7 Braze Features Designed for Simplicity and Impact

Braze is a modern customer engagement platform built to help marketers execute their strategies with greater speed, precision, and impact. With powerful automation tools, cross-channel orchestration, and robust data activation capabilities, it offers everything needed to deliver personalized experiences at scale.

While the platform is packed with advanced tools, a few standout Braze features deliver exceptional simplicity, versatility, and value for everyday marketing efforts.

At Mavlers, our Braze specialists have worked closely with the marketing platform and uncovered 7 key features for marketers that truly elevate campaign performance and enhance customer engagement.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Braze for marketers a real game-changer.

1. Feature Flags

2. Global Control Reporting

3. Teams

4. Project Catalyst

5. Connected Content

6. Smart Iterative Sending

7. Bulk Merging

Wrapping up

1. Feature Flags

Feature Flags are a powerful tool that allow brands to remotely enable or disable specific features or functionalities within their mobile apps or websites without needing to deploy new code or submit app store updates.

The key benefits of Feature Flags include:

• Faster iteration and deployment: Release new features more frequently and with less risk.
  
• Data-Driven Decisions: Conduct robust experiments to understand the impact of new features and optimize performance.
  
• Reduced Risk: Safely test and roll out features, allowing for quick rollbacks if needed.
  
• Operational Efficiency: Streamline workflows, improve coordination across teams.

As you must know, submitting a new version of a mobile app requires a review by Apple or Google. 

Source: Braze Feature Flags

Now, this review process can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, creating a significant delay between when you want to deploy a change and when it actually reaches users.

“Delays in the app review process can be an obstacle, but there are strategies to manage it. Common sources of delays include not meeting App Store Review Guidelines, bugs and crashes, as well as privacy issues or additional information requests,” Median states in their blog post on App Store approval. 

With Feature Flags, you can instantly turn a feature on or off for all users, or a subset, without a new app store submission.

This makes Feature Flags one of the most helpful Braze features for marketers.

2. Global Control Reporting

A Global Control Group in Braze is a feature that allows brands to set aside a specific percentage of their entire user base who will intentionally not receive any marketing campaigns or Canvases (Braze’s customer journeys).

The primary purpose of a Global Control Group is to measure the true incremental uplift or impact of your messaging. 

But Global Control Reporting has other benefits as well:

• Beyond high-level impact, you can use the Report Builder to dig into specific campaigns to understand which tactics contributed most to performance uplift, enabling smarter optimization for future campaigns.
  
• You can define the size of the control group and use tags to set up exception rules, ensuring that critical user experience communications continue even for users in the control group.

By identifying which specific campaigns or channels drive the most meaningful impact, you can apply the learnings to future messaging strategies.

Source: Braze

When you can clearly see which of your campaigns are driving measurable results, it becomes easier to reallocate your budget more effectively. 

For example, if a series of promotional push notifications shows no uplift in app engagement compared to a control group, it may signal that this approach isn’t resonating. Instead of continuing to invest in those messages, you could shift resources toward more effective channels. This ensures your budget is focused on what actually moves the needle.

3. Teams

Teams is yet another standout feature in Braze, a highly useful administrative tool that allows organizations to manage user access and permissions within their Braze dashboard. It’s designed to facilitate collaboration while ensuring data security and adherence to internal workflows.

Below are some of the core advantages of Teams in Braze: 

• Teams was built to adapt to any organizational structure, whether it’s based on geography, language, customer lifecycle stage, or function, giving brands full control over how permissions are assigned.
  
• Permissions are dynamically tied to individual customers’ identity and profile data, ensuring that only the right teams can access and engage each customer at the right time, based on real-time attributes like location or status.
  
• Because Teams is powered by Braze’s segmentation engine, access and messaging permissions automatically adjust as customer data changes.
  
• By clearly defining who can message whom, Teams reduces the risk of teams sending messages to the wrong audience.
  
• Teams can focus on their specialized roles without needing workarounds or constant coordination, thanks to seamless and tailored permissioning.

Source: Braze

Teams plays a crucial role in streamlining martech collaboration.

Cem Dilmegni and Mert Palazoglu from AI Multiple highlight several case studies that reveal the challenges organizations face without RBAC (role-based access control) systems. In one such case, they cite Western Union, where the lack of streamlined access controls created significant operational drag:

“The time spent administering access controls and reacting to regulatory changes was long.  Each new hire required access to 7-10 applications and their related permissions. The access was manually supplied, and it took ~20 minutes per person to submit the access request and receive first-level approval.”

Braze Teams is designed specifically to address these kinds of inefficiencies, making it a standout feature for scaling access control without compromising on security or agility.

4. Project Catalyst

Project Catalyst in Braze is an AI agent designed to help brands personalize and optimize customer experiences at scale.

Marketers provide high-level guidelines for customer journeys, content, offers, and incentives, along with a target audience and goal. Project Catalyst then generates thousands of variations for each element (subject lines, message tone, offers, channels, timing, etc.) to create a unique and individualized experience for each customer. This paves the way for: 

• Efficient experimentation: Catalyst enables large-scale experimentation by automatically creating and optimizing combinations that would be too complex and time-taking to manually build and test.
  
• Human-controlled AI journeys: While Catalyst handles the heavy lifting of generating and optimizing experiences, marketers remain in control by setting high-level goals, guardrails, and creative boundaries to align with brand standards and strategy.
  
• Seamless integration: Catalyst complements Campaigns and Canvas, blending handcrafted strategies with AI-generated scale. This hybrid approach empowers teams to evolve their marketing without ditching proven workflows.

As far as we are concerned, large-scale experimentation is one of the standout benefits of Project Catalyst.  

Why? Because it enables us to gather such a wealth of insights through extensive testing. 

As Tim Parkin, a martech consultant, reminds us, “The goal of testing, contrary to popular belief, is not to get better results; that’s a byproduct of good execution. The true purpose is gaining new insights into what works (and what doesn’t). From this perspective, every test generates value in the form of insights, even if it fails to produce a performance improvement.”

5. Connected Content

Connected Content in Braze is a powerful feature that allows marketers to pull real-time data from external platforms (like your own web servers, databases, or public APIs) and directly insert that data into messages sent through Braze. 

Source: Braze

Marketing platforms require significant custom development work, often involving IT or engineering teams, to achieve this kind of real-time data integration. 

Braze, however, empowers marketers to do this themselves using Liquid templating language. This democratizes access to sophisticated personalization, making it much more agile and efficient for marketing teams. You don’t have to wait for developers; you can build and test these dynamic experiences in-house.

6. Smart Iterative Sending

Unlike many marketing platforms where you need to create multiple campaign versions for testing and other purposes, Braze treats each campaign as a “dynamic container,” allowing marketers to launch the same campaign multiple times without duplicating efforts . 

Here’s how it works: when you send a one-time campaign in Braze, it automatically tracks which users have received it. If you decide to increase your audience later—whether for A/B testing, phased rollouts, or operational reasons—you can simply re-launch the same campaign. Braze will only target new, eligible users who haven’t already received that message.

Why it matters:

• Run phased rollouts without duplicating campaigns
• Test with a small group, then scale confidently using the same campaign
• Avoid accidental re-sends.
• Fix minor issues and resume sending without losing continuity
• Keep dashboard clean with fewer campaign versions

In our experience with other marketing platforms, clients often struggle to duplicate campaigns efficiently for testing and experimentation. Braze’s iterative sending capability eliminates this challenge entirely by allowing seamless re-use of the same campaign for phased rollouts or controlled experiments—no duplication needed.

7. Bulk Merging

Source: Braze

Bulk merging in Braze is a feature that allows you to efficiently identify and combine duplicate user profiles into a single, comprehensive profile. This is crucial for maintaining a clean and accurate customer database, which in turn leads to better targeting, more accurate personalization, and a unified view of each customer.

Wrapping up

The seven Braze features we explored are thoughtfully designed to empower marketers to do more with less complexity, less guesswork, and greater impact. At Mavlers, we believe that tools should make your work easier, not harder. Braze stands out by delivering powerful capabilities in a way that’s intuitive and scalable.

As customer expectations continue to rise, simplicity and agility will be the true differentiators in marketing.

Need help with Braze? Book a free 30-min call with us, and let’s discuss your Braze marketing needs.