Braze Delivery & Entry Types: Scheduled [Part 2, Intelligent Timing]
Continuing our Delivery & Entry Types discussion. This series might have a few more parts!
Also, thank you Ray for sharing your wisdom and experience! We have a great lead on a potential answer to our question from yesterday’s video.
Check out the video for his answer, and of course, if you do have the exact same use case, please reach out to Braze to be 1000% sure.
Also, got a new watch in the thumbnail 🙌🏻
🗣️ WATCH FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE 🗣
[Braze-mas 2023, Day 13]
What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 13 of Braze-mas 2023!
Before we get started, if you have any questions, whether you are currently using Braze or considering using Braze, please feel free to reach out! You can find these addresses and more in the Youtube description below.
Monthly Recurring Campaign Question, Potential Answer
In today’s video, we are going to continue talking about the Delivery and Entry Types in Braze! We actually had a question for Braze at the end of our video yesterday, which was, what happens when we schedule a monthly recurring campaign to start on January 31st? Then what happens when it’s time to send at the end of February?
According to the Braze power user Ray, Braze will send this campaign at the end of the month. So if the monthly recurring message starts on January 31st, then it will send on the last day of February, the 31st of March, the last day of April which is the 30th, and so on.
Of course, if you do end up launching a monthly recurring campaign with this exact same use case, please reach out to Braze to be 1000% sure, but until then, thank you Ray!
And with that, let’s pick up where we left off!
Canvas: Enter users at a designated time
We finished yesterday’s video with an exploration of “Send at a designated time” from a Campaign Builder. Let’s jump over to a Canvas Builder and do a quick comparison.
So although there is a small UI change, your options are actually exactly the same. We have frequency, Start Time, Start Date, the local time zone check box, and then we also have the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly options with the exact same additional options.
And actually, it looks like on the Canvas Builder, they do specify the timezone for the Next Send Time, which it didn’t in the Campaign Builder, so that’s nice that it’s at least highlighted here.
Intelligent Timing
We are back on the Campaign Builder page, and moving on to the 3rd option for Scheduled Campaigns, which is Intelligent Timing, and Intelligent Timing is one of Braze’s Sage AI features, under their Intelligence Suite. According to their documentation, “Braze calculates the optimal send time based on a statistical analysis of your user’s past interactions with your app, and their interactions with each messaging channel.”
And even with Intelligent Timing, we have very similar options as “Send at a designated time”. We still have the Send frequency of Once, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly, as well as the Start Date.
There are a few new options here: we have “Only send messages within specific hours”, where we can set a window for the Intelligent Timing delivery time. This is done in the user’s local time, and if Braze’s optimal time falls outside this window, then users will receive the message at the edge of the window closest to optimal time. So if the user’s optimal message falls outside of our window, then it will send at either 8am or 12am, whichever one is closer to the optimal time.
We also have some options for when the profile does not have enough data to calculate an optimal time: most popular time to use amongst all users, or a specific custom fallback time, which we would set ourselves, in local timezone.
Preview of Delivery Times
When we select the Intelligent Timing option, there’s this new section that pops up where we can preview the delivery times determined by Braze’s AI Intelligent Timing feature.
If we click “Target User”, it sends us to the Target Audience page and requires us to add at least one segment or filter, so we’ll choose All Users for now, scroll down and click “Refresh Data”, and my dashboard is a bit limited with user data, but here’s an example of what this preview looks like. So there’s some data here around Engagement Data and Most Popular App Time, super cool.
Canvas Intelligent Timing
One thing to note is that Canvas does not offer Intelligent Timing at the Entry level. However, you can actually still use Intelligent Timing, which can be found under the Build Canvas page, and at the Canvas Step level, under “Delivery Settings”, here’s where you can set the Intelligent Timing for each Canvas step. It doesn’t look like we have the option to set a window, but we do have these two other options.
But once again, you will not see the Intelligent Timing option under Entry Schedule in the Canvas Builder.
Thank you!
That’s it for Day 13. We will finish covering the last remaining bits of the Delivery and Entry Types in our next video.
If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏
If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!
Thank you for watching, and see you next time!
allan@fornowmarketing.com
fornowmarketing.com
