Braze is a powerful lifecycle marketing tool that enables you to send email, push, SMS, and in-app messages to your leads and customers with great flexibility and segmentation capabilities. Given everything you can do with Braze’s multi-channel feature set, being an expert requires an understanding of marketing strategy, creative, analytics, and programmatic languages like HTML, SQL, and Javascript.
For companies looking to get more out of Braze, they often struggle with finding the right expert or team to fill these positions because:
- Braze is a highly configurable and complex platform that is relatively new in the lifecycle marketing ecosystem
- Braze requires a wide range of skill sets and competencies
- The person(s) must communicate well and work within a clear process with the rest of the stakeholders
- The person(s) must be adaptable to changing scope and volume of work coming in a given time
Skills and knowledge required to operate Braze
Lifecycle marketing strategy
Understanding lifecycle marketing strategy is fundamental to operating Braze. Lifecycle marketing is the process of guiding potential customers through stages in the customer journey, and Braze’s purpose is to support those efforts on your site or app. To start with, a Braze lifecycle marketing expert must understand the basic stages:
- Awareness.
- Engagement.
- Evaluation.
- Purchase.
- Support.
- Loyalty.
But they must also be able to understand and follow a user journey through the details of specific stages of your user journey like new user activation, onboarding, and other specific processes of your business. Your Braze expert must have at least a basic understanding of your user journey.
Pro tip: If you haven’t already done this, create your user journey map in a tool like Figjam or Miro. These tools are excellent at helping onboard your Braze lifecycle marketing hires (and clue in others as to what is going on at a high level).
When to use different lifecycle marketing channels
Braze has the ability to send email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, and other data types like content cards and webhooks. Emails are longer format and can have significantly more embedded content, making them great for onboarding sequences, whereas push notifications are much shorter, and are great for simply getting users back into the app with a quick tap of a screen. A Braze lifecycle marketing expert must understand:
- Which content types are best suited for which channels
- Which channels should be used in combination
- Which stages of the user lifecycle respond best to which channels
- What frequency of communication in each channel will be tolerated by users
Creative skills needed for Braze experts
While not every Braze expert is going to be a dedicated graphic designer or copywriter, being competent in the ability to create design and copy for email, SMS, push, and in-app notifications should be skills a Braze expert has. Some teams may have dedicated copywriters and designers, but most do not possess the skills to take designs and build them into email, push, and in-app friendly content in Braze.
A Braze expert should understand:
- Content/character length for Emails, push, and in-app messages
- How to create at least basic banner and hero images, buttons, and body content
- How to design and code in HTML for email
- Desktop/mobile responsive
- Dark mode for mobile
Important note: You can find a lot of Braze experts who can manage the platform, but being able to code emails can be extremely challenging and is a very common skill gap we run across.
User segmentation
Segmenting a database of users is essential to mastering lifecycle marketing in Braze. A Braze expert should be able to take a basic list of user requirements in what I refer to as “plain English”, and turn them into a combination of and/or logic leveraging attributes and events tracked in Braze to identify those users. This requires a very rudimentary understanding of the principles of SQL.
More critically, a Braze expert should be able to read between the lines and pull out of the requirements “we want these users, but not these other users”. Finding the first part of that statement is pretty easy. Knowing who should be excluded and how is where the real experts separate themselves.
Custom event & attribute architecture
Integrating custom events and attributes from your app or store is essential to running an optimal Braze instance. A Braze lifecycle marketing expert must understand how this information should be stored in Braze to be leveraged in segments, user flows, and dynamic content.
- When someone makes a purchase, should the purchase information be sent to klaviyo as an event? Or an attribute? What about their total number of purchases?
- When someone upgrades from a free to paid plan, how should that information be tied to the user?
If custom events and attributes are not set up and stored correctly in Braze, it can lead to a mess of a configuration and errors in the future.
A Braze expert must be able to communicate with your development team on how to pass these items to Braze and also understand when this information can and should be sent to Braze. A good Braze expert can get to the bottom of questions like:
- How quickly can a ‘checkout started’ event from an e-commerce store be sent to Braze?
- How often should custom attributes be synced to users?
A Braze expert does not need to be a backend developer, but they should have a high level understanding of how APIs work. The passing of events and attributes is done through an API (or in some cases through tools like Segment) and can sometimes have issues where the information fails to come through, or comes through in an unexpected format. In that case, they should understand how to help troubleshoot potential issues by looking at Braze API logs.
Hiring a Braze expert can be the impetus to better define and document the event and attribute architecture.
Pro Tip: If you’re looking for a template on how to lay that foundation so that your expert can work with you and your development team to understand where and how all the relevant information is stored in Braze, you can copy our template here.
Dynamic & Connected Content
If you are using Braze, you likely chose it because of its multi-channel communication possibilities and to leverage dynamic content to personalize your messages. Braze has industry-leading capabilities in this area, and a Braze expert should be able to do more than just do simple personalization like inserting a dynamic “Hello, {{first_name | default: “there” }}” into an email subject line.
Braze uses nearly the entire suite of Liquid programming logic in combination with HTML to do things like:
- If / Else If / Else logic to show/hide content
- Assign variables and do mathematical operations between two attributes
- Abort messages if certain conditions are not met
- Show how much time there is left before a key date
- etc.
A Braze expert should also understand how to leverage Connected Content and work with developers to expose the ability to look up and pull content from internal APIs and pass them into messages for things like:
- Look up and show the current contents of a shoppers cart for cart abandonment sequences
- Look up the current weather in your area and tell you whether or not you might want to bring an umbrella
- Pull in product recommendations based on past purchases
Analytical skills
Braze experts do not necessarily need to be product or business analyst experts, but they should understand the basics of evaluating conversions, funnels, and churn. When setting up lifecycle messaging through Braze canvases and campaigns, it’s important to actually measure for success. Braze allows you to track multiple metrics as conversions, so a Braze expert should be able to determine which events should be deemed a success criteria, whether the events are the ultimate goal or just steps along the way.
It’s also not enough to just measure conversions, they should often be measured against control groups. Braze has one of the more sophisticated testing configurations and allows you to be very specific about your testing. Braze experts understand that abandoned cart messaging can improve conversion rates, but some users will end up returning to their cart to place orders without messaging. Determining how much lift the messaging has requires control groups to measure.
Analytical skills are also helpful in prioritizing a complex scope of work. Braze experts should be comfortable discussing user journeys and funnels to understand where the biggest opportunities lie to make improvements to conversions and retention. If conversion rates are low for one part of a user journey but have very little users moving through them, a good Braze expert will ask if the attention should be focused on getting more users into that part of the funnel, or prioritizing other areas where user reach can be maximized through Braze’s lifecycle messaging channels.
Miscellaneous Braze skills and experience
Deep linking and universal linking
Deep linking and universal linking are required to create both a smooth user experience when driving users from Braze communications into specific screens/pages of your mobile app (if they have it), your web app if they are on desktop, or the app store to download the app if they don’t have the app. It also helps in tracking attribution of downloads given the black box that is mobile app store attribution. A Braze expert should be able to help your development team get these protocols set up and ensure that links route communications recipients to the proper pages/screens/resources you’re driving them to, regardless of device.
Email deliverability
Email deliverability is not something that’s talked about until it becomes a problem. We’ve written at length about the importance of understanding it, and being able to ensure your emails are not hitting the spam folder when you’re making a lot of effort and spending a lot of money on Braze is critical. When hiring a Braze expert, you should be making them the internal champion of email deliverability to sustain the channel for the long term.
How to scope Braze work
Project based Braze work vs ongoing Braze support?
Now that you know which skills are needed from your Braze expert, you must scope the work to find out what kind of relationship you need with an expert. Most likely, you have a few initiatives that are on your or another teammate’s plate that are driving the need to hire an expert because you don’t have either the skills or the time to complete them efficiently yourself. Some teams will have these projects scoped very clearly with at least the majority following items briefed:
- Basic user communication journey outline (user story)
- Audience criteria (whether based user attributes or when an action takes place)
- Potential communication channels and basic creative outline
- Goal outcomes
A Braze expert can help consult on each of these topics, but if you have those items defined with clarity for a handful of tasks – you may find that you can get away with project based work. Keep in mind that in our experience, these things almost always change or have unforeseen considerations that will make a project take longer or be more complex than initially thought.
If you anticipate more initiatives coming that are not yet clear, or there is uncertainty and help needed in scoping the work, then you will absolutely need an expert to be around for more than just on a project basis.
Determining specific roles and responsibilities
If you’ve made it this far, you know there’s a lot that goes into managing Braze. There’s the overall strategy, content development, events and attributes, HTML development, testing & QA, and analytics. When you hire a Braze expert, both you and your expert need to have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what.
At MH Digital, we’ve used a RASCI chart to clear up expectations with our clients about what our involvement is in particular areas like copywriting, strategy, and reporting. The RASCI chart works by creating a matrix defining what the different roles for the entire Braze operations are and assigning different categories of responsibility to stakeholders – with the following breakdown of responsibility types:
- Responsible: This person(s) makes sure that the initiative is deployed. If they need help they can ask one of the supportive members.
- Accountable: This person(s) has ultimate control over the initiative and the resources allocated for its completion.
- Support: This person(s) may provide help by providing resources to the Responsible members. They actively work with the Responsible in order to complete the initiative.
- Consulted: This group of people are collaborators. They are subject matter experts and will provide relevant advice, help or opinion, based on information provided by those responsible.
- Informed: This group of people will need to be kept informed about the progress of the initiative, until deployment. This is useful for future collaboration and consultation.
This breakdown makes the scope of work explicitly clear both for you and for who you hire. At MH Digital, we have different responsibilities for different clients based on their internal skills and needs, so every client gets personalized help.
Tip: For your own team, you may want to break apart the “Client” responsibility for individual stakeholders who may be involved in Braze operations in addition to who you end up hiring for the role. PS – you can steal, copy, and modify from our RASCI template here.
When hiring for the position, you should at least have a rough idea of what you’re looking for the Braze expert to do. Having it clearly defined by the end of your hiring process should be a requirement in creating clear expectations with everyone involved.
Finding the right people to be your Braze expert
Full time vs freelancer vs agency for Braze expert?
On full-time vs part time Braze experts
Hiring a Braze expert can be difficult. The nature of lifecycle marketing projects ebbing and flowing based on things upstream like product changes and improvements, marketing content development, competing web/app development projects creates a challenge in predicting how quickly Braze initiatives can be implemented. There can be periods of time where there is a ton of work to be done and times where there is less work to be done. This makes hiring a full-time Braze expert a bit of a risk and in many cases only works when this person is both the head of all lifecycle and growth efforts, in addition to running all of the Braze operations.
If this role is already filled elsewhere, then a full time employee dedicated only to Braze may not make sense.
Pro Tip: If you consider hiring a freelancer or agency to be your long term Braze expert, make sure you’ve first hired someone to manage them (or that’s part of someone’s job responsibilities – if you’re reading this, it’s probably you!).
Your Braze expert is unlikely to have the bandwidth to both operate Braze and dictate your overall marketing strategy. There is simply way too much to know about your entire business and user journey to have a part time person or team manage all of it. You can get away with this in very early stages of your lifecycle marketing efforts, but if you want to take things to the next level, these need to be separate roles once you get the basics in place.
On individuals vs agency Braze experts
If we refer back to our section on required skills, we see we need expertise in lifecycle marketing, email design and copywriting, content development, HTML, Liquid, and APIs, and analytics. If this one person is out there, we’d love to meet them. But more than likely you’re going to find that an individual has gaps in these areas.
If you’ve mapped out your RASCI responsibilities and can make up those gaps in skills internally, then an individual full-time employee or even freelancer may make sense. However, if you have significant gaps across creative, technical, and strategic disciplines, then your best bet is to find that in an agency partner.
There are a few situations in which we actually don’t recommend hiring an agency, you can read about those here.
Where to find Braze experts?
If you’re in the market for a full-time employee, finding that expert means going through standard hiring practices. Keep in mind that Braze has not been in existence for as long as platforms like Salesforce for instance, so the expertise will likely skew a bit younger, and you’ll want to take that into account when determining where to look and how to attract talent.
For freelance Braze experts, platforms like Upwork, Growth Collective, and other freelancer sites will be your best bet. Expect to pay $100+/hr or monthly retainers for these experts. Avoid cheap freelancer sites like Fiverr like the plague!
To find other Braze expert agencies like ours, Clutch.co, The Manifest, and Goodfirms may be good resources to compare vendors.
Are Braze certifications valuable?
Normally, I am against making certifications a requirement for hiring. Marketing certifications are most often created to curate more champions for a platform than to show any actual expertise, as many of the tests to take them are rooted in ‘know the exact lingo our platform uses’ rather than knowledge about how the platforms work best or strategies within them.
Having taken and passed Braze’s certification, it does have a lot of questions that do require you to know off the top of your head things that would not actually take long to confirm in the support documentation, but there were also an impressive number of questions that made you answer ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ rather than simply ‘what?’. On top of that, the proctoring was extremely strict. The proctoring was done live, I had to have my entire screen recorded and nothing else open but the test, and my webcam and microphone had to be on with the proctor asking me to pan around the room I was in to verify there were no additional materials. The test was quite thorough. So while I don’t think a Braze certification is a requirement, it is nice to have. You can see the approximate number of people who are braze certified by having a look at this linkedin group membership size to get a sense of how many certified Braze experts are out there.
What should you budget for a Braze Expert?
Braze expert salaries
There isn’t a ton of information out there on how much a full-time Braze expert salary would be. Given how new the platform is compared to something like a Salesforce expert, we can make some assumptions based on jobs in which Braze expertise would be required. Jobs like Senior Lifecycle Marketing Managers, Email Marketing Managers, and CRM Manager jobs fluctuate anywhere from $70k/yr to $150k/yr depending on experience. Given that Braze is a niche tool and you’re looking for expertise out of the gate, budgeting at least $90k/yr for a full-time employee would be a decent starting point.
With these positions, you’re more likely to have someone experienced on the administrative/operations side of Braze, rather than someone who can execute strong creative. If you need both creative and strategic/technical help, you’re going to have a challenging time finding an individual without paying a hefty price.
What to pay an agency for Braze expertise?
Hiring an agency to be your Braze expert is likely to be based on a monthly retainer, as getting onboarded to a Braze client takes some time and investment to learn the business well enough to ask informed questions and be a true consultant. It is often not worth it to an agency to get onboarded to a Braze client for short bursts of project work.
As such, you should expect an agency to charge you anywhere from $3k-12k/mo for Braze expertise. Obviously that’s a big range. Speaking from experience, the biggest factors that go into those cost are:
- The volume of creative work and campaign/canvas initiatives on a monthly basis
- The complexity of the user journeys and integrations
- The need for the Braze expert to have input and collaboration on the overall strategy and analysis of the initiatives
At MH Digital, our costs typically range from $4k-8k/mo as they align best with where our client needs are and where our best value is.
How to keep Braze expert costs down
As shared above, creative work and campaign/canvas initiatives are where Braze expert costs can be driven up. Having creative (copy and design) done internally will be one of the biggest cost savings areas, as the agency does not need to pull in design and copy resources. If the agency can operate those initiatives solely in the assembly and test areas, they can save a lot of time and therefore money in the form of cost savings to you. Keep in mind they still are likely to need to be able to implement dynamic and Connected Content into the creative when implementing in braze, and they’ll also need to know how to design/code emails. A Braze expert will always be involved in creative, they just don’t have to lead it.
The other big lever to keep Braze costs down for an agency is managing the scope of work and leading the initiatives of figuring out what should be worked on next (this is why we say that managing your Braze expert is critical!). If you want your Braze expert to lead these initiatives, they’re going to need to become deeply involved in your product(s), users, and your larger marketing efforts. Taking on both analyst and lifecycle marketing leadership roles takes considerable time.
In most cases, we recommend against this and often tell our own clients that we can help set up the initial efforts. In the long term, your manager of the Braze expert should be directing where the work is done next. An outside Braze expert will never be as good at understanding the business and marketing needs as you will.
If you can limit the Braze expert to consultants in the scope of work rather than the responsible party, you’ll be limiting their needs to know the business from top to bottom, save them time in working on your account, and thus save you money in cost.
Braze Expert Requirements and Interview Questionnaire Cheat Sheet
Scope and requirements development
Step 1 – Outline your project scope for the foreseeable future with the following information at a minimum:
- Basic user communication journey outline (user story)
- Audience criteria (whether based user attributes or when an action takes place)
- Potential communication channels and basic creative outline
- Goal outcomes
Step 2 – Create a RASCI Chart for your team based on the roles you have internally and those you need to outsource to your Braze Expert. Remember, you can copy ours from our Google sheet we use to create them during our proposal process here!
Finding and attracting Braze experts
Step 3 – Determine where to look for talent. Refer back to the Finding the right people section to determine whether you should be looking for individuals or agencies based on your budget.
Step 4 – Use your RASCI chart to start formulating your job posting or RFP description, skill, and responsibility requirements for your Braze expert.
Interview questions for a Braze expert
Step 5 – interview your potential candidates or vendors, the following questions are loosely grouped by how they can help you understand how well a candidate can fill your task/roles in your RASCI chart. If you don’t need that role filled at all by your Braze expert because it’s handled internally, you obviously don’t need to ask about it for anything other than understanding general familiarity.
Braze Configuration & User Journey Questions (Strategic)
- What is your experience with Braze and what business type have you worked with before?
- What role did you take on in managing the Braze account?
- Did you help set it up from implementation? Or take it on after the initial setup and integration were done?
- What is your background in marketing automation/lifecycle marketing?
- What type of lifecycle marketing initiatives have you worked on in the past? (Onboarding, retention, nurturing, etc)
- What kind of communication channels did you use for those initiatives and why? (Push for X, email for Y, etc)
- How do you plan out a lifecycle marketing canvas or campaign in Braze and what requirements do you need to be successful?
- Do you have experience in managing weekly/monthly one-off campaigns?
- Do you have experience managing email deliverability?
Braze Configuration & User Journey Questions (Technical/Data)
- Have you worked with developers to integrate events and other data into Braze?
- How do you determine which information should be passed as events or attributes?
- What experience do you have with Dynamic and Connected Content in Braze?
Content Creation & Assembly Questions
- Do you have copywriting experience?
- Do you have design experience for in-app and email marketing?
- Have you built push, email, and in-app messages?
- Do you have experience with deep linking and universal linking for mobile apps?
- What experience do you have with HTML for email?
- How do you manage testing and deployment of campaigns or canvases?
Reporting & Optimization
- How do you measure your success in Braze?
- What is your approach to determining how to prioritize user journeys and canvas initiatives?
- Do you have experience with analytics tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude?
Hiring and onboarding your Braze expert
Step 6 – Find, hire, and begin onboarding your new Braze expert. If you find someone who can answer these questions for you and match them up to your needs in your RASCI chart, there’s a great chance you’ve found the perfect person or team for your Braze needs.
Remember that having your user journeys documented and having your integrated custom events and attributes document prepared will be a big step in getting them onboarded quickly!
A pitch for MH Digital as your Braze expert
Given I wrote this requirements sheet, I feel confident in saying that if you’re looking for a team to fill a lot of these needs and requirements, MH Digital should be on your shortlist! We’ve got experience with mobile apps, e-commerce implementations, B2B2C applications, and have all the skills listed in what you might need in a Braze expert.
If you’d like to connect to see if we’re right for you, let us know here.