It’s human nature to stick with the familiar. It’s the reason you always buy the same toothpaste, listen to the same playlist in the car, and the restaurant down the street knows your standing order. In Braze’s world of marketing automation this autopilot mentality could be expressed in the desire to use Campaigns for all single messages and only Canvases for multi-step journeys. But what if using Canvases for single-message campaigns could unlock a wealth of opportunities? It's time to challenge the status quo and explore how this approach can elevate your marketing strategy.
Right off the bat, let's start by addressing a common concern. Will you lose functionality by choosing a Canvas over a Campaign? The short answer - no. Canvases offer all the features from Campaigns you love - multi-channel capabilities, A/B testing, flexible delivery options, precise audience targeting, and the same intuitive content building experience. You're not sacrificing anything. In fact, it’s just the opposite, you're gaining potential!
Why Use a Canvas?
The primary advantage of using Canvas Flow for single message communications is its flexibility and future-proofing. A Canvas allows you to build and evolve your marketing over time without starting over. While expanding a single message into a multi-step journey is an obvious benefit, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Canvases offer a toolbox of capabilities that can enhance your messaging strategy:
Next-Level A/B Testing with Canvases: Unlike Campaigns that need to be stopped to make testing adjustments (canceling the initial test), Canvases offer multiple ways to enhance testing:
Create new variants and adjust audience distribution on the fly.
Use Experiment Paths to define audience distribution and automate "winning path" selection.
Leverage Personalized Paths, an Experiment Path feature (currently in BETA), to select the best-performing path based on individual user characteristics and behaviors.
Dynamic User Profile Updates: The User Update component in Canvas allows you to modify a user's profile after sending a message. For example:
Follow up A/B testing by setting an attribute indicating which variant the user received.
Track engagement by updating a “last_engaged” attribute with the current date or track how many campaigns a user has been sent by using the “increment by” action that can increase ana numeric attribute value, for instance “campaign_interactions”.
Enhance offer management by updating an “offer_sent” attribute with offer details which can be used to prevent sending duplicate offers. You can also update an array attribute to track each offer sent to a user.
Log a custom event to the user profile when they’ve engaged with a high-value CTA in a sent message, for example, a “completed_survey” event when a user clicks on a feedback link.
When to Stick with Campaigns
While Canvases offer numerous advantages, there are scenarios where traditional campaigns might be preferable:
High-Volume Bulk Sends: For sending millions of messages simultaneously, campaigns might offer a speed advantage due to their optimized sending engine behind the curtain.
User Adoption: When people transition onto Braze they may be coming from less sophisticated tools. Therefore, having a wizard-like guided experience may feel more relatable and less risky (remember, people don’t like change) to start their Braze tenure.
Using Canvases for single-message campaigns isn't just about breaking convention, it’s about opening a world of possibilities! We encourage you to experiment with Canvas for your next single-message campaign. You might discover innovative ways to engage your audience that you hadn't considered before.
If you liked learning about when to use a Campaign versus a Canvas, then you might also like this article calling out four more Braze features you shouldn’t sleep on.