Braze has established itself as one of the most advanced customer engagement platforms in the market, serving over 2,300 global brands with its AI-powered, cross-channel marketing capabilities. With its ability to create personalized experiences across email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages, it has become the go-to solution for enterprise teams serious about data-driven customer engagement.
To create this Braze review, I've analyzed the platform extensively. While Braze excels at creating marketing journeys and real-time personalization, maintaining the quality of your customer data requires specialized attention. This is where an integration like mailfloss becomes invaluable: an automated email verification service particularly effective for e-commerce and D2C businesses that need to continuously clean email lists, fix typos, and protect sender reputation.
The integration between these platforms creates an ideal combination. Braze helps you create complex customer journeys across channels, while mailfloss ensures the email component of those journeys reaches real, valid addresses. Invalid emails can damage your sender reputation, skew your campaign analytics, and reduce the effectiveness of your carefully crafted campaigns.
Table of contents:
- What is Braze?
- Braze Pros & Cons
- Braze Review: How it Works & Key Features
- Where Braze Falls Short
- Best Braze Integration for Email List Hygiene: mailfloss
- Braze and mailfloss: Integration Summary
- Final Verdict
What is Braze?
Braze was co-founded in 2011 as Appboy by Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian.
The founders initially focused on mobile-first marketing, recognizing that widespread mobile adoption would transform how businesses connect with customers. In 2017, the company rebranded to Braze to reflect its growth from a mobile platform into an advanced multi-channel platform.
Today, Braze positions itself as an AI-powered customer engagement platform that enables real-time, personalized experiences at scale.
The platform processes over 3.9 trillion messages and actions annually, serving 7.2 billion monthly active users across its customer base. Built on modern technologies including Snowflake, Kafka, and MongoDB, Braze offers sub-second data processing that enables real-time personalization.
The platform went public in 2021, raising $520 million in its IPO and demonstrating the market's confidence in its approach.
Braze now serves notable clients including Canva, Disney, and HBO. Its ideal customers are mid-market to enterprise companies with advanced marketing needs, particularly those in retail, e-commerce, media, entertainment, and financial services who prioritize data-driven customer engagement across multiple channels.
Braze Pros & Cons
Braze Review: How it Works & Key Features
Canvas Flow: Visual Journey Orchestration
Braze's Canvas Flow serves as the platform's journey orchestration engine, allowing marketers to create advanced, multi-step customer experiences through a drag-and-drop interface.
Users can build journeys that adapt in real-time based on customer behavior, with components including messages across channels, delays, decision splits, action paths, and experiment paths for A/B testing.
Source: Braze
Entry into a Canvas can be triggered by specific actions, scheduled times, or API calls.
Source: Braze
Each component offers detailed configuration: message steps include channel selection and delivery timing, decision splits create branches based on user properties or behaviors, and experiment paths enable testing of different journey variations. Canvas Exit Criteria automatically removes users who complete desired actions, preventing over-messaging.
Advanced Segmentation and Targeting
Braze's segmentation engine creates dynamic audiences that update in real-time as user data changes.
Marketers can filter users based on demographic data, technographic information, behavioral patterns, custom attributes and events, and campaign engagement history. The platform supports nested logic with AND/OR statements for creating precise audience definitions.
Source: Braze
Segment Extensions allow segmentation based on historical data up to two years old and support SQL queries for complex audience definitions. The Predictive Suite uses machine learning to create segments based on predicted behaviors like churn likelihood or purchase probability. Audience Sync capabilities push segments to ad networks for coordinated cross-channel targeting.
BrazeAI: Intelligence Layer
BrazeAI encompasses the platform's artificial intelligence capabilities designed to enhance personalization and optimization.
Predictive Churn assigns risk scores from 0 to 100 based on historical behavior patterns. Intelligent Timing analyzes individual user engagement patterns to deliver messages at the most effective times. Intelligent Selection shifts traffic toward better-performing message variants in campaigns.
Source: Braze
The BrazeAI Liquid Assistant helps marketers generate personalization code using natural language prompts, reducing reliance on technical teams. The platform can generate message copy in various tones and create personalized product recommendations based on user behavior.
Source: Braze
Messaging Across Channels
Braze combines messaging capabilities across third-party channels including email, SMS/MMS, mobile push, web push, and WhatsApp, as well as in-product channels like in-app messages, in-browser messages, and Content Cards.
Source: Braze
Each channel offers broad composition capabilities with support for dynamic content, interactive elements, and Connected Content that pulls real-time data from external APIs.
Content Cards provide a persistent, non-intrusive content stream within apps or websites. Feature Flags enable remote control of app functionality, allowing synchronized feature rollouts with marketing campaigns. The platform handles over 37 billion messages during peak periods while maintaining 99.99% uptime.
Where Braze Falls Short
While Braze excels at creating advanced customer engagement, several limitations become apparent for maintaining optimal email data quality. These constraints reveal a platform optimized for message delivery and personalization rather than advanced data quality management.
Limited Email Verification: Braze performs basic syntax validation on email addresses but lacks advanced verification features. Invalid email addresses accumulate through typos during signup, natural list decay (22.5% annually according to industry data), and fake entries. Since email service providers closely monitor bounce rates, sending to invalid addresses damages sender reputation, potentially causing valid emails to land in spam folders.
Impact on Campaign Performance: Invalid contacts create multiple challenges for marketing teams. They skew engagement metrics by inflating your total audience size while reducing overall open and click rates. These false metrics distort predictive models and make it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance. For teams investing significant budgets in Braze, operating with incomplete data management undermines the platform's capabilities.
Manual List Maintenance: While Braze removes hard-bounced addresses, it provides limited tools for identifying and removing decaying addresses before they impact delivery rate. Teams must configure sunset policies manually or rely on basic engagement filters, both requiring ongoing attention and technical knowledge. This manual approach doesn't work well for enterprise organizations managing millions of contacts.
Data Quality Blind Spots: Braze's advanced predictive analytics and segmentation features assume data accuracy. Invalid emails reduce the effectiveness of even the most advanced campaigns. The platform's capacity becomes diminished when operating on flawed data, making external verification tools essential for maintaining optimal performance.
These limitations show Braze's focus on engagement creation over preventive data maintenance. However, they create clear opportunities for specialized tools that ensure the foundation of clean, valid data that modern platforms like Braze require.
Best Braze Integration for Email List Hygiene: mailfloss
mailfloss addresses Braze's email verification gap by providing automated list cleaning that's particularly effective for e-commerce and D2C businesses relying on email marketing.
Founded to solve real deliverability challenges, mailfloss operates as a "set-it-and-forget-it" solution that continuously maintains email list quality in the background in real-time, especially valuable for businesses collecting emails through newsletters, coupons, and promotional offers from everyday consumers.
Seamless Integration Process
Connecting mailfloss to your marketing stack takes approximately 60 seconds without requiring developer resources.
The platform integrates with approximately 40 leading ESP platforms through native connections. Once connected, mailfloss automatically syncs with your email lists and begins daily verification scans.
Users configure preferences for handling invalid emails: automatically unsubscribing them, deleting them entirely, tagging them for review, or updating custom fields. The system supports whitelisting to protect important contacts and blacklisting to block known problematic domains. Different cleaning intensities allow teams to balance precision with caution.
Comprehensive Email Verification
mailfloss performs over 20 verification checks on each email address.
The platform's Deep Clean Engine can verify challenging domains like Yahoo and AOL that other services often mark as unverifiable. This helps maintain list cleanliness while minimizing false positives. Teams can evaluate the platform's effectiveness through a 7-day free trial before committing.
Automatic Typo Correction
A standout feature is automatic typo correction for common misspellings in email addresses.
When someone enters "john@gmial.com" in a signup form, mailfloss automatically corrects it to "john@gmail.com", recovering what would otherwise be a lost lead. This works subsequently on existing lists and in real-time for new signups.
For e-commerce businesses running Braze campaigns, every recovered email represents a potential customer who can now receive carefully crafted journey messages instead of being lost to a simple typo. With each saved subscriber representing significant lifetime value, the ROI from typo correction alone can be substantial.
Real-Time Verification with Braze
Beyond daily cleaning, Braze provides real-time verification as emails enter your system.
When enabled, any new contact added through forms, imports, or API calls undergoes immediate verification. Invalid addresses can be automatically tagged, unsubscribed, or deleted before entering Braze workflows.
This proactive approach ensures Canvas journeys only target valid recipients and prevents bad data from skewing your analytics. The feature works through JavaScript widgets on forms, API integration, or direct ESP connections. For businesses running paid ads, Instafloss is valuable, preventing wasted ad spend when users sign up with typos and never receive their promised coupons or content.
Detailed Analytics and ROI Tracking
mailfloss provides comprehensive reporting on list health trends.
Interactive dashboards show invalid email categories, typos fixed, spam traps removed, and overall list quality improvements. Reports arrive via email in CSV format for more analysis.
For Braze users, these insights help understand true audience size versus inflated counts including invalid addresses. Teams can track improvements in deliverability metrics and campaign performance resulting from cleaner data.
Braze and mailfloss: Integration Summary
| Aspect | Braze | mailfloss |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Purpose | Customer engagement orchestration | Email verification and list hygiene |
| Channels Covered | Email, SMS, push, in-app, and more | Email only |
| Automation Type | Journey workflows and personalization | Daily list cleaning and typo fixing |
| Data Processing | Real-time behavioral and predictive analytics | Email validation and correction |
| Pricing Model | Enterprise (typically $60k-200k/year) | $29-209/month |
| Setup Complexity | Weeks to months with technical resources | 60 seconds, no developers needed |
| Key Benefit | Sophisticated cross-channel engagement | Protected sender reputation |
Final Verdict
Braze is an efficient customer engagement platform that gives enterprise marketing teams the tools to create advanced, personalized experiences across every channel. Its real-time data processing, AI-powered optimization, and visual journey builder make it a good choice for companies ready to invest in broad customer engagement. The platform's ability to create complex, multi-step journeys based on real-time behavior represents advanced marketing automation capabilities.
mailfloss serves as the essential foundation for email success within any marketing stack. By automatically cleaning lists daily and in real-time, fixing typos, and preventing invalid addresses from entering your database, it ensures your Braze campaigns reach real people. The integration is simple and runs seamlessly in the background, allowing teams to focus entirely on crafting engaging journeys while mailfloss handles email hygiene.
You can check out mailfloss here
Together, these platforms create a complete email marketing system: Braze provides the intelligence and orchestration to engage customers meaningfully, while mailfloss ensures those carefully crafted messages actually reach valid inboxes. For any team using Braze, adding mailfloss represents a small investment that protects your sender reputation, improves campaign analytics, and maximizes the ROI of your customer engagement efforts through better deliverability and data quality.