Lean Teams, Powerful Results: How Lifesum and KFC Trinidad and Tobago Drive Mighty Moments

The success of your marketing program isn't determined by team size. At Braze, we embrace the motto "start anywhere, go everywhere," believing that brands of all sizes can begin crafting compelling customer journeys and scale their efforts as they grow.

To learn how lean teams are delivering significant value for their businesses, Haley Trost, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Braze, chatted with Kristijan Arsov, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Lifesum, and Kern Ramlochan, Manager of Digital & eCommerce at KFC and Pizza Hut Trinidad and Tobago.

With no more than three full-time employees each, the customer engagement teams at Lifesum and KFC Trinidad and Tobago have tackled some ambitious goals over the past couple of years. Let’s dig into a few of their most successful campaigns and their advice for teams on the smaller end of the spectrum.

Lifesum Powers Smart, Gamified Engagement

For Lifesum, their customer engagement strategy revolves around helping users discover features in the app and use them to build healthier eating habits. The CRM team executes every phase of a campaign or strategy themselves, so they are pros at finding creative ways to use Braze. For example, their gamified onboarding flow gets new users up and running with Lifesum in a fun and engaging way.

The “Starter Kit for Success” campaign measures new users’ onboarding progress and nudges them to perform the next key action. Messages in the flow are personalized to each user so they can see what they’ve already accomplished and what’s left to explore.

Here’s how they do it: The team uses webhooks to create new custom attributes that capture the total number of times a custom event is triggered (for example: “checklist_3meals >= 3” tracks when users have logged at least three meals in the app). Then, they use Liquid personalization to tailor each user’s next onboarding message with those new custom attributes. The onboarding flow uses email, push notifications, and in-app messages to drive users to the app and continue engaging them inside the app.

Their lean team secret? They use simple if/else conditional logic to make personalization that looks super advanced. Additionally, creating their own data in Braze using webhooks and the User Update step in Canvas has saved their engineering team weeks of time, and the cross-channel onboarding campaign successfully drove users to take key actions and improved 30-day retention.

KFC Trinidad & Tobago Boosts Engagement and Conversions

As they transition to 100% digital, the KFC Trinidad and Tobago team is focusing more and more on understanding their customers and delivering a premium experience. While they have a yearly plan focused on key campaigns, they leave flexibility to adjust as they discover new opportunities—which is exactly what led them to the birthday campaign.

The birthday campaign was born when the team realized that only around 1% of users had shared their birthdates with KFC Trinidad and Tobago. To address this gap, the team planned a new campaign asking customers to update their profiles.

Here’s how they do it: In the first version of the campaign, users received messages asking them to update their profile info to qualify for a birthday reward. Users who did not update their profile then received a partner offer as an additional incentive. By the end of this campaign, 20% of customers had completed their profiles.

The second version of the campaign implemented key learnings from the first version: The partner offer was removed, a push notification reminder using Intelligent Timing was added, and unresponsive users were retargeted with Facebook ads via Braze Audience Sync. Now, more than 35% of customer profiles have been completed.

Key Takeaways for Lean Teams

Kern and Kristijan offered this advice for other lean customer engagement teams:

1. Grow the right skills on your team. “A technical resource is a really good place to start,” said Kern, while Kristijan emphasized that “a certain ‘love’ of being technical is a strong prerequisite” for smaller customer engagement teams.
2. Take advantage of educational resources. There’s a lot to learn about customer engagement and about Braze. As the winner of the 2023 “Community Member of the Year” Torchie award, Kristijan is a big advocate of the Braze Bonfire community. Other resources Kristijan and Kern find helpful are Braze Learning, customer events like Forge, documentation, and monthly product update webinars.
3. Prioritize user onboarding. During the session, we saw impactful onboarding campaigns from both Lifesum and KFC Trinidad and Tobago. Kern recommends that customer engagement teams “prioritize welcoming new users to your digital presence and sell them on the value you can provide.” A strong start to your relationship with a customer has long-term benefits.
4. Test, learn, and adapt. Lean teams often have the advantage of being able to move quickly on new ideas, so teams should continuously test and iterate on their campaigns. More specifically, Kristijan suggests testing new comms against existing comms to see the true impact, since testing against a control group receiving no comms will (almost) always win.
5. Have fun! Finally, the experts recommend having a little fun with your customer engagement campaigns and not taking CRM too seriously. Take risks, keep learning, and find new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Final Thoughts

Your customers don’t know or care how big or small your team is; they expect relevant, memorable experiences from brands of all shapes and sizes. With the right tools, strategy, and mindset, lean teams are turning their big ideas into major business value.

To learn more about How Small Organizations Drive Mighty Moments, be sure to check out Forge on demand.