Enhance Cross-Channel Consumer Experiences, The Canva Way

When 9 out of 10 consumers want a seamless cross-channel experience, understanding their interactions with your brand isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s imperative. A sophisticated engagement platform within a built-for-purpose marketing technology stack can provide in-the-moment insight into the lifecycle of your consumers. By following the user journey, your organization can create engaging, personalized campaigns.

Canva, a Braze customer since 2017, uses the Braze platform every day to deliver marketing messages that reach users at specific touch points. Emily Stewart, Global Head of CRM and Messaging at Canva, sat down with us to discuss how the online drag-and-drop design platform utilizes Braze to support better customer experiences and stronger marketing results.

The Right Customer Engagement Tools Drive Consistent User Experiences

Siloed marketing campaigns create disjointed user experiences. With campaigns utilizing three or more channels earning a 250% higher engagement rate than single-channel campaigns, a powerful customer journey management tool should be a part of every marketer’s tech stack. For Stewart and her team at Canva, Braze is their one-stop shop for tracking the user journey.

“We use Braze for all of our marketing messages, for in-app, push, and email,” Stewart says. Canva has two main types of campaigns: Newsletter emails and trigger notifications. Canva’s weekly newsletter emails keep their users steadily engaged while their trigger notifications (which include other messaging channels) target users with “real-time, personalized messaging,” Stewart explains. These as-they-happen notifications include messages related to onboarding, usage of specific product features, and moments for possible upsell.

Brands employing cross-channel campaigns see great results in their marketing campaigns, including retaining 89% of their customers. For Canva, cross-channel marketing strategies powered by Braze have resulted in a 20% increase in trials of their premium plan, a 15% increase in monthly active weekly newsletter users, and a 99.2% deliverability rate across emails.

A Look Into Canvas, Braze’s Lifecycle Engagement Feature

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When asked about her favorite feature of the Braze platform, Stewart highlighted Braze Canvas, our customer journey builder tool. With Canvas, the days of manually piecing together a user’s touch points are over; marketers can create personalized, automated campaigns anywhere within a given user’s journey. “It allows us to send our messaging on a user’s most engaged platform,” Stewart explains, adding that it enables her team to “develop quite complex flows so that we’re sending the right messages at the right time.”

While Canvas is built to provide a great degree of nuance when it comes to building out messaging flows, that specificity didn’t slow down Stewart and her team. In fact, it made their current approach possible: “We started to get more and more sophisticated with our canvases and we now have different steps within canvases that are using webhooks that talk to each other so we can stop repetitive messaging happening,” Stewart notes as she describes the sense of satisfaction that comes with building these complex campaigns “without any engineering work.”

Final Thoughts

Today’s consumers expected relevant, cohesive brand experiences, no matter where, when, or how they choose to engage. To make that happen, brands need the right technologies at their disposal. By understanding how customers engage across channels and then using that understanding to personalize not only what content is sent to consumers, but also when and why you’re sending them content, you can provide exceptional brand experiences and better marketing outcomes.

Looking to dig deeper? Discover the possible uptick in consumer engagement your brand can experience by gaining detailed access to your consumers’ journey.