Braze’s CMO on the Platform Achieving $100 M in Revenue (the Unicorn Metric)

Braze, a customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, apps, and more, announced it has crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) on December 13, 2019. Sara Spivey, Chief Marketing Officer, Braze, talks about vaulting over the new “unicorn metric” of $100 M in revenue, their plans for expansion in 2020, and top trends in customer engagement.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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In this exclusive with MarTech Advisor, Spivey reveals exactly how Braze helps transform marketing strategies into well-orchestrated experiences. With over 30 years of experience in marketing, strategy, and leadership, Spivey leads the global marketing programs, including brand strategy, and communications at Braze.

Here are the edited excerpts from our exclusive conversation with Braze’s CMO:

MarTech Advisor: What were the top 3 milestones for Braze in 2019?

Sara: In 2019, Braze achieved 3 key milestones as we continue to grow and scale our business.

• First, we crossed the $100M in ARR threshold. We’re proud of this milestone as we’ve been disciplined in our approach to growth and investment, prioritizing and anticipating our customers' evolving needs while also being deliberate about long-term planning.
• Second, we surpassed a record customer retention rate and crossed the 800+ customer mark.
• And third, over 10 billion messages were sent on our platform between Black Friday and Cyber Monday with 100% uptime and service reliability.

MarTech Advisor: What is your roadmap to compete with other strong players in the market?

Sara: We have a two-pronged approach of investing in sophisticated, but user-friendly tools for marketing teams to rapidly experiment and evolve their engagement strategies, while also exposing our entire stack programmatically to allow for engineering groups to further leverage our capabilities. Our mobile-first foundation allows us to help customers manage the complexity of cross-channel customer experience without resorting to legacy organizational silos that stifle speed, creativity, and results.

Against the legacy marketing clouds, we can offer more scalable infrastructure to meet high volume demands as well as far better cross-channel messaging orchestration. We’ll continue to invest in all these areas as they are major differentiators for us.

MarTech Advisor: What are the biggest changes you see taking place in Braze’s service lines and your go-to-market strategy after crossing $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR)? 

Sara: Continuing to scale in all areas of our business to be able to cross $200M in one quarter the time it took us to cross to $100M. We’ll also be executing further geographic expansion, pushing into new customer categories, and expanding into new channels and platforms.
 

MarTech Advisor: Customer engagement platforms are transforming rapidly. What are the top 3 trends in customer engagement you are most excited about at Braze?

Sara:

• Privacy regulations will make it difficult, or impossible to use third-party data. More consumer data regulation, like GDPR and CCPA, will come. This means that enriching customer data with third-party sources will be a headache at best, and illegal at worst. To prepare for this, brands will need to double-down on earning first-party data by investing more in customer relationships now. Listening to customer sentiment about sharing location, preferences, and behaviors will be the key to garnering valuable first-party data. 

• The discipline of moments-based marketing will force companies to transform processes. Brands will shift from campaigns to moments-based marketing, which means they will be delivering experiences continuously across the customer journey. Doing this will force organizations to change how they work. We already see brands starting these changes. For example, an American fast-casual chain told us they have overhauled workflows on the creative team to match the speed with which the marketing and product teams are communicating with customers. In addition, the use of machine-based learning will allow brands to get closer and closer to understanding the context of the conversation. Machine-based learning will become a step function improvement in bringing the human element to every interaction between brands and customers.

• Marketing and product teams will merge because customer engagement, in addition to advertising is where the brand lives. Today, marketers view customer engagement as a chance to drive conversions across various channels. Advertising drives customers to those channels. Tomorrow, marketing and product teams will combine because customer engagement will be the primary delivery mechanism for their brand and brand values. 

About Braze: 
Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. Context underpins every Braze interaction, helping brands foster human connection with consumers through interactive conversations across channels that deliver value quickly and continuously.

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