Braze Step-By-Step Guide: Split Users Based On Canvas Entry Property
Use Case: You want to send new users down different onboarding paths based on their membership_tier which is a Canvas Entry Property. The membership_tier doesn’t flow in as a custom attribute, so you can’t use an Audience Path (at least, not yet). Read more to find out how!
Braze Canvas
Braze Canvases are perfect for Lifecycle Marketing Flows; you have the flexibility to “paint the Canvas” however you’d like with so many powerful customization capabilities.
However, one use case that’s unavailable out-of-the-box is the ability to split users based on their Canvas Entry Property.
Considerations
Let’s consider all the options before we get started.
1. Audience Path Step
The Audience Path Step is very useful for splitting based on Custom Attributes but doesn’t allow you to split users based on the specific Canvas Entry Property.
This route is actually possible if you have the Event Property Segmentation feature enabled, but this can only be done by the Braze team. Reach out to Braze for more details.
2. Action Path Step
This very useful step waits for the user to perform another action after entering the Canvas. However, that is not the user journey flow that we’re working with currently.
3. Making multiple Canvases for this single use case
The title says it all… NEXT.
Let’s look for a solution that does not require us to create, manage, and report on multiple Canvases.
4. Liquid
Liquid is probably our second-best solution here. However, with Liquid, we can only practically control the copy of our messages, and it would be very difficult to create completely different flows without coordinating many abort statements very carefully.
Another downside is that we lose analytics/reporting capabilities if we use Liquid within a single step to branch out users.
User Update Canvas Step
Enter the User Update Canvas Step. This semi-recent addition to Braze Canvases made it much, much easier to update user profiles within the Canvas journey, and in fact, this is going to be the key part of today’s step-by-step guide.
Thank you, Braze, for adding this feature, and shoutout to the OGs who have been updating user profiles using a Braze-to-Braze Webhook to the users/track endpoint (what a mouthful!) to get the accomplish the same use case. This option is still possible, and sometimes still necessary, if you’re looking for a technical challenge.
Let’s get into it!
Step 1: Choose the correct Custom Event as the Entry Trigger
For our use case, we will use CREATED_ACCOUNT to enter users into this Canvas.
Step 2: Make sure all users go through the User Update Step
Whether you have a single-variant or a multi-variant Canvas, all users need to go through the User Update Step.
We actually suggest using a single-variant Canvas for this use case and manually performing a multi-variant test, if you’d like. More on the manual multi-variant Canvas setup on a differnet blog post.
Step 3: Set Up User Update
Step 3a: Enter Custom Attribute
Although membership_tier is passed along as a Custom Event Property, we don’t have this data available as a custom attribute.
So we are going to do exactly that: log membership_tier as a custom attribute, so it becomes available under the Audience Path step.
For the custom attribute name, choose whichever name that makes sense. We chose “onboarding_canvas_path”.
Step 3b: Enter Key Value
Here, we’re telling the User Update step to populate the custom attribute onboarding_canvas_path with the value that’s coming from the Custom Event Property, membership_tier.
Personalization type: Canvas Entry Properties
Attribute: insert the name of the Entry Property (membership_tier, in our case)
NOTE: Please keep in mind that each time a user goes through the User Update step, this will consume 1 data point. Be sure to calculate the daily volume of users who will enter this Canvas to avoid exceeding your contractual allotment.
Step 4: Add a 5 Minute Delay for a Peace of Mind 🧘🏻
Just to make sure we give the data enough time to be logged and become available in the next step, we will add a 5 minute delay, which is more than ample time recommended by Braze.
If you ABSOLUTELY needed to decrease this delay time, we recommend no shorter than 5 seconds.
Step 5: Add Audience Paths Step
At this point, the value of the Canvas Entry Property membership_tier should be logged as a custom attribute, and therefore, will be available to use with Audience Paths.
Split your users accordingly, make a personalized, unique flow for each membership_tier, and keep rocking on with Braze!
Thank you!
That’s it! These are the quick and easy steps to split users based on the Canvas Entry Property.
Thank you for reading, and please feel free to reach out with any questions. We’re happy to help! 🙏
fornowmarketing.com
allan@fornowmarketing.com
