Are you ever intimidated when faced with a blank canvas in Braze? Whether you're a newbie or returning after a break, we've got you covered with some quick refresher strategies for creating segmentations. These techniques are essential for any effective marketing analyst, so let's get started.
When it comes to building segmentations, there are two approaches at your disposal: inclusive thinking and exclusive thinking. By mastering both, you can achieve impactful results that drive your marketing efforts to success. So, let's explore each mindset and learn how to leverage them effectively.
The primary goal of segmentation is to refine your audience into more meaningful groups. Utilizing exclusions enables you to remove individuals from your targeted marketing audience. For instance, this could involve eliminating customers who have opted to be on a 'Do Not Contact' list.
On the other hand, inclusions play an equally significant role in segmentation. Here, you aim to curate a group of marketing contacts to add to your targeted audience. For example, you might focus on identifying new customers to include them in your onboarding journey.
To help cement the two styles of segmentation development, here are some examples:
Excluding the Irrelevant
Braze allows you to refine your campaigns by excluding specific users from receiving certain messages, ensuring your communications are highly relevant. Consider a business that aims to optimize their first-purchase promo offer by excluding customers who have already purchased more than one item with them.
Define your exclusion criteria: Identify attributes or behaviors that don't align with your first-purchase promo offer. In this case, you're excluding customers who’ve already made a purchase.
Create an exclusion segment: On the Braze dashboard, navigate to the Audience tab on the sidebar, and select "Segments." A quick click on "Create Segment" on the right, and you're all set!
Within the segment, customize the filters based on attributes, events, or custom events related to your target audience. For this example, you’ll exclude users who have made a purchase as indicated by a Y/N flag in the database.
Apply the segment to your campaign: When setting up your first purchase promo campaign, you can now code in a way to exclude all those who have previously purchased from you.
Targeting the Relevant
Precisely target users who meet specific criteria, ensuring personalized and engaging experiences. Imagine you were running a sports website as an example, and you want to send a basketball themed campaign.
Determine your inclusion criteria: Identify attributes or behaviors distinguishing basketball enthusiasts, like interacting with basketball content, making basketball purchases, or self-identified an interest in the subject on your communication preference page.
Create an inclusion segment: Rather than going through “audiences” you can now streamline your path to building segmentations with Braze's new dashboard feature. Navigate to the sidebar, and you’ll see a section called “Quick Links.” It provides easy link access to not only segments, but canvas and campaigns too. In this case, you want to click on segments and then create segment.
Set up filters based on relevant attributes or events, such as "Viewed Basketball Category ”or “Sports Interest = Basketball,” to hone in on your target audience.
Apply the segment to your campaign: Use the inclusion segment as the target audience, ensuring the campaign reaches basketball enthusiasts exclusively. This enhances relevance and engagement for the intended audience.
Why Does it Matter?
Now that you’re re-armed with the knowledge of how to build segments from the positive (inclusions) or negative (exclusions) within Braze, you may be thinking: why does this matter to your marketing campaigns?
Relevance and Personalization: When you target specific groups of users with relevant content, you increase the chances of engaging them and driving desired actions. By excluding users who aren't likely to be interested in a particular message, you can avoid spamming them with irrelevant content, which could lead to user dissatisfaction and disengagement.
Customer Retention and Loyalty: By sending relevant and timely messages to your existing customers, you can foster customer loyalty and retention. Exclusion segments can help you avoid bombarding loyal customers with repetitive offers and instead focus on providing them with exclusive rewards or promotions.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Optimize marketing efforts by reaching the right audience, reducing wasteful spending, and maximizing campaign impact.
Improved User Experience: Deliver personalized content that resonates with users, leading to higher satisfaction and increased brand loyalty.
Higher Conversion Rates: Targeted messaging prompts users to take desired actions, such as purchases or sign-ups, increasing conversion rates.
Insights and A/B Testing: Segmentation allows you to analyze the performance of different campaigns, messages, or offers through A/B testing. By comparing the results from other segments, you can gain valuable insights into what resonates best with specific user groups and refine your marketing strategy accordingly.
Bonus Tip: Consider combining exclusion and inclusion segmentation for advanced targeting to create highly refined segments that reach your desired audience.
By embracing these strategies and tips, you're well on your way to mastering Braze's segmentation logic. To dive deeper into segmentation creation in Braze, check out our article Does Time Really Matter? where we explore how using the time attribute filter can impact your logic.