer journey accurately when data lives everywhere? What even is the right data to use? How do you deliver tailored messages at scale without overwhelming your already stretched team? What messages take priority when balancing promo emails and everything else on the content calendar? And once you launch, how do you measure what’s truly moving the needle? We work with marketers every day who want to break free from one-off campaigns and build a smarter, more flexible marketing engine. In this newsletter, we’ll share practical frameworks to help you get your lifecycle marketing off the ground — and keep it driving real growth. What we're talking about this month: 💡 How testing breathes new life into lifecycle journeys 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ The most relevant updates from Braze’s recent release 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft 🎰 What we’re up to at Forge 2025 STITCH IN TIME Small tests. Big impact. 💥 Lifecycle journeys, most everyone has them, but more often than not they’re left on auto-pilot. Usually, lifecycle journeys fall victim to a "we'll get to it eventually" mindset where more "urgent" requests always take priority. Without intentional focus on lifecycle journey optimization, companies are leaving opportunities on the table. Customer behavior evolves, but over time, even the strongest journeys can lose their edge. The good news: introducing testing and optimization doesn’t require massive bandwidth. In fact, small, structured experiments are one of the most efficient ways to unlock more value from the work you’ve already done. How to get started with testing: Focus on one flow: Pick your highest-volume or highest-value journey (a Welcome Canvas, for example) and identify 1-2 elements where you think performance can improve. Run one clear test at a time: Keep it manageable—say, send time optimization this month, message interval next month. Use built-in tools: many platforms today make it easy to test full Canvas variants or smaller Experiment Paths; use the tools that Braze gives you. Start small: start with 10-20% test groups to prove out performance High-impact tests you can try today: Subject lines or push titles: Fastest lever, lowest lift. Send timing: Morning vs. evening, Intelligent Timing, immediate vs. next-day. Delay intervals: 1 day vs. 3-day delays between messages, 7-day vs. 14-day Canvases Email content: highly creative vs. text-heavy content, short vs. long emails Personalization: generic messaging vs. targeted, propensity-based messaging For example, one of the brands we work with recently tested intelligent timing after thinking about it for a while. It was easy to set up, and they quickly learned that while it didn’t provide a significant lift in the message engagement itself, it did lead to a 10%+ increase in sales vs. a scheduled timing send, driving hundreds of thousands of dollars in increased revenue. Think of your lifecycle programs as living systems. Roadmap your tests by months or quarters to evolve with your customers, rather than running on autopilot. And the payoff compounds quickly — just a one-percent lift in a core journey can translate to thousands of additional conversions over time. The key is not waiting for “someday.” Start small, start simple — and let the data guide you. - Brendan Foerster Solution Architect & Pro Girl Dad (x3) PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 As users move through your company’s lifecycle — from anonymous browsers to identified customers — duplicate profiles can quietly creep in, fragmenting your data and complicating messaging. Braze’s Manage Audience feature is your best defense: it helps you find and merge duplicates so every user lives in one clean, complete profile. Why should you care? When you have unified profiles, your frequency caps work as intended, personalization hits the mark, and you avoid bombarding the same person with redundant messages. Here’s how to turn it on: Head to Audience > Manage Audience > Edit rules. Choose the Identifier (External ID, email or phone number) that determines which profile wins in a merge. Set your tie-breakers — decide if you keep the newest or oldest profile, based on created date, updated date, or last session. Schedule your daily merge to run automatically — no more manual cleanup. Enabling this feature is a straightforward way to improve data quality and campaign effectiveness without any extra effort. In other words, it's a must-have. - Tatum Lynch Solution Architect & Self-Proclaimed Band Nerd (Trumpet Player) PATCHWORK Decoding Braze product updates 🛠️ Here's what caught our team's eye this month. Braze MCP Server - Conversational Access to Engagement Data via AI Tools [BETA] The new Braze MCP Server provides a secure, read-only bridge that lets AI agents like Claude and Cursor query aggregated, non-PII data from Braze. You can use it to ask natural-language questions about campaigns, canvases, segments, custom attributes, and more. It’s read-only and you set up specific endpoints & permissions so your AI tools only see what you want them to. Why it matters: In a landscape where “data democratization” is rapidly becoming table stakes, this feature helps marketers and ops folks bypass infrastructure bottlenecks. No more waiting on SQL reports or engineering cycles. You can surface insights fast, iterate strategy quicker, and still stay safe (non-PII, read-only). For companies with cross-functional stakeholders or teams who need to pull insights on demand, this can speed up decision-making substantially. WhatsApp Flows + Product Question Handling [EARLY ACCESS] Braze has introduced WhatsApp Flows to enable more interactive and dynamic messaging on WhatsApp. On top of that, you can now accept inbound “product questions” from users in response to your product or catalog messages. Those questions carry extra contextual metadata (product ID, catalog ID), which you can use to build automated response paths or route them to support. Why it matters: Conversational commerce (especially on WhatsApp) is accelerating, and customers expect two-way interaction, not just outbound blasts. These updates let you build more engaging, responsive experiences like reply flows and product inquiries without having to build everything from scratch. For marketers, this means better engagement, better insight into user intent, and perhaps most importantly, a channel to reduce friction (if someone has a question, you can respond in-channel rather than losing them). Time Zone Consistency Standardization [EARLY ACCESS] Braze is now normalizing all timestamps with datetime types from trigger event properties in action-based Canvases to UTC. If you’re part of the Canvas Context early-access program, you’ll see these changes. Why it matters: Inconsistent time zones are a silent source of campaign misfires - wrong send times, confusing metrics, and unpredictable user experiences. By moving everything to UTC, Braze ensures consistent timing across events, making campaign behavior more predictable and reliable. This is especially valuable for brands running global campaigns or time-sensitive programs like flash sales or behavioral triggers. - Kevin Dowd Business Strategist & Dedicated Plant Parent FORGE 2025 See you in Vegas? 🏙️ If you’re attending Forge this year, stop by our booth and say hi or attend one of our speaking sessions: Best of the REST: Level Up with APIs in Braze Tuesday 1:00 p.m. and Wednesday 1:00 p.m. Ryan Wilkins, Stitch Solution Lead, teams up with Braze Learning's Alex Magidow to unlock API power for marketers. The session covers Webhooks, Connected Content, and external system integration. Live examples include weather-triggered messaging and automated project management workflows. This is perfect for technical marketers ready to expand their toolkit beyond basic platform features. How to Transform Your Campaigns through AI with Taco Bell & Whataburger Wednesday 11:30 a.m. Taco Bell and Whataburger join us for a live demonstration of AI-powered campaign deployment. This session features an end-to-end automation journey with a real-time demo. Speakers Bobby Tichy (Stitch), Troy Vo (Taco Bell), and Keith McClellan (Whataburger) reveal how AI agents eliminate bottlenecks and free teams up for strategic work. This is an ideal starting point for brands exploring AI implementation. Let's chat. Want to meet 1:1? Book time with us here. HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 Here are some things to add to your toolkit: Test yourself. A loyalty program is a key component of a lifecycle marketing strategy. Take our 10-question quiz to benchmark your approach and see what it takes to get to the next level. Watch and learn. Our Braze how-to series, Thread the Needle, covers some great strategies that can be used to enhance your lifecycle marketing. Been thinking about implementing personalized product recommendations to drive retention, or planning a year-in-review campaign to wrap up the year? We’ve got you covered. 📚 What we're reading/watching Marketing Is Broken: Why You’re So Busy and Still Not Getting Anything Done - Dave Gerhardt, Exit Five Why every company needs Lifecycle Marketing (and how to do it right) - Dillon Nuanes, for 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