Driving Revenue Growth Through 1:1 Personalization With BrazeAI Decisioning Studio

Braze commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying its Braze customer engagement platform as well as BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™, which is an advanced AI decisioning product.¹

The Braze customer engagement platform allows marketers to create and deploy highly personalized customer communications, supporting a high volume of experimentation across email, in-app and onsite messaging, mobile and web push notifications, SMS and RCS, app and web banners and inboxes, messaging apps, and landing pages. It uses a company’s first-party data to target tailored experiences to complex customer segments. It also embeds AI throughout the platform to help marketers gain deeper context, apply smarter intelligence, and deliver more meaningful customer experiences at scale.

BrazeAI Decisioning Studio is an advanced AI decisioning product, distinct from these platform-embedded AI features, which was integrated into the Braze product suite upon Braze’s acquisition of OfferFit in 2025. Built on five years of real-world application and refinement, this product moves organizations from segment-level marketing to true 1:1 personalization at scale. Marketers define their goals and guardrails, and reinforcement-learning agents continuously optimize all aspects of the customer journey.

The TEI study modeled the benefits and costs of both products, which can be adopted separately, and showed the value that marketing teams could realize both from adoption of the Braze customer engagement platform and the additional value that comes from an investment in BrazeAI Decisioning Studio.

This abstract will focus specifically on BrazeAI Decisioning Studio and is based on four of the six interviews conducted for the TEI study, including:

• The managing director of growth for a media company with an annual revenue of $1 billion that has been using BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for four years and the Braze customer engagement platform for five years.

• The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing for a financial services company with an annual revenue of $2.6 billion that has been using BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for two years and the Braze customer engagement platform for seven years.

• The head of martech for a travel app/software company with an annual revenue of $608 million that has been using BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for one year and the Braze customer engagement platform for eight years.

• The CRM and personalization senior manager for a CPG company with an annual revenue of $22.4 billion that had just subscribed to BrazeAI Decisioning Studio at the time of interview. This company has been using the Braze customer engagement platform for two years.

Each of these interviewees said their organizations had seen strong success with the Braze customer engagement platform prior to adopting BrazeAI Decisioning Studio. The Braze platform had helped their teams become significantly more effective at conversion and retention across a wide range of channels, including email, in-app and onsite messaging, mobile and web push notifications, SMS and RCS, app and web banners and inboxes, messaging apps, and landing pages. The interviewees said the platform allowed teams to tailor content by customer segment in an efficient, scalable manner that was possible with a small group of five to 10 marketers.

Having seen how the Braze customer engagement platform allowed their organizations to significantly elevate both the scale (quantity) and the performance (quality) of their marketing efforts by improving the personalization and relevance of their customer communications, the interviewees were eager to take their marketing activity to the next level of personalization with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio.    

Investment Drivers

The interviewees’ organizations adopted BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to further optimize and personalize the customer journeys that they created through the Braze customer engagement platform. These organizations were looking for opportunities to:

• See additional conversion and retention lifts from true 1:1 personalization. All six interviewees in the original TEI study said their organizations saw improvements in their conversion and retention rates due to using the Braze customer engagement platform to improve the relevance of their marketing messages. The four interviewees whose organizations opted to deploy BrazeAI Decisioning Studio wanted to move from this “one-to-few” model to true 1:1 personalization, providing each individual customer with a message tailored specifically to them, not just to the majority of buyers in their segment.
  
  Interviewees felt that this enhanced personalization of product offerings or incentives, messaging, creative, timing (e.g., day of the week, date, and time), and frequency — for an overall more personalized experience — would provide further conversion and retention lifts for the following business-critical use cases:

  • Media company: Cancel-save, reactivation, and cross-sell to a new streaming product
  • Financial services company: Cross-sell to generate new loan applications from deposit-account customers
  • Travel app/software company: Boost second-purchase rate within two months of first purchase, which correlates with high lifetime customer value
  • CPG company: Cross-sell and receipt upload into their app, allowing them to track product purchases through third-party retailers  

• Operationalize continuous autonomous experimentation. BrazeAI Decisioning Studio’s advanced AI decisioning capabilities allowed interviewees’ organizations to efficiently deliver continuous, complex optimization by running thousands of multivariate combinations based on individual-level customer data, in real time. Interviewees also noted that BrazeAI Decisioning Studio automated decision-making to help increase engagement and maximize business KPIs like revenue and lifetime value, using reinforcement learning agents to run a far greater number of combinations than would be possible with human effort alone. They explained that while AI handled the decisioning execution, the marketer remained in control by setting the optimization parameters. As the group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing at a financial services organization explained, this automated system takes the place of human-driven iteration: “It’s doing a lot of the experimentation that we would be doing. Now we’re constantly doing it with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio.”

• Scale optimization exponentially. As marketers at the interviewees’ organization moved from simple segmentation to more complex segmentation to 1:1 personalization, the content variations and potential combinations increased exponentially. All interviewees agreed that driving this scale of activity, analysis, and iteration would be impossible with human effort alone.

BrazeAI Decisioning Studio Features

The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for the following reasons:

• Ability to match individual-level customer data with relevant product features. Interviewees described how BrazeAI Decisioning Studio was able to cross-reference product knowledge with customer preferences to deploy an ideal, individualized match in terms of relevant marketing content. The managing director of growth at a media company gave an example of how the tool helped their organization enhance its cancel-save program through tailored content recommendations: “Because we’ve taught the decisioning agents about global programming schedules, it knows that this particular season finishes in November and there’s no similar content until this other season starts up in March. So if a customer is leaving at the end of November, we’ll give them a discount offer that we think will bridge them to the next strong content. Every individual customer has this mosaic of different interests, and we execute our cancel-save and cross-sell offers accordingly.”

• Ability to handle vast amounts of data combinations. The interviewees noted that after the implementation of the Braze customer engagement platform, their teams could not only complete their current workload more efficiently but also (and more importantly) increase their output to a level that would not have been possible in their prior state. They all saw net-new activity growth with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio. As the head of martech from the travel app/software company explained: “[Our team is] smaller than it was before, and the output is way higher than it’s ever been. One of the biggest benefits is a lot of this just wouldn’t have happened [without BrazeAI Decisioning Studio].”

• Ability to prove attribution and incremental value. All interviewees could provide precise metrics on conversion- and retention-rate lifts with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio. They also viewed the tool’s performance in terms of contribution to overall revenue. The CRM and personalization senior manager from a CPG company, which had been using the Braze customer engagement platform for several years but had only just signed on with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, explained their organization’s incremental measurement approach: “With BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, [measurement] is more about contribution to goal. The way we frame everything is in the context of what we are contributing to our department KPIs. When we implement BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, that’ll be our first time actually being able to measure incrementality.”

• Support from Braze forward-deployed data science teams. The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing from a financial services company noted that the sophisticated technology behind BrazeAI Decisioning Studio wasn’t a “plug-and-play.” The product was incredibly flexible, with AI decisioning agents capable of optimizing any metric and work with any custom data schema. Further, this interviewee said that working with the Braze team of forward-deployed data scientists, whose ongoing “white-glove service” and consultative support was included in the subscription costs, took the fear of a steep learning curve off the table and mitigated the hiring needs usually associated with large AI deployments. The managing director of growth at a media organization shared: “Usually the [Braze forward-deployed data science team] will come out to our offices and sit down for a week of workshops to design all the guardrails and targets so we make all the decisions together. [Then, after the onsite workshops conclude], we have a business cockpit on our side and a technical cockpit on the Braze side where they’re looking at the deep data science.” The head of martech at the travel app/software organization echoed that the Braze team offered ongoing, regular support, noting they have a scheduled 30-minute sync with Braze every week.

Key Results

The results of the investment for the three organizations that had implemented BrazeAI Decisioning Studio at the time of the interviews include the following:

Media company. The managing director of growth said their organization used BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to boost both the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of its cross-sell, cancel-save, and reactivation programs.

• Cross-sell program. The interviewee noted their entertainment provider turned to BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to run a cross-sell program when it launched a new streaming channel. After two years, the number of existing customers who had also subscribed to the new channel had increased by 105%. The interviewee also noted that this success was not driven by discounts; instead, it happened during a period of modest price increases across its product portfolio.

• Cancel-save program. The interviewee said their company was able to save an additional 10% of customers who had initiated a subscription cancellation.

• Reactivation program. The managing director of growth shared that, when they were using just the Braze customer engagement platform for its reactivation program, 70% of customers who cancelled renewed their subscriptions within 12 months. After two years with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, that reactivation rate went up even more to 84%.

• Discount optimization and savings. The managing director of growth explained that when marketers can target the offer and size of a discount only to their most deal-motivated customers, they can boost retention at a lower cost. They said: “We have a couple of different pricing tiers for each product, and we have a large churn base that we target with reactivation offers through [the] Braze [customer engagement platform]. We use BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to dynamically price those offers to every customer when we need to.”

They noted that their company also measured their success at not giving value away, stating: “When we first launched our reactivation use cases, we had an efficiency rating: How many of the people did we send offers to that took up an offer versus a control group that would have come back otherwise versus ones that we actually influenced. That efficiency rating when we launched was 50%. Within two months of learning and experimentation, that had gone up to 80%, and then within six months, it got above 95%, and it’s stayed there. It’s gotten very, very smart at not giving away value to customers.”

Travel app/software company. The head of martech said their team used BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to boost second-transaction conversions for newly acquired customers, which had a high correlation with high customer lifetime value (CLV). The interviewee said, “We learned that the customers who make a second purchase within two weeks of their first are highly likely to become our highest-value customers over time.”

Their “business as usual” in this case was a segmented campaign that ran on the Braze customer engagement platform and targeted new customers within the seven-to-14-day window after their initial purchase, incentivizing a repeat purchase. By using an AI decisioning agent to optimize the campaign and achieving true 1:1 personalization, the interviewee’s organization saw its second-purchase conversion rate increase by 81% from its baseline activity over a three-month period.

Financial services company. The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing said their organization ran a cross-sell program on BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to generate new loan applications from existing deposit customers. According to the interviewee, BrazeAI Decisioning Studio allowed their team to refer customers to the most appropriate lending products for their situation and stage of life. This enhanced personalization gave their organization’s customers a more relevant interaction that enhanced their experience with the brand and thereby made the marketing campaign more successful.

While this interviewee was not authorized to share specific metrics, they said that BrazeAI Decisioning Studio had performed “very positively,” and their team was planning to expand its use of the platform to promote its investment products.  

CPG company. As stated earlier, this interviewee discussed the reasons behind their organization’s investment in BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, but they did not have results to share at the time of the interview, since their implementation was not complete.