Marketers can sometimes run into difficulties making customer data usable in Braze. Braze is an extremely powerful engagement platform but it also requires that data be in a certain format to be used for audiences and dynamic emails.
As a result, marketers have to spend time, money, and energy cleaning, editing, and deduplicating data. For example, this user on the Braze Bonfire community forum was trying to format their currency codes and capitalize the first letter of each word:
Common data transformation tasks include cleaning, deduplicating, validating accuracy, changing data types, inputting missing values, and merging data. These tasks may be simple individually, but each one takes time away from other essential tasks such as designing marketing experiments and measuring success.
In short, raw data often requires manual effort to be usable in Braze. Census helps Braze users clean, enrich, and transform their data so they can immediately start using it for customer engagement.
Key Takeaways
- Due to data transformation struggles, Braze users may face delays in launching campaigns and personalizing messages.
- Marketers must allocate valuable resources to performing data tasks themselves, or wait for technical teams to fulfill their requests — taking time and energy away from marketing.
- Census serves as a bridge between raw data and Braze by providing tools to clean, enrich, and transform data.
Understanding Why Data Transformation is Essential for Braze
Integrating customer data across multiple business platforms often causes challenges. Data is collected and stored by a variety of tools — such as a behavioral tracking platform, cloud data warehouse, CRM, or CDP — and these complex data flows mean that data is sometimes lost, incomplete, or in the wrong format by the time it gets into Braze.
Without clean and accurate data, you miss out on opportunities to reach your customers with targeted campaigns, or even worse, send the wrong messages to the wrong customers.
Imagine this scenario caused by bad data: A single user might have multiple user IDs or session IDs. They should have been identified and merged into the same profile, but if not, the customer might be annoyed by two or more of the same email.
That’s why data transformation is critical to pinpoint customer needs, launch targeted real-time campaigns, and create consistent omnichannel experiences.
What Braze Users Say About Common Data Transformation Challenges
With bad data and partial information, businesses are essentially flying blind, resulting in inefficient marketing or even negative brand experiences.
Here are some of the primary challenges with data transformation:
Data Mapping and Ingestion
Data mapping is the process of connecting and matching data fields from a source to corresponding fields in Braze, ensuring consistency and accuracy when integrating data from multiple places.
While Braze offers multiple different options for data ingestion, oftentimes raw source data needs additional cleaning or transformation to become usable for marketing campaigns.
As one G2 reviewer says, Braze “lacks some advanced customization functionality on the ingestion and classification layer like transformation/mapping of data from raw data source.”
A Braze consultant notes, “It takes time and planning to align data types and structures to Braze’s capabilities and consider the custom data that’s possible to integrate into Braze (and which data works best for each type i.e. custom attributes, custom events, purchase events, product information, etc.)”
This means that data or operations teams need additional time and effort to process data before marketers can use it in Braze.
Complex Liquid Syntax Requirements
Liquid syntax is a templating language that uses tags, filters, and conditional statements to display content in the right place at the right time.
Braze supports Liquid in its email template editor to display contextual content and dynamic fields. However, not all users are proficient enough in Liquid to manipulate data, and Braze’s Liquid editor does not scale to large-volume data transformation.
As one Braze forum poster explains: “I want to display the date format of a custom property in an email in a different way. In the property, we save the date in this format: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss. I'd like to display the property in the email in this format: DD.MM.YYYY.”
Another Braze forum poster says, “I want the value of this object to be a date, but I don't want to use liquid to convert this string into a date to play with it.”
Additionally, this Braze customer has a more complex use case: “Is it possible to create a Liquid syntax that will spit out a result which is the percentile difference between 2 values? Let's say there's an attribute called 'last_week_total_meals' with value 5 and another one 'this_week_total_meals' with a value of 3, what liquid can I code to show that there's a -40% difference between both values?”
This is the suggested solution in Liquid, which would be pretty complex to use every time you need it.
These data transformation challenges may seem simple at first glance, but if you multiply small changes by hundreds of customers or thousands of behavioral events, data quality issues will quickly spiral out of control.
How Census Simplifies Data Transformation
Fortunately, you can solve these data transformation problems by using Census to sync data into Braze.
Census is a data integration platform purpose-built to help marketers create cleaner, richer, and faster data. You can easily transform, segment, and move your data with a no-code, user-friendly interface.
Another advantage is that Census transforms data in the source, so you only have to clean your data once to use it in Braze and every other business tool. You can power other marketing tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Attentive with the same trusted data models used in Braze.
Here are just a few ways Census provides data transformation solutions for Braze customers:
Unify and Define Data
- Entity Resolution: You can ensure accurate customer profiles by identifying, merging, and cleaning duplicate data duplicates across sources, providing a unified view for better targeting. For example, you won’t have to worry about multiple emails being sent to duplicate users.
- Data Warehouse Support: Census is natively integrated with data warehouses and data lakes such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, and Azure Synapse, so you have access to the most complete source of first-party customer data at your organization. Marketing teams can leverage their warehouse via Census and data teams can provide secure and governed access.
Enrich and Enhance Data
- Computed Columns: Without code, you can quickly manipulate data by applying equations, percentages, sums, rollups, and text transformations.
- GPT Columns: You can use LLMs and natural language to enrich and enhance your data. This means you don’t have to worry about using Liquid. Marketers use GPT Columns for multiple use cases like account fit scoring, churn prevention, upsell scoring, and sentiment analysis.
Activate and Use Data
- Audience Hub: Braze Segments are extremely powerful, but Census enables you to build segments on the data warehouse upstream of Braze. This makes omni-channel marketing easier, as audiences can be quickly reused in other tools and channels alongside Braze. Audience Hub allows you to precisely segment customers with minimal effort and send those audiences to any marketing platform.
- Reverse ETL: Data is only useful if it’s in the right place at the right time, and Census helps you move data across every business application without worrying about APIs and custom pipelines. Census supports real-time syncing, every data type and format, and seamless integration with Braze and 200+ business tools.
Get Started with Census to Ensure Seamless Data Transformation for Braze
Census is a universal data platform designed to save you time, money, and energy on all data tasks. It offers marketing teams the opportunity to execute on big ideas and use the apps you love while minimizing data transformation issues that get in your way.
Census takes the complexity away from:
- Enriching customer profiles
- Cleaning and deduping messy data
- Orchestrating data across tools and APIs
You can integrate Census right into any application you’re using, whether it’s Braze or your data infrastructure. We bridge the gap between data and marketing teams so your campaigns and experiments are seamless, efficient, and effective.
Start a free 14-day trial or schedule an onboarding call to see how we can help transform your data today.