There’s no doubt that digital marketing has revolutionized brand’s relationships with their customers. In contrast to the one-sided messages of yesteryear, today’s consumers have come to expect personalized, interactive customer experiences from all the companies they interact with. Channels such as push, in-app messaging (IAM), SMS, and email have given customers the power to make their preferences known, while giving marketers insight into their behaviors. But in order to transform this insight into stronger customer engagement, you’ll need a cross-channel strategy that reaches them with the right messaging at the right time. The challenge lies in how to implement this kind of customer experience management.

Overall, you won’t be able to ensure a high level of automation and provide customers with dynamic messages without the right software. Only modern martech integrations—like the one between Braze and Braze Alloys technology partner Inkit—can help track user actions and customize customer engagement interactions in real time.

By joining Braze with Inkit, you can supercharge your digital marketing by leveraging direct mail to provide a unique customer experience. Online and offline communications can be combined into a single well-planned cross-channel marketing strategy that encourages leads to move seamlessly through the sales funnel.

Interested in learning more about how Inkit and Braze can support customer experience management and engagement? Read on:

• When Braze Meets Inkit
• How to Combine Offline Communications with Digital Marketing
• Braze Alloys and Your Marketing Toolkit

When Braze Meets Inkit

A comprehensive customer engagement platform like Braze lets you automate personalized messaging that’s triggered by customer behavior. From push notifications to IAMs to emails and more, you can send customers relevant content in real-time to keep them engaged with your brand. However, as great as digital marketing is, sometimes you need to step outside the virtual world to really make an impact. Here’s where Inkit and digital direct mail come in.

Direct mail may seem like an old-fashioned method of marketing. Yet up to 90% of direct mail gets opened compared to 20-30% of email. As with digital marketing, the trick is to send well-timed, relevant mailers that grab your audience’s attention. So, how do you do that? With digital direct mail, of course!

Inkit is taking traditional direct mail to the next level as part of their Reach Enablement Platform, allowing brands to leverage their direct mail automation tool to reach more customers more effectively through personalized, better-timed campaigns. By integrating Braze and Inkit, you can trigger individually tailored direct mail the same way you trigger push notifications and build coordinated campaigns across online and in-person channels. Inkit also supports address autocomplete and data verification functionality that helps you prepare your database for mail delivery. It matches address records with the data provided by the United States Postal Service (USPS) to make sure each one is valid and mailable. This increases the accuracy of customer engagement campaigns and allows you to optimize their cost.

Inkit also serves as a full-fledged customer experience management platform with many additional features. It allows businesses to generate custom PDF documents and send them through multiple channels based on behavitriggers. Plus, all relevant interactions are tracked to allow your marketing team to check the history of communications, supporting a simple, highly automated customer experience.

How to Combine Offline Communications with Digital Marketing

Far from being a one-trick pony, digital direct mail can serve as a powerful tool at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Whether you should send it at a specific stage will depend on your brand and your audience, so understanding your customers’ behavior is essential. Here are a few customer engagement use cases to consider:

• Brand awareness: Given direct mail’s response rate, it’s often the perfect way to introduce new customers to your brand. An eye-catching postcard with a strong call to action and a QR code that directs recipients to your website can get new users to browse, sign up for your mailing list, or download your app.
• Cross-sell or upsell: Did you know that 4 in 10 Americans look forward to checking the mail? Why not send them a personalized offer that will bring them back to your online presence? Whether you want to promote a new product or cross-sell an item you’re sure they’ll love, your existing customer data will help determine who should receive which message.  
• Follow up on missed connections: Push notifications let you immediately alert someone that they left an item behind. And a follow up email can give them another nudge. But if your potential buyer still hasn’t come back, triggering a direct mail piece can catch them in the real world and convince them to buy. This customer experience management strategy works great to encourage people to return to abandoned carts, for example.

As you can see, there are several ways to integrate direct mail into your cross-channel marketing strategy. And integration is easy with Braze. The simple three-step process that combines the power of Inkit and Braze can make the difference between a strategy that drives good engagement results to one that drives great results.

Braze Alloys and Your Marketing Toolkit    

Building a marketing technology ecosystem that meets your needs doesn’t have to be difficult. Braze Alloys offers a nearly effortless way to add new partnerships—like Inkit—to our Braze Partnership program. You can combine our customer engagement platform with a variety of other technologies to create personalized brand experiences at scale.     Interested in working together? Visit our partnership hub to learn more about Braze Alloys and what it can make possible for your customer engagement efforts.