Braze Profile Attributes AKA Default Attributes

Pop Quiz: What’s the correct data field for email address in Braze? A. email_address B. Email C. email D. Email Address E. All of the above

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[Braze-mas 2023, Day 3]

What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 3 of Braze-mas 2023!

So yesterday, on Day 2, we talked about the 3 types of User Data that we see on the User Profile, which were Profile Data, SDK Data, and Custom Data, and Custom Data actually had 3 types also, which are Custom Attributes, Custom Events, and Purchase Events.

Today, we’re gonna talk a little bit more in-depth about Profile Data.

Profile Data can also be called Profile Attributes, because like Custom Attributes, Profile Attributes are adjectives that describe a user. The biggest difference between Profile and Custom Attributes is that Profile Attributes are universal and will most likely be collected by majority of the brands vs Custom Attributes which will be very customized and specific to each brand.

We also mentioned yesterday that Profile Attributes can sometimes be called Default Attributes. That is because Braze has a list of reserved data fields that can only be used for these Profile Attributes or Default Attributes.

So, let’s take a look at this list of Profile Attributes with the reserved data fields.

We can find this list here on the User Import Braze documentation which will be linked in the Youtube description below.

We won’t talk about all of these, but let’s go over some of the important ones.

external_id is the primary and unique identifier for your consumers. It’s also called User ID in many cases.

For my user profile, it’s the “1234-abcd-5678-efgh” ID right here.

user_alias_name and user_alias_label always come in a pair, and it’s another way to identify your users, mostly reserved for your prospective users.

We will have a video on the different types of identifiers in the future which will be super helpful, so please keep an eye out for that one.

first_name, last_name, email, country, dob, gender, home_city, language, and phone, these are all pretty self-explanatory data, but there’s a few things to note here in the description.

For example, country data always need to follow the ISO-3166–1 alpha-2 standard, which I believe is just a fancy of saying the two letter code for each country.

You can check out more here on this wikipedia page.

dob, as well as all other date types in Braze, needs to follow the ISO-8601 format, which is the familiar YYYY-MM-DD format.

And phone numbers need to follow the E.164 format, which for US phone numbers is +1(areacode) and the rest.

Let’s scroll down a bit to email_subscribe and push_subscribe. So these are the users’ email and push subscription statuses, respectively, and these fields can be one of three values: opted_in, unsubscribed, or subscribed. And subscribed is usually the default state for most Braze dashboards.

So these are some of the Profile Attributes or Default Attributes which have specific data fields reserved for them, meaning, these fields right here can never be registered as anything besides a Profile Attribute.

Another important note is that these field names are case-sensitive.

So lowercased “first underscore name” is a Default Attribute; however, capitalized “First underscore name” is not, and if you try importing this data field, that will get registered as a Custom Attribute.

Same thing with email. The reserved Default Attribute spelling is exactly email, all lowercase. Any variation of that would be registered as a Custom Attribute, and the only way to target the user via email is if the email address is logged under the correct, email field under the Profile Attribute.

Here are some examples of Default Attributes that have been logged incorrectly as Custom Attributes. So you can see that these tiny spelling mistakes will result in a pretty big error when it comes to data ingestion in Braze.

And one last note before we wrap it up today, you may have noticed these terms, String and Boolean. These are called Datatypes, not to be confused with the differnet types of data that we’ve been talking about. Every data needs to be have a specific datatype, and we will talk more about these in a future video.

Thank you!

To summarize today’s video, we talked about the different types of Profile or Default Attributes which are list of attributes with reserved data fields.

That’s it for Day 3.

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