Braze Demo: Catalogs and Selections, New Kids On The Block (Part 1)
Braze Catalogs and Selections, launched in early 2022, are the new kids on the block. Not all teams have “met” them yet, but for those teams that did, they know how cool these new Braze features are. Let’s see what the hype is all about!
Catalogs
From the Braze Docs, “With catalogs, you can reference non-user data in your Braze campaigns through Liquid.”
Catalogs provide a similar benefit to setting up Connected Content endpoint where Marketers can freely access data that don’t live in the user profile.
Except with Catalogs, we need absolutely zero engineering resources; creating Catalogs is as simple as a CSV upload!
Whether your company offers a product or provides a service, you have something to offer in the form of a Catalog.
Selections
Once again, from the Braze Docs, “Selections are groups of [Catalog] data that can be used to personalize a message for each user in your campaign. After creating a catalog, you can further reference this data by incorporating selections in your Braze campaigns.”
Pretty much, you can further filter, sort, and limit your Catalog data, to create subgroups of your Catalog, AKA Selections.
We especially like Selections because they seem to offer a bit more flexibility than Catalogs; more on this later, and in future posts.
Creating a Braze Certifications Catalog
For our example today, we are going to create a Catalog of all the Braze Certifications that have ever existed, for your interest, knowledge, and historical documentation.
And what I’ve created to get us kickstarted is a Google Sheets file that includes all the Braze Certifications and some basic information about each of them.
By the way, keep an eye out for a future post that explains each certificate with more details!
But for now, let’s quickly go over the columns we have.
First, when uploading a CSV file to create a Catalog in Braze, the CSV file must have a column called id.
Spelled exactly this way, lowercase i, lowercase d, nothing else.
All the values under the id column must be unique, and the values can only contain letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.
And the id is pretty much the full name of the certification, just with underscores.
We have exam_duration_in_minutes, how long you have to take the exam, the level of the certification, the description, the created_date which are not accurate at all, I just created some approximate timestamps for each, and then the link to the image of the certifications.
By the way, the two certification that have weird numbers for exam_duration_in_minutes and level, those two aren’t technically exams, which is why they have weird values for these columns.
Anyway, my CSV file meets those criteria, so let’s go to File → Download → .csv.
Then, let’s go to Braze, Data Settings → Catalog → Create New Catalog → Upload CSV → drag my CSV from the Downloads folder into Braze → and click Next Step.
So on this page, for each of the columns from the CSV, we have to choose a datatype. The id is a String by default, the name should be a String, exam_duration_in_mins should be a Number, level is a Number, description is a String, created_date should be a Time, and image_link is a String.
By the way, if you’d like to learn more about Braze Datatypes, please let me know in the comments, but even if you don’t let me know, I will probably make a video about them anyway, so stay tuned!
Let’s click Next Step, and the Catalog Name also has the same requirement of only containing letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores, so let’s name this Catalog braze-certifications, no description, and click “Process Catalog”.
And… something looks wrong.
If we go back to the main Catalogs page, our Catalog has an Invalid tag, and it says “Something went wrong”.
Let’s click “View Error Details”, which says, “Some item ids have characters that aren’t allowed. Item IDs can only include letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.”
So I used to be a teacher, and teachers always do this thing where they intentionally throw in a wrong example to see who’s paying attention and who can catch the mistakes, so I purposely included a blank space in one of the id values which is what’s causing this error.
If you caught this error, awesome, if you didn’t, that’s not a problem at all, but I wanted to show us this example as I ran into this error several times when I was first learning to use Braze Catalogs.
So let’s go ahead and fix this mistake, and feel free to fast forward this part where I pretty much just redo the last few steps.
Awesome, I’ve re-uploaded the CSV, everything looks great, and we actually have a Catalog this time!
Updating Braze Catalogs
Now, how can I update this Catalog? Well, we have a few options here.
If we click “Update Catalog”, you see three options, Add fields, Delete fields, and Add item.
There’s actually a column I “forgot” to add, which is called publicly_available, a true or false value based on whether the certification is open to the public.
So I’ll go ahead and click Add fields, choose Boolean, which pretty much just means True or False, and we haven’t used this one yet, so now we have an example of all the datatypes.
And to add a value to the new field we just added called publicly_available, you click on each row’s eyeball, click Edit Item, and then manually update the item.
If you have too many rows, then another way to do this is to click Update Catalog → Upload CSV → and choose the Update Items option, go back to revise your CSV, then upload a new CSV with that contains values for the publicly_available column.
So I will go ahead and do this really quickly; so I’ll add a new column called publicly_available at the end, and by the way, the order of the columns matter, so if you’re following along, make sure you’re also adding them at the end.
By the way, Boolean values, True and False are both case-sensitive. Keep this in mind if you’re having trouble uploading this last column. If you’re using Google Sheets, this shouldn’t be a problem.
All right, so we finally have our Braze Catalog created. By the way, keep in mind that you have a size limit of 100MB for all Catalogs in your dashboard. Our Catalog is pretty small, so no worries here.
Creating Braze Catalog Selections
Let’s head over to the Selections tab and create some subgroups of our Catalogs.
Click Create Selection, and the first Selection I’ll create is actually the “all_items” Selection.
This is pretty much a “subgroup” that contains all the items in the Catalog, so it’s not actually a subgroup.
However, Catalogs only allow us to insert up to 3 items in our messages, so having this “all_items” Selection is a great workaround for the limitation. More on this later.
The easiest way to grab all items in the Catalog is to have absolutely no filters, so I’ll get rid of the default filter.
The one limitation here is that we can only grab up to 50 items, which should be plenty for most use cases, but if you have the need for more items, then you can possibly spread out your items over multiple Selections.
Please let me know in the comments if you’d like a video for that. That one, I may not make a video if there isn’t a specific request, as that seems more of an edge case.
Anyway, let’s go ahead and click Create Selection.
And let’s create another Selection, and this time, let’s only select the certifications that are publicly available.
So I’ll call this one publicly_available.
And then under Filter Settings, let’s click Select a field → publicly_available → Select an operator → is, the only option → and type in lowercase “true” for attribute.
For our Sort type, let’s actually not randomize, but sort by level, so untoggle the Randomize button, click Select a field → level, and leave as “ascending” so we can see the certifications from lowest to highest level.
Lastly, let’s increase the limit once again to 50, just to make sure we’re getting all the certifications that fit this criteria.
Click Create Selection, and I think we’re finally ready to see these Catalogs and Selections in action, which we will do in part 2 of this post!
Thank you!
Catalogs and Selections give us the ability to easily create and access non-user data in our messages, and we believe every team has tons of awesome use cases for Catalogs and Selections.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this post to see how to actually use Catalogs and Selections in Braze.
If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏
If you learned something from this tutorial, please subscribe for more awesome Braze tutorials in the future!
Thank you for reading, and see you next time!
allan@fornowmarketing.com
fornowmarketing.com
