Braze User Profile Creation & Types of User Data [Braze-mas 2023, Day 2]

Do you know the 3 types of data you see on the User Profile?

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What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 2 of Braze-mas 2023!

We posted our first video of Braze-mas 2023, yesterday on December 1st, and today we are excited to talk to you about our topic for Day 2: User Profile Creation and Types of User Data.

Before we jump into today’s topic, a reminder to you all that your feedback will be super helpful throughout this experience, so please keep an eye out for a paid feedback opportunity.

And please excuse my voice as I’m recovering from a sickness.

All right, so let’s get into today’s topic, which is User Profile Creation and Types of User Data.

User Profile Creation

For most brands, before they can start reaching out to their consumers, the consumer needs to create an account with the brand’s website or mobile app. Through the sign up process, the User Profile in Braze gets created, and the consumer can provide consent to be contacted through the various Braze channels.

For our videos, we will use Nike as our go-to example. To clarify, this is a completely hypothetical situation, and we do not know if Nike is a Braze customer. But I personally like Nike, and so we will work with hypothetical Nike data in the For Now Marketing Braze dashboard.

So let’s say I’m a new Nike consumer. I’m gonna head over to the Nike website and click “Join Us”. I want to start purchasing more Nike items, receive coupons and new releases, and just overall be more in-the-loop with Nike.

All right, so the very first information that Nike asks for is email, which is very common practice.

Okay, so it’s asking for a code, very secure in today’s world.

Besides the code, let’s notice some of the other information that Nike asks us as we are creating our account.

First and last name are absolutely necessary, the most basic, personal information you can have about your consumers.

A password, a part of the sign up process.

Shopping Preference: this is cool, Nike is already trying to get to know us a little beter.

Birthday for a Member Reward.

And the first checkbox looks like our email subscription, which I will leave checked.

And the second checkbox is required.

Click Create Account, and there we have it, our own Nike account.

Now, once again, this is a hypothetical situation, but if I were the Braze Expert on Nike’s team, I would expect some sort of a User Profile, that looks like this:

This is what the Braze User Profile looks like, this is my user profile which just got created from the “Nike” website, and we are on the Overview tab.

You can see my first and last name, the email address I entered, and my birthday.

And notice that the shopping_preference got logged as what’s called a Custom Attribute, and you can also see another piece of data called account_created under Custom Events.

So among these 6 boxes, there are 3 types of data.

Types of User Data

1. Profile Data

The first type is called Profile Data. Now, Profile Data may not be the official name for this type of data, and they may also be called Standard Data or Default Data, more on why it’s called default data in a future video.

But, we like to call them Profile Data, and it also says the word Profile here, so we’ll go with that.

Profile Data is pretty much the basic information that most brands gather about their consumers.

By the way, this isn’t the full list of Profile Data in this box, as first name, last name, email, and phone number, and several more are also considered Profile Data.

And Most Recent Device Locale which somehow squeezed itself into this box, but I would say that this data actually falls under a different category, which takes us to our next type:

2. SDK Data

SDK stands for Software Development Kit, and if you’re not familiar with the concept of SDK, that is totally okay for today’s video. Think of it like this:

When Nike, or any other brands decide to use Braze as their Customer Engagement Platform, they integrate the Braze SDK, or the Braze Kit into their website. Then, the Braze SDK can start logging some Braze-specific information about their consumers, such as Sessions Overview or the Recent Devices data. The Most Recent Device Locale would also be tracked by the Braze SDK.

So if this were actually Nike’s Braze dashboard, and I just made an account on the Nike website, we would most likely see that I had at least 1 session on their website under Sessions Overview, and my Macbook Pro device would be logged under Recent Devices.

3. Custom Data

Lastly, and the most important type of Braze Data, is Custom Data.

It is so important that it actually has 3 different types of Custom Data.

3.1 The first Custom Data we have are Custom Attributes, which are pretty much adjectives that describe our consumers. So right now, we only have my shopping_preference, but as I spend more time on Nike’s website, Nike will eventually learn what my favorite sport is, my shoe size, and a ton of other information which can later be used to segment their audience and send personalized messages.

3.2 Next, we have Custom Events. If Custom Attributes are adjectives, then Custom Events are verbs. It’s what the consumers do. Any action that the consumers have taken on the Nike’s website or mobile app can be tracked as a Braze Custom Event.

Right now, all I’ve done is create an account and that’s the only data we see, but as I navigate the website longer, Nike can track more and more Custom Events to understand their consumers’ behavior on their website.

3.3 Lastly, we have Purchase Events. Purchase Events are similar to Custom Events as Purchase Events are also actions taken by the consumer. Ultimately, all brands want their consumers to make a purchase, and so Braze has a type of Custom Data dedicated entirely to purchases.

So if I were to purchase something on Nike’s website, we would see the name of the product as well as the price I paid under this box.

Thank you!

To summarize today’s video, here on the Overview Tab of my User Profile, we see three types of data:

Profile Data, SDK Data, and Custom Data.

And for Custom Data, we have 3 more types, which are:

Custom Attributes, like adjectives

Custom Events, like verbs

and Purchase Events, simply for purchases.

That’s it for Day 2.

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