Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
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Braze
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
While Braze is considered one of the better marketing automation platforms, it hasn't been a market leader in the e-commerce world. Again, based on what I've seen recently, enhancements in this area have been rolled out, but as a brand, we've yet to test these new features. If you're looking for a platform that allows you to set up and activate campaigns for multi-brand businesses/products, then Braze is for you. The drag and drop template builder and A/B testing functionality is easy enough for anyone to learn and use.
At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
The ability to send push notifications to a seed list like how we can for email would be great. Just so we can confirm everything is going out correctly in the instances where are marketing team doesn't fit the criteria for a certain message.
Being able to archive segment extensions if the campaigns that are using them have been stopped or archived for over a certain number of days. This isn't a real issue, just a small quality of life improvement for those that like having things as clean as possible. 🙂
A global suppression list. Again, this isn't a big deal to add, it's just the only other thing that came to mind.
We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this
It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
Creating emails and editing the existing journey can be a tedious task when we want to do it on the same canvas. When emails need to be developed using emails from another canvas, it can be somewhat challenging. Other email marketing platforms offer a separate section for emails, which is particularly beneficial. Indeed, Braze offers good functionality for creating and testing mobile-friendly emails in one place. The provided segmentation options are also helpful.
Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
Very responsive and helpful on simple questions, but not great other than that. They do not have a way for the customer/user to escalate a ticket. You have to contact your rep and in some cases, they don't respond within 24 hours so you have no idea if they have escalated it. There is no phone number for an urgent issue - you have to rely on email
Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.
SNS’s core advantages are –
· no setup/no maintenance
· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)
· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)
· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still achieving high throughputs would be expensive
· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.
· no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
I wasn't part of the decision-making process for selecting Braze, since I joined the company after Braze was already "integrated" with our company. I'd still say that Braze would me my 1st choice compared to other tools that I used in the past.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.
Our customer experience is much more cohesive- it allows multiple departments to run numerous campaigns at the same time without them conflicting with one another which is great- saves contributors a lot of unnecessary back and forth
Better tracking- we are able to pivot away from campaign styles faster using Braze tracking as it is faster and more reliable
Reduced execution time- our team has gotten back dozens of hours of time because of the streamlined execution process and user-friendly interface. This has provided us with more time to think creatively and focus on the bigger picture
We are able to run more complex campaigns in order to target customers across more stages of the shopping and browsing experience
