Braze has gained significant traction as one of the most commonly used platforms in the customer engagement space.

Offering most of the features and functionality that CRM teams have come to expect, such as email and push notification campaigns, user segmentation, and basic campaign analytics, Braze is recognized for its utilitarian approach to customer engagement.

That said, many marketing teams have started to feel the limitations of these standard and formulaic approaches to segmentation and user journeys offered by Braze and many of their competitors, causing them to explore other tools for CRM marketing automation.

Timing and Resource Constraints

Like most other customer engagement platforms, Braze allows marketing and CRM teams to segment users, build user journeys, send ad-hoc messages, and run A/B tests.

While all of these tools and features are helpful, teams often find that they can quickly become very difficult to manage.

  • The more Segments you create, the more messaging and User Journeys you need to build.
  • More User Journeys mean more maintenance.
  • Ad-hoc messaging is very time-consuming.
  • A/B testing is clunky and cumbersome, with most teams only able to run a small handful of tests at a time.

While Braze has promised AI features to help reduce this workload, customers have reported that these have been inconsistent in their offerings and implementation.

Far from streamlining work, many companies have had to build entire teams to manage Braze.

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"Simple" user journeys are never simple.

‍Cumbersome Testing Process

Testing is a cornerstone of CRM and growth, but teams often report that the limitations and time-consuming nature of the Braze testing environment make it less feasible for teams to run more than a small number of tests simultaneously. 

This leads to slower iterations, less effective decision-making, and a constraint on campaign optimization.

With Braze, for each individual test, you must:

  • Create a campaign and select a channel
  • Compose your variants (currently limited to eight)
  • Schedule your campaign
  • Choose a segment and distribute your users across variants
  • Set up a control group
  • Designate a conversion event
  • Review and launch

(The above list is taken from Braze’s testing support docs.)

This severely limits each team’s capabilities to run tests, with most companies reporting they can only run one or two tests simultaneously.

Limited Capability for Personalization

With hours spent manually building campaigns, creating segments, and managing journeys, with limited testing capabilities, Braze users report that, despite the advertising, achieving true personalization with Braze is actually quite difficult.

That’s why companies who use Braze turn to Aampe

Is Braze designed to reduce your workload, or create it?

Aampe is an AI-native infrastructure that offers teams a workflow that alleviates the main pain points marketing and CRM teams experience with Braze.

Note: Many teams use Aampe on top of Braze to automate the most time-consuming and laborious tasks associated with Braze via a simple API connection. Alternatively, many teams have achieved a substantial reduction in cost while still experiencing an increase in performance by swapping Braze out for a combination of Aampe + Firebase.

AI-driven Segmentation

As opposed to manual segmentation, which requires you to identify key groups and continuously refresh key segments, Aampe runs a clustering algorithm to automatically discover thousands or even hundreds of thousands of unique and specific segments.

Instead of being based on general criteria, such as user activity level, the segments Aampe creates are based on patterns observed between the complex interactions each of your individual users has with each one of your app events, combined with their reactions to specific elements within your messaging.

Aampe also maintains a continuously adaptive synthetic control group, which allows teams to run tens or hundreds of thousands of continuous tests without interference.

Aampe continuously refreshes all of these clusters based on your users’ individual responses and changing behaviors.

User-Level User Journeys

Aside from being an unexpectedly laborious source of incredible complexity, one-size-fits-all user journeys just don’t make sense.

Aampe automatically navigates this incredible complexity at an individual user level, finally turning that dream of CRM being a one-to-one conversation into a reality.

Active users who are receptive to messaging continue to get messaging that supports and maintains their activity level:

While, for users who are at risk of churn, Aampe’s model switches back to explore mode, automatically reducing messaging volume and trying different offerings and motivations, and then optimizing messaging patterns that lead to each individual user’s sustained activity and conversions:

Omni-Channel Orchestration

Not only does Aampe’s model learn and understand which specific timing and messaging will encourage a user to take action, Aampe also navigates the complexity of omni-channel marketing by learning each user’s individual preferences and tolerances for each messaging channel (SMS, push notifications, web push, in-app messaging and even email) and then deploys a full omni-channel strategy on a per-user basis to keep them engaged.

Testing as a Function (not just an event)

Aampe’s model learns from every single interaction with a user, making every single message a multivariate test.

With each message send, Aampe monitors every user interaction as a matrix, not just looking at what they click, but also when they click and what they do after the click, and comparing this to details contained in the content within the message (e.g. do they view the content referenced in the message or something else entirely?).

After individual user data from these interactions is observed, the model’s scoring of that user is modified based on the observed behavior and the next test or optimization for that user is scheduled.

How do CRM Teams Work With Aampe?

If Aampe is building the segments and journeys and is running testing, what do I do?

Well to answer that, we first have to realize that the true value of marketing and CRM teams is not in their ability to determine how much time should elapse between messages in a user journey, but it’s rather in their ability to really understand each of our customers. 

What are their motivations? What are their wants and needs?

…and what are the various features within our app that uniquely motivate each user?

As Aampe actually allows you to achieve true, hyper personalization (meaning: unique messages tailored to the specific needs, desires, and motivations of each individual user), CRM teams at companies who use Aampe focus on growing a deeper understanding of their customers at an individual level and ensuring they have the appropriate content to support it.

It means…Actually, we’re not going to tell you what it means. We’re going to let some of our customers — who formerly used a customer engagement platform like Braze — tell you how they feel using Aampe:

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Should you use Braze without Aampe?

Many teams do, and they have the headcount and elaborate user journeys to prove it.

Alternatively, companies who use Aampe + Braze (or even Aampe + Firebase) note incredible results such as:

  • 11x increase in CRM team efficiency
  • 329% increase in conversions
  • 1,128% increase in app visits
  • 112% increase in engagement rate while sending 75% fewer SMS messages
  • 32% increase in new-user retention

Ready to see if adding Aampe to your MarTech stack would be a good strategy for your business?

Reach out to us at get@aampe.com and we’ll help you construct a free ROI assessment.

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