Disclaimer: This isn't a live use case, just me playing around with Context Steps for the Canvas Challenge
The Strategy
So the goal with this Canvas is to re-engage inactive susbcribers specifically ones who haven't opened an email or push notification in about 30 days. We would do this by serving them a dynamic, automated end-of-month Push Story. This is evolution on the manual weekly sends we put together for our weekly newsletter, saving time and effort by using this automated journey. We achieve this by gathering top new releases across the month delivering a dynamic visual recap at a lower frequency in the hopes that the new context (monthly instead of weekly) makes it worth engaging with.
The Architecture
We're combining a few Braze features including our daily-refreshing Braze Catalogs which hold the latest titles, Canvas Context Steps to log each iteration, and Liquid logic as the glue:
- Dynamic Context Logging: Across a 4-week branch, weekly Context Steps evaluate the latest titles (New). The step captures title metadata (image, name, deep link URL) for the #1 featured item. It will also de-dup if it appeared in previous weeks.
- 4-Week Accumulation: Over consecutive 1-week delays, Context Variables continuously store up to 4 weeks’ worth of top releases without needing external API calls.
- Timed Push Story Delivery: The Canvas checks for the final week/Friday of the month and populates the stored title metadata into a multi-card Push Story showcasing "New titles". I did a Top 10 version in the screenshot incase we wanted to do a "Top titles of the Month" sort of thing.
The Impact
- Primary KPI: Driving high-intent app sessions
- Secondary KPI: Increasing total complete streams.
- Key Learning: By combining Braze Catalogs (or however to get fresh data daily) with Context Steps (the ability to accumulate context over time), we transformed what used to be a heavily manual monthly workflow into an entirely automated, evergreen lifecycle re-engagement loop.
Hopefully this inspires some ideas in your own Braze CRM workflows
