Boost conversion rates with cross-channel messaging campaigns

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Cross-channel messaging strategy has become an increasingly large part of modern customer communication. When a marketer employs a cross-channel strategy, they’re using email, push notifications, in-app messages, and whatever other traditional and contemporary methods they can, in a smart combination, to reach users wherever they are (without overdoing it).

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to use Twilio Engage and Braze cross-channel campaigns to target the users most likely to purchase a particular product. You’ll leverage Braze’s Content Cards to educate users on specific products or new campaigns. Plus, send push notifications to boost conversion rates. 

Step 1: Set up Data Tracking on Your App

The first step is to sign-up or login to the Segment App. Next, create a Source for your Mobile App. A Source is where events such as Application Opened and Feature Used are collected and sent to Segment. Since we’d be sending mobile push notifications, we recommend you begin with an iOS or Android Source. After you set up your Source, you’ll begin to implement Events, which are essentially actions such as screen views or button clicks performed by users on your App. You can implement events by bundling Segment’s Android or iOS SDK with your App. (Check out these docs to learn more about setting up your source.) 

We recommend you track the below events to understand what actions users are performing on your site. 

E-Commerce Events:

In addition to the track events, we also require you to send an identify  call each time a user registers, logs in, or updates their info. 

Step 2: Connect Braze Destination with Twilio Engage

In this recipe, we will be using Engage to create an audience of inactive users and then send that information to Braze, a customer engagement platform that lets you send emails, SMS, and push notifications to your users.

The next step is to enable the Braze Destination inside Segment. Go to the Connections page and navigate to the Destinations section.

Click “Add Destination” and then search for “Braze” within the Destinations Catalog and enter the API key details to enable the destination. (Please see these detailed instructions if you need additional guidance.)

Step 3: Create a New Computed Trait and Send it to Braze

Once you’ve successfully enabled the Braze Destination, the next step is to create a Computed Trait. This will be logged as a Custom Attribute on each user’s profile within Braze, and will later be used to target these users with personalized campaigns. 

To do that, start by navigating to the Computed Traits page, click the “New Computed Trait” button to calculate this value and then send that information to Braze and other marketing tools. In this Recipe, we are calculating a user’s most frequently viewed product category. You can construct your audience query and preview the results. Click on any user to get a 360-degree view of their profile.

Sync this Computed Trait to your Braze Destination and choose a connection setting of send identify  to send this Trait to Braze as an Attribute.

Finally, give your Computed Trait a name and description that allows you to identify users with this Trait inside Braze. 

On each user’s profile in the Braze dashboard, this Attribute will be unique to that user’s specific most frequently viewed category.

Step 4: Create a Cross-Channel Campaign in Braze

In order to drive users to the app, we want to ensure that our messages have timely content about relevant products—and that some of these messages can persist once these users are inside the app. To make that happen, we'll use both a Push Notification as well as a Content Card.

The push notification acts as the ephemeral and timely content pointing users to open your app and take action. For those users who do not immediately open the app or convert the Content Card acts as a reminder to the user to take action, this reminder persists within your app providing additional opportunities for your users to view the content.

To do that, navigate to the Campaigns page within the Braze dashboard and create a new Multichannel Campaign.

Add your first messaging channel, a push notification, then select your preferred notification platform—iOS, Android or Web. This step can be repeated for all notification platforms you wish to use. 

Then compose your notification by choosing a title, message, and a push icon image. 

Once you are done composing your push notification, the next step is adding a Content Card as your second messaging channel. Content Cards typically sit in a feed of sorts (but not necessarily) and help you take advantage of the visual space by incorporating images and graphics that stand out. Check out this article to learn more about Content Cards.

Use the Card Type dropdown to choose the style of Content Card that best fits your needs.

Then compose your Content Card by adding a title, message and—if you so choose—imagery.

You can spotlight this Content Card within your app by pinning the card to the top of your feed. As with push notifications, you can define what action should be taken when a user clicks on the Content Card. (Check out Braze documentation to learn more about deep linking to your in-app content.)

Step 5: Test your messages

You can use the “Test” feature in the Braze dashboard composer to send a test to yourself and see how your messages will look.

Step 6: Target your Users

In this Recipe, we are targeting users who have purchased loungewear and whose most frequently viewed product category is “Cozy Essentials,” then serve them additional product content from that collection. This use case will define who and how we choose to send our campaign. Once the push notification and Content Card have been composed, the next step is to advance to the Delivery section of the campaign builder. 

Select an action-based delivery and trigger the Campaign off a purchase, in this case, we will trigger off of a specific purchase of any “loungewear”. Then add a scheduled delay to ensure that the push notification is not sent to the user immediately after purchase.

Braze gives you the capability to add exception events to your campaigns. After the period of time defined in the Schedule Delay, Braze will only send this campaign if the user has not logged any of the defined exception events. For our use case, we are adding the purchase of a “Cozy Essentials” product as the exception event. 

When tracking an “Order Completed” each product listed in the event will be sent to Braze as a purchase. The product_id associated with each product will be the name of the purchase inside Braze. For easier readability in creating Braze audiences and triggering messages off of purchase events, Braze recommends setting the product_id to be a category or the name of the product rather than an ID or SKU.

Optional: Using custom events rather than purchase events If it is preferable, custom events can be used in place of purchase events to denote a user has made a purchase. It should be noted that if custom events are used in place of purchase events analytics like a user’s Lifetime Revenue will not be available through Braze. To use a custom event rather than a purchase event as the trigger within this multi-channel campaign simply choose “Perform Custom Event” from the dropdown menu.

Choose the appropriate custom event. By clicking on “add property filters” you can use event properties, the metadata sent along with the event, to further specify the trigger action. 

Check “Removal Event” to use a purchase of a “Cozy Essentials” product as Content Card dismissal criteria. With this event-based card dismissal feature, the Content Card will be removed from the user’s feed if they take the specified action or when the set expiration date hits. This removal event can also be updated to use a custom event similar to the workaround shown above.

Advance to the “Target Users” tab to specify your audience. Using the Additional Filters dropdown, filter by Custom Attributes and select the most_frequently_viewed_categories  Custom Trait name we created in Engage. We’ll use the equals  operator to specify that we’re targeting a value of “Cozy Essentials.”

Braze allows you to track whether users perform specific actions (Conversion Events) within a conversion timeline after receiving a campaign. Up to four conversion events can be added to a campaign. In this recipe, we are going to choose “Start Session” as our first Conversion Event, since we want the initial step in our conversion funnel to be an app session. 

Our second Conversion Event will be “Makes a Purchase”. Within the Braze platform’s analytics view, this will allow us to see how many users opened the app as a result of our push notifications, then continued to the next step of our funnel and made a purchase of a “Cozy Essentials” collection product.

Step 7: Review and Deploy

Take a moment to review a summary of the campaign you’ve just designed, then click “Launch Campaign” to send. Confirm all the relevant details and watch the data roll in!

Results

Keep an eye on campaign analytics over time around each channel’s message performance, your conversion rates, and much more. Then think about how you can adjust the campaign to improve your results over the long haul

Additionally, you can see the breakdown of analytics on a channel by channel basis.

Wrapping up

Here’s what we’ve done in this recipe:

• Created a Mobile Source for your eCommerce App to track events
• Connected Braze destination with Segment Personas
• Created a new Computed Trait for the most frequently viewed product category in Engage and sent it to Braze
• Created a Cross-channel Campaign in Braze with Push Notification and Content Card as messaging channels
• Targeted users inside Braze who have purchased loungewear and whose most frequently viewed product category is “Cozy Essentials”
• Launched the campaign and measured the conversion rate, i.e., users who made a purchase