The Total Economic Impact™ Of Braze

Additional Profit From Improved Conversion

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that after their organizations moved to Braze and could run more personalized campaigns at higher volumes, their conversion rates increased. These benefits compounded: Improved personalization drove higher conversion and retention, while increased efficiency allowed teams to scale campaigns and experimentation — further accelerating performance gains.

The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing from the financial services organization summed it up this way: “The more it feels like a message is ‘for’ or ‘about’ a customer and not ‘to’ a customer — the more personalized a communication is — the more likely it is to convert. Those are the experiences we’re trying to create, and we’ve seen very positive results from those highly personalized campaigns.”

• The global head of lifecycle marketing from the creative app/software company said their organization used events to introduce prospects to their products. Since they offer many different products that appeal to distinct user profiles, personalizing their marketing messages for those events was a key part of their strategy. The global head of lifecycle marketing said: “When we market events, between 38% and 52% of the traffic to key landing pages comes from our lifecycle campaign, which is run on Braze. So that means we’re contributing almost half of the total event ticket sales in some cases.”

• The CRM and personalization senior manager from the CPG organization said they used Braze-powered messaging on their website to tailor content to each visitor based on their interests and behaviors: “We have some key areas where we know there’s high traffic and high click-through rates where we swap the standard component for a content card. From a user perspective, they don’t know what’s powered by our product team and what’s powered by Braze. They just notice, ‘Oh hey, this is more relevant to me,’ and that’s because Braze is sitting on all the data.”

• The same interviewee shared that their company’s average overall conversion rate increased from 7% in 2024 to 17% in 2025, their first year with Braze. They noted: “That’s driving conversions of all kinds: creating an account, uploading a receipt to our app, building a profile, a whole host of things. I talk to my friends in performance marketing, and they’re after a 1% conversion.”

• As interviewees compared their organizations’ conversion rates before Braze and with Braze, the average overall lift was 8% to 10% over a multiyear period.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite reaches 100 million unique prospects in Year 1 through several entry points, including visits to its website and app stores. Prior to Braze, its historical conversion rate from visit to paid-subscription signup was 3%.

• Once the organization begins to run its campaigns on Braze, it sees a 2% relative conversion rate lift in Year 1, which increases to 3% and 4% in Years 2 and 3, respectively. As it compares conversion rates before and after Braze, it sees an overall 9.3% lift in initial conversion rate from the beginning of Year 1 to the end of Year 3.

• This lift results in a total incremental gain of 590,000 new customers across Years 1 to 3, for a total revenue impact of $70.8 million over the three years.

• For the organization’s profit margin, Forrester uses the NYU Stern School of Business cross-industry average of 12%.⁶

Risks. Small differences in the various inputs can make a big bottom-line difference for companies that market in very high volumes. Here are a couple of situations where specific companies may see different results for this benefit.

• Variations in order value and volume. This benefit fits a composite organization whose product is relatively low-cost (annual order value of $120) but has a large number of customers. Companies that sell higher-priced products at a lower volume may see their gains distributed differently across the various inputs.

• Variations in conversion rate. The initial gross conversion rate used here (3%) is a typical benchmark for a midtier media company, but even a slight degree of variability can affect the overall value of the benefit.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $6 million.

Additional Profit From Improved Retention

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that Braze helped their teams boost engagement, which led to higher customer retention.

• The global head of lifecycle marketing from the creative app/software company said that being able to create highly personalized newsletters in Braze helped them keep more active users in their customer base (retention) and in their marketing audience (reach). They explained: “Braze helps us increase our reach and maintain engagement among our active users. Our reach has increased due to Braze because we’re offering recurring newsletters, which drive habitual use of our product. The more people we can get a great newsletter to, the higher the engagement and the more people who stay in our active, eligible audience. So we’re able to maintain more active users over time with this strategy.”

• Interviewees also said the ability to connect disparate data points using the Braze Data Platform to convert anonymous visitors into known users also drove higher engagement. The CRM and personalization senior manager for a CPG organization explained: “Web engagement is good, but if we get them over to our app, it’s even better, and then it’s even higher as we get them to further engage in key features in the app. When we look at the volume of users, Braze alone contributed 15% of our registered user volume.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The total customers for each year reflects the composite organization’s initial conversion rate of 3% and baseline annual retention rate of 48%.

• After moving to Braze, the organization experiences an overall 11.4% relative lift in retention rate across the three-year period. The incremental year-over-year lifts increase from Year 1 to Year 3 as the composite’s marketing team becomes more familiar with the Braze platform and implements best practices.

• This lift results in a total incremental gain of 798,000 additional customers retained across Years 1 to 3, for a total revenue impact of $95.7 million over the three years.

• The retention rate modeled in this section does not include the additional marketing efforts required for cancel-save, when a customer initiates cancellation of a subscription. That activity is modeled in Benefit E.

Risks. Once again, small variations multiplied across large volumes can have a big impact on the total value of this benefit. As readers model this benefit for their own organizations, they will likely see differences in the annual retention rate and the annual order value, depending on their industry sector, product value, and pricing structure.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $8.2 million.

Employee Efficiency Gains

Evidence and data. Because of the user-friendliness of the Braze interface, interviewees said that marketers were less dependent on data engineers to create and send their campaigns, and they could finish tasks much faster. Not only could marketing departments do more with the same size team, but they could also scale the volume of their communications like never before. These improvements supported a faster time to launch and faster learning and refinement, and they allowed marketers to focus more of their time on creativity and strategy, as opposed to operational effort.

• The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing from the financial services company said: “Braze is very user-friendly. It’s simple enough that if you are in a marketing role where you wear lots of hats, Braze is a tool that marketers can use end to end. You don’t need to be an engineer to configure things. You can also create and templatize things quite well. Features like drag-and-drop and HTML editors are huge for productivity.”

• The same interviewee estimated their team’s time savings: “I know I can probably build a customer journey end to end in 10 to 15 minutes. For a less experienced user, it might take an hour. I definitely couldn’t send something with [our prior solution] in that time. It physically queried our database from an external connection that took so much time that it wasn’t possible to generate an audience that quickly. It probably took four times longer.”

• The CRM and personalization senior manager from the CPG company said Braze’s use of Content Cards that can be swapped in and out make it fast and easy to build highly customized campaigns. They shared: “We’re seeing time savings in creative development because now we have more standard templates and components in Braze. For journey orchestration, even though the message, brand elements, or segmentation may be slightly different from one campaign to the next, the flow and the touchpoints are all the same. So we’re seeing efficiencies there, too. And same thing from an analytics perspective in terms of the measurement.”

• When interviewees were asked to talk about efficiency, they all said the story was less about time savings and more about Braze enabling a level of productivity that wasn’t previously possible. For example, the managing director of growth from the media company, who lamented having to manually and individually change terms and conditions across 300 pieces of content in their former system, said Braze workflows enabled an explosion of personalized messaging volume. They said: “Because Braze is built on canvases, you make one change and it flows through everything. And that’s why overnight we went from hundreds of variations to over a million.”

• All interviewees noted that the level of output they’d achieved with Braze had transcended the limits of what would be possible with their former system. The global head of lifecycle marketing from the creative app/software company talked about how being able to experiment at such high volumes supported rapid learning and performance improvement: “With Braze, we can experiment much faster. We do upward of 50 experiments every year, and they’re often quite complex. In our onboarding program, for example, we have active experiments that test different pieces of content. In that program alone, we have dozens of different variations that are being handled by the logic in Braze. It would just be unmanageable if we didn’t have this tool.”

• Across the six organizations, interviewees reported that their time to launch improved dramatically after moving to Braze. According to the respective interviewees, the healthcare retail company’s hands-on time went from four weeks to 5 minutes, and the financial services company went from 4 hours to 1 hour. The CPG company reduced its launch time from 51 days to 28 days, and its CRM and personalization senior manager said they once launched a campaign in 48 minutes.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Taking the most conservative time-to-launch reduction from the interviews, the composite organization reduces its average time to launch by 20 days after moving to Braze. Within this time frame and based on interviewee input, the company’s marketing team saves dozens of hours per campaign across the various stages of work, from creative development to journey orchestration to data segmentation to post-campaign performance analysis.

• Additionally, the organization saves 90 engineering hours on each campaign since marketers can self-serve in the Braze platform without depending on ongoing technical assistance.

• The composite organization experiences high growth in the number of campaigns it executes per year.

• Forrester applies a 50% productivity recapture rate to the time savings enabled by Braze as not all time saved will be repurposed for high-value work.

Risks. Employee time savings across marketing work can vary based on several factors, including:

• The team’s organizational structure, level of engagement, and each employee’s experience level.

• The number of campaigns run in a year.

• The level of effort required for each individual campaign. Interviewees universally described explosive, if not exponential, growth in annual marketing activity after moving to Braze. While they quantified this activity in terms of number of campaigns, the definition of a “campaign” can vary from one marketing team to another and isn’t always a consistent or linear indicator of level of effort. One campaign may be a copy of last year’s promotion with minor copy changes, while another may be an entirely new concept around a product launch.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $4.4 million.

Legacy Martech And Operational Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees remarked that moving from a highly complex and engineer-dependent martech solution to Braze also reduced ongoing operational expenses by reducing their dependence on developers and engineers.

• The managing director of growth for the media company noted: “We used to have a team of contractors who would just keep [our prior solution] running. We got rid of that completely, so that was a significant cost savings. We were spending a million dollars a year on contractors just to keep the thing running. Now, with Braze, I’ve got two people in martech who make tweaks or build integrations. So the cost is less, and it’s about augmentation, not just maintenance.”

• The global head of lifecycle marketing for the creative app/software company said: “Supporting Braze is a single data engineer’s job now versus two or three people before. We’re saving $400,000 a year, easily.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The company retires its legacy solution in Year 1, sunsetting an annual licensing cost of $400,000.

• The composite also reduces the level of engineer maintenance effort required. While some internal maintenance effort is still required for Braze (see Cost G), the composite reduces its engineering labor investment from two FTEs at 75% of their time to one FTE dedicating 30% of their time to managing the core Braze engagement platform. This represents an 80% annual engineering labor savings. Considering the total deployment — the core Braze engagement platform plus BrazeAI Decisioning Studio — the organization still requires less technical support to manage both solutions (0.55 FTEs annually for both Braze platforms, versus 1.5 FTEs annually for the legacy platform).

Risks. Individual companies will see some variability in the scale of this benefit based on the cost of their prior marketing solution, when it is fully retired, and the level of engineering effort (internal and/or external) required to maintain it.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.5 million.

Uplift From BrazeAI Decisioning Studio

Evidence and data. In addition to the performance uplift, time savings, and operational savings that interviewees saw across all their marketing activities with the core Braze customer engagement platform, the organizations that also implemented BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for true 1:1 personalization saw additional incremental benefits for certain key use cases.

• Reactivation was a common use case. The media company factored dynamic pricing into its BrazeAI Decisioning Studio “cancel-save” reactivation campaigns. Its managing director of growth explained: “We have a couple of different pricing tiers for each product, and we have a large churn base as well that we target with reactivation offers through Braze. We use BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to effectively dynamically price those offers to every customer when we need to. Sometimes, there’s a short-term discount to get a customer to reactivate, and we give the [agent] the ability to basically pick any price for any customer at any time. But pricing is just one of the things that we optimize on. More generally, it’s, ‘What is the right piece of comms, whether it’s content-driven or whether it’s offer-driven, that is going to trigger a customer to come back to the product?’ [We don’t want to give] value away to people who would come back on their own.”

• Cross-sell was another common use case. The financial services organization turned to BrazeAI Decisioning Studio to further personalize its cross-sell journeys for customers who currently use its basic banking services and were good referral candidates for its lending products.
  The CRM and personalization senior manager from the CPG company explained the natural fit between personalization, engagement, and cross-sell: “What we’ve seen is that as consumers engage more with our digital ecosystem, they’re more loyal, and they’re more open to cross-sell. That’s part of what we’re here to deliver with personalization with Braze.”

• The interviewees whose organizations were using both Braze products were able to parse out attribution of general benefits due to the core Braze customer engagement platform, versus the incremental uplift over “business as usual” for their key 1:1 personalization campaigns run on BrazeAI Decisioning Studio. Interviewees from the media company and one of the app/software companies were able to share specific metrics, while the interviewee from the financial services organization spoke qualitatively, validating the significant uplift.

• The interviewee from the travel app/software company ran a second-transaction conversion campaign on BrazeAI Decisioning Studio. Their business-as-usual in this case was a segmented campaign running on the core Braze customer engagement platform, targeting new customers within the seven-to-14-day window after their initial purchase, and incentivizing a repeat purchase. By moving these campaigns to BrazeAI Decisioning Studio and achieving true 1:1 personalization, they saw their second-purchase conversion rate increase by 81% from their baseline activity over a three-month period. The head of martech at the travel app/software company said, “This is important because 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.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• For the Cancel-Save Use Case:

  • The improvement in retention rate modeled in Benefit B reflects an overall improvement in customer engagement and satisfaction. Reactivation campaigns described in this benefit, in contrast, describe the additional outreach that happens when a customer initiates subscription cancellation.
  • Around 50% of the company’s customers initiate cancellation at some point during the year. The company has a reactivation success rate of 20% with its business-as-usual campaigns.
  • The 1:1 personalization possible with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio enables an overall 14.65% relative lift in that 20% cancel-save rate from Year 1 to Year 3, with year-over-year improvements building incrementally from Year 1 to Year 3.
  • With this improvement, the company saves an additional 191,000 customers from cancellation over the three-year period, resulting in a total revenue gain of $22.9 million.

• For the Cross-Sell Use Case:

  • The company introduces a new product for which its baseline cross-sell conversion rate is 4.5%.
  • The 1:1 personalization possible with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio enables an overall 106% relative lift in its cross-sell conversion rate from Year 1 to Year 3, with year-over-year improvements building incrementally from Year 1 to Year 3.
  • With this improvement, the company sells an additional 639,000 new-product subscriptions over the three-year period, resulting in a total revenue gain of $76.7 million.

Risks. The risks for variability discussed in the previous sections also apply here; once again, small variations in conversion rates and reactivation rates can have a notable impact on the total value of the benefit. In addition, a product like BrazeAI Decisioning Studio requires a sophisticated marketing organization, which — as the CRM and personalization senior manager from the CPG organization explained — involves both a strong appetite for experimentation (and potential failure) and a budget healthy enough to fund it. They said: “At our company, there’s so much appetite for experimenting, bringing on new tools, and doing proofs of concept to incubate things and see what happens. We have a spirit of entrepreneurship and exploration that is fantastic to be a part of.”

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $8.5 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improved customer experience. Offering more personalized marketing boosts sales performance precisely because it creates a better customer experience. While CX improvement in itself can’t be as easily and objectively measured as the end result — higher conversion, retention, and revenue for the company selling the product — it is nonetheless a significant benefit. The global head of lifecycle marketing for the creative app/software company shared, “With Braze, customers receive a much more tailored set of content in their inbox.”
  For the healthcare retail company that participated in this study, greater messaging personalization in emails and on its website through Braze-enabled content cards allowed the marketing team to provide specific and accurate prices for the brand’s home healthcare products. The company’s director of marketing technology and customer engagement said: “Before Braze, we couldn’t tell the customer the actual price of the item being promoted in the email because there were so many variations based on insurance coverage. Imagine trying to make a decision on a home medical device that might be free, or might cost several hundred dollars. Now, with Braze, we can give the customer the pricing information that pertains to them, which helps them make a better purchasing decision.”

• Increased business agility. Several interviewees described how the Braze platform — and specifically, its ability to aggregate, augment, and share data insights bidirectionally — had helped break down silos within their organizations. The CRM and personalization senior manager from the CPG company said: “One key difference, when I look at how we were activating before versus where we are now, is we now have set KPIs that are aligned with the business. We’re operating much more like an agile shop and constantly delivering value.”

• Enhanced opportunity to learn from other Braze customers. Leaders also mentioned the valuable networking available through Braze events and the Braze Bonfire community, where they could discuss challenges and best practices with their peers in other industry verticals. The group manager of lifecycle TPM and database marketing from the financial services company explained, “The conferences I’ve been to with Braze have been ahead of the pack as far as more advanced feature adoption and scale of use.” The CRM and personalization senior manager at the CPG firm elaborated: “Part of what Braze is bringing to the table, less tangible than the capabilities, is the sharing of use cases. I can talk to my peers in different industries about how to use the same tactics. We always want to know what everybody else is doing, and that part is really advantageous.”

Flexibility

The flexibility opportunities outlined below acknowledge that different companies may realize additional sources of value from Braze due to industry- or company-specific use cases. Some of these scenarios explored in the customer interviews included:

• The ability to respond rapidly to changing market conditions. The capacity to launch campaigns faster, which was explored in Benefit C, may bring more than simple time savings and productivity gains in certain circumstances. For example, when the CPG company pushed a last-minute promotional campaign through its app in a record 48 minutes, customer response helped it deliver the additional registered users it needed to meet its quarterly goal. And when the same company used Braze to target buyers of a competing brand with an in-store coupon, it saw a 26% increase in purchases for one product line and a 10% increase for the other. According to the company’s CRM and personalization senior manager, the team launched this campaign within four weeks of being alerted to the product’s underperformance. The senior manager said: “Moving to Braze has meant that we can move fast, and because of the way the platform works, we can deliver really quickly. It’s allowed us to take things that are happening in the marketplace and directly respond to them.”

• The opportunity to earn partnership or ad revenue. The head of martech at the travel app/software company said they ran several successful campaigns in which they pushed partner ads to the user base. In one six-week test with a gaming app and a language-learning app, the company earned $85,000 in revenue by showing its users special offers from relevant, noncompeting partners. The head of martech said, “When you can [run these partnership campaigns] with three and a half million users, you can get some decent results, and the learnings you get are also pretty useful.”

• The ability to leverage audiences for internal loyalty-building programs. Leveraging a base of loyal, known users isn’t limited to external partnerships; companies can also cross-promote internally. For example, the CPG company ran a sampling-and-review promotion program — which it traditionally had run with a third-party consultant — on its own app, using the Braze platform. Not only did it save on third-party fees, but it got better results by leveraging its own highly engaged users. The CRM and personalization senior manager said: “When we were running that program with a third party, it would typically take eight weeks. We were able to do it in six because the users were more engaged — and there was an additional halo effect of each user submitting more reviews. The rule of thumb is that a strong review increases conversion rate 10% in our category, so it was a valuable investment.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).