Scaling Personalized Customer Engagement at Speed

How Celerity's Braze Expertise Helped the Client 5x Its Campaign Velocity While Growing Engaged Users by 30-35%

Client Overview

The Client is a fast-growing consumer financial services company offering a suite of products including a debit card, two credit cards, an investment platform, a credit-building card, and cryptocurrency trading. In the past year alone, the Client expanded its product lineup significantly and grew its engaged user base by an estimated 30-35%, making customer engagement and personalized communication a mission-critical capability.

The Challenge

As the Client scaled rapidly across multiple financial products, the company needed a way to deliver highly personalized, compliant, cross-channel communications (email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app content) at a pace that matched its growth. As a regulated credit card and financial services company, every communication also required careful legal and QA review, adding complexity to campaign execution.

The Client selected Braze, a customer engagement platform, as its core marketing and transactional messaging tool, moving away from more complex, rules-driven platforms like Adobe Campaign. However, to fully capitalize on Braze's capabilities and build out the campaign infrastructure ('canvases') needed to support a fast-growing, multi-product business, the Client needed an experienced implementation partner who could operate at scale and move quickly.

Why Celerity

The Client's engagement with Celerity began through an existing relationship: a key stakeholder at the Client had worked with Celerity roughly 8-10 years earlier at a previous financial services company and had a strong, trusted history with the team. When that stakeholder joined the Client and needed an implementation partner capable of standing up Braze quickly, she personally recommended Celerity.

What started as a small team working roughly 70-80 hours per week grew as the Client's needs expanded, with Celerity's involvement nearly doubling to meet demand as the marketing program - and the results it was producing - continued to scale. Celerity's dedicated Braze team has since grown to 6 specialists supporting the Client.

The Solution: Braze Implementation & Optimization

Building the Engagement Engine

Celerity's team designed and built out the Client's Braze "canvases" - automated workflows that determine audience eligibility, orchestrate message delivery across channels, and continuously test and optimize performance. This included both marketing communications and time-sensitive transactional messages (such as account or credit card alerts), each governed by distinct compliance and formatting rules.

Next Best Product/Feature (NBP/NBF) Program

A flagship initiative led by the Celerity team is the Client's Next Best Product/Feature program, which uses customer behavior - products viewed, emails opened, pushes engaged with - to intelligently route customers toward the product or feature most relevant to them across roughly 20 distinct canvases tailored to different card types and offers.

Experimentation & Analytics

Celerity built out extensive A/B and multivariate testing structures within Braze, splitting audiences across multiple paths to determine which messaging, offers, and channels performed best. This experimentation-driven approach, combined with Braze's built-in analytics, allowed the Client's leadership to continuously refine campaigns based on real engagement and conversion data rather than assumption.

Leveraging Braze's Built-In AI

The team also made heavy use of Braze's native AI assistant to accelerate HTML/Liquid email development, generate and test code, identify the correct custom attributes among the Client's roughly 1,400 tracked attributes, and preview messages for specific customer segments and card types - reducing the technical barrier for building sophisticated, compliant campaigns.

Documentation & Knowledge Transfer

Recognizing that the Client's internal processes (not the Braze platform itself) were the primary source of onboarding friction, Celerity is producing an extensive internal playbook - roughly 30 pages covering both general Braze best practices and the Client's specific processes - to streamline onboarding and reduce time spent correcting avoidable errors.