SCHMACK CHAT | Braze, Liquid Logic & Multi-Market Personalisation - Transcript

SCHMACK Chat is an interactive, community-driven open office session designed to create open discussions, offer insights, and provide guidance within our community. This relaxed and open space encourages participants to ask questions freely, engage in informative conversations, and share experiences.

Transcript

Introduction

Pia Ehnebom: Today is the first SCHMACK Chat ever. You will be able to ask questions either in the Q&A box or directly in the form and the form is linked in the chat. Feel free to ask questions there. Today we're going to speak on braze and the use of liquid for marketeers and how to use it for multi-language and multi-markets. So, ?do you guys want to introduce yourself?

Marta Orsini: Hi, I'm Marta and I joined the agency very recently - a week ago - as a senior CRM consultant.?

Harry Fremantle: I've been here a couple of months now on the technical side. So really getting into the problem solving a bit more - looking at the data and the integration parts, especially focusing on Braze.

A bit more about the topic

Harry Fremantle: We'll just try and really understand how to leverage Liquid Logic and use multi-language or multi-markets as points of personalisation. Really trying to understand the best practices, what can go wrong, what you should do, what you shouldn't do and some tips and tricks. Ultimately, how to really get the most out of it; saving yourself time and making it easy to report on all that kind of stuff.

How can you avoid having to write the same liquid logic out in all of your emails?

Marta Orsini: One way would be to standardise and build templates as much as possible. So for example for headers and footers, you can create content blocks in the Library, and use them to be more efficient and fast in building your emails.

Marta Orsini: What else?

Harry Fremantle: I think there's a lot more you can do external to Braze. You can take this kind of as far as you want. In a Google Sheet, in AirTable, in whatever platform you use - you can set it up so that it will generate the liquid Clause that you need for you. Say you regularly use two languages - English and French - you have a templated document you put in the English and French copy and it will spit out the code for you. That can then be taken a step further - you can have that as your briefing document to your copy teams. You can do the same with your studio teams for creative and use the exact same liquid clause with your image assets.

And yeah, if you want to take it even further you bring in connected content and make that update completely dynamically. So you have your liquid logic feed off at Google sheet. You don’t actually need to copy and paste anything in so it's super scalable.?

And, ultimately, a lot of the time it is about finding that optimal method for you that's going to save you time and not be too much to the setup or overcomplicate things for you. As Marta touched on, you can use content blocks to your advantage. You can have it predefined in your email templates. And that's what is great about braze , there are always multiple ways to do the same thing and get the same result, but it's finding that nuanced way that works for you.

So there are many ways to do the same thing - how do you choose the optimal one in braze?

Marta Orsini: I think as Harry said there are literally infinite ways to use Liquid Logic. Use it to make your life easier. So really it just depends on what works for you. And for your team, I think are good way to make this work as best as it possibly can is to have a process in place. Having something that you can share with your creative team and then you can get straight away in the email templates will be a nice way to make things quicker and more efficient.

Harry Fremantle: Exactly that. If you're a one-man band and you're doing the full end-to-end process of content production through to execution yourself then that full bells and whistles approach isn’t going to be the most relevant for you. So whatever you’re most comfortable with is the optimal approach - sometimes if you're quickly sending out a push notification it might be quicker for you to just write the code from scratch there. Generally though, keep a library of Liquid Logic clauses you use all the time in a Google Sheet or in a text doc - then you can just copy/paste and bring them in - all those little time saving things I think is often the way to go.

There's so many different variations of liquid that you can, and might, be using on a regular basis. So really try and have those to fall back on and keep that library. Then you have that library to share with other people, to tap into yourself and to take with you if you're changing roles and get yourself off the ground quicker.

How are reporting and analytics impacted by using Liquid when creating bespoke content for different languages and countries together?

Harry Fremantle: I think this is quite an interesting one because as much as it's great to put all your content in the same email or the same push notification or whatever for all your different users - if you don't have a great data analytics platform and you're doing all your reporting within Braze, you can't easily segment on custom attributes. So you might have an email go out to three different markets or a different subscription tier, whatever. But you're not going to be able to understand the true performance of that campaign if you don't have a decent data analytics platform that's integrated with Braze so you can then filter on those custom attribute values.

When you're looking at different markets, it's generally, unless you're really on it with your analytics platform and reporting, easier to just split them out and you get a better idea of the customer flow and where the users are flowing throughout your journey. It's that trade-off with everything in Braze.

Marta Orsini: I would say that the key here is to have a good analytic tool connected to Braze. For example, in my previous company, we had Amplitude. I think it's a really good tool and you could split by the behaviour of customers who received the email and look into how many converted etc.?

I think you would have to be pretty advanced and have lots of time on your hands to connect it all up just through Braze - you can't really get a hold of how your comms are performing just by splitting through my languages. But yeah.

Harry Fremantle: There are methods but it's just clunky - you can manually do it via a segment but then you can't look at a fixed timeframe because email opens from sends in previous weeks or would ruin your stats. You can use an SQL query on the query builder. But again, it's very very manual and pretty inefficient.

What is the best way to write multiple conditions in the same Liquid Logic? For example, the market is US and the language is Spanish. Do you write all the possible combinations or are there more efficient ways?

Harry Fremantle: One of the best ways especially if you’ve got a seriously large number of markets or languages is using a “for” tag to take away an extra layer of IF clauses.?

So for example, if your language is Spanish - you might have users from Mexico, Argentina, Spain etc. You say:

• FOR users whose language is Spanish
• IF the country is Mexico then show your Mexico content
• IF the country is Argentina then show your Argentina content?
• Etc.?

You might then have an English version so you start with “FOR users whose language is English…”?

I think that's a good way to do it, but if you're only doing four or so different options, then you can just write it out. It depends what's quicker for you and how often you do this or if it’s going to be templated.

How can I learn Liquid Logic as fast as possible?

Marta Orsini: The beauty of bBraze is the extensive library of contents that you can dive into. L:iterally every piece of information you might need. I’d say there is a 99% chance that it's there. Also, you can dig into any community of experts - for example Braze Bonfire.?

Harry Fremantle: Tools such as chatGPT are great as well - it can mitigate some of the repeated writing out of clauses. If you can streamline that process and just essentially get chatGPT to do it for you then great. Then you have shared channels or slack spaces. There's loads of support out there. And, because liquid is a Shopify language, there's also a lot of Shopify documentation. That's great but the problem there is, some of the liquid tags are not fully compatible with braze. So you have to be a little bit careful, but generally there's enough to get going with there in terms of actually taking on that information.

Practising and engaging with it, using it regularly and not shying away from it. Using templates and chatGPT is great but if you actually want to get up to speed as quickly as possible, then it might actually benefit you to write out your formulas each time.?

Then you have the personalisation wizard integrated within Braze. It’s not great in terms of writing extended clauses and using maths tags - it’s limited. But it has advantages - to make sure you've got the right format for your custom attribute tag and stuff like that. So it has its advantages for sure, but it's not perfect.

A company operates in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. When sending emails, there are a maximum of 18 versions - three cities and two languages per country. They want to include all 18 versions of the message in the same email step using Liquid. Is it possible? Is it recommended? Is it efficient?

Marta Orsini: I would say no - not in the sense that it's not recommended personally. One best practice is to always keep your emails as light as possible. It’s possible with Liquid Logic, but I wouldn't say that it's a good practice. In my experience, keep the email or their communication in general light but still efficient.?

Harry Fremantle: Definitely. It's just overcomplicating things for yourself. If you need to update the content for one particular City? - you’re then having to navigate through so much content to find that point to make amends and it can make things a little bit more difficult, I guess.?

Transactional emails where it might be less important to update often and the content might be streamlined - that might be a use case where it would be sensible but again that content is always going to change over time and it’s going to massively complicate things.?

I would never do that within one email itself. I'd use content blocks so that if you need to go and change the Denmark content you, would go into a Denmark content block or one of the specific cities within Denmark and work at it that way so then at least you have a specific touch point to go for any of those rather than having to just scroll through lines and lines and lines of Liquid Logic.

Marta Orsini: Yeah, it doesn't look like a smart way to do it.

Harry Fremantle: Exactly, and it's again the analytics then becomes really complicated if you're doing that in Braze. And your audience segmentation, you've got to make sure your triggers got the correct country, city and language attributes and it's covering all of your data. If you've got anything else that might clash with that as well. I think it's often easier to just split something out a little bit.?

Saying all that, it is really good to have a global footer and a global header because they're very unlikely to change regularly. And again, you can use content blocks within the content blocks if needs be. Then it’s easier to update the content for a specific market - and then you know that they’re fixed in place. Your actual content itself can be different in different emails but keeping the header and footer fixed makes life so much easier for sure.

How else could you use Liquid to personalise content at a layer deeper than by language. Do you have any quick wins for new users or those just getting started using liquid logic.

Marta Orsini: Braze have plenty of documentation available and, as I mentioned, AI is so useful. We are lucky enough to live in this day and age and it's another really good tool to learn. Just go and try and make mistakes, maybe before sending though, and just throw yourself into it because that's the only real way to understand the language and how everything is connected. And then for the layers, I think I will leave this to Harry because it's way more technical than me.

Harry Fremantle: There's so many different ways you can interpret that question. I think, and if we're just looking at Custom attributes, then It's kind of the same formula right? But it's when you start to consider actually how those custom attributes interact with each other that’s interesting.?

As an example from something I did recently - Braze frequency capping is restricted to weekly or daily in terms of numbers you can receive in that period of time. So for capping sends over a year or a different period of time you can use liquid. You assign custom attributes after each send and treat them as numerical values - total them up with maths operators. Then look at a period of time and say how many sends a customer received over a fixed period of time based on the custom attribute values. and personalise their content depending on the number of sends received.?

So you can really do so much with it. What I think works really well with liquid is when you personalise your hero image with liquid.?

It's an image asset you just uploaded but in your HTML it’s a background image so you have text, and Liquid Logic, on the top of it. You can then tailor your image to have the first name, or any attribute, of the user into it. Say your product is about booking events and - amazing, a user booked 10 classes - bring that into your hero image and I think it can have a really great impact. That's just a couple examples of how you can really stack it and make the most out of not just language and looking at two different custom attributes, but enabling a better experience.

And in terms of just some quick wins, I think. Marta's spot-on -? just being hands-on and not being shy to ask Brave support as much as they might take a little bit of time to get back to you. Yeah, they're a little bit awkward sometimes to work with but they will come back with answers for you. So if you're trying to do something particularly complicated and you can't get to the bottom of why it's not working. They'll really help you. If you've written something out and again, it's not working.

You can put liquid into chatGPT and ask what's wrong? Is this format correct? And you might be missing an apostrophe somewhere. You might be missing a bracket somewhere. It's really good in terms of cleaning that up and explaining to you where you've gone wrong - and that's not just if you’ve missed out an apostrophe, but generally the whole composition. It can be really useful to explain that in a reasoned response and not just give you “this is the answer” but also why this is the answer. So I think that's a really useful method to understand what you're doing wrong or what you're doing right.