Quick Guide
The Low Down on Customer Engagement Platforms
As marketers, we’re no strangers to compartmentalizing. The trouble is, when marketing teams and functions go independent, the results can be symptomatic of this.
We’re talking inconsistent messaging, bland web copy, and the cardinal sin that is sending irrelevant offers to already converted customers (think welcome emails to your most loyal customers – yikes).
Your customers are exposed to up to 10,000 ads and brand messages per day* on average (*Apt Visuals). So, making the most of your email marketing potential is key to cutting through the noise.
Sometimes, an entry-level email platform won’t do, especially when you’re looking to scale. A Customer Engagement Platform (or CEP – yes, another acronym) is a type of marketing tool that can be used to centralize your digital marketing channels and customer data into a single, unified system.
You can think of a CEP as the brain or control room for all your marketing operations. They pull in data in a Single Customer View and support behavior-based triggers across your digital marketing channels.
Think abandoned cart triggers (from web data) for an immediate SMS follow-up, low app usage data for an email re-engagement campaign, or an in-app reminder for expiring loyalty/discount rewards sent by email.
This allows you to connect the dots and use your channels to their full potential, rather than being limited by technical limitations or convention.
Introducing Braze and Sailthru
Braze and Sailthru are two major players in multichannel marketing automation. They’re both being used by major players worldwide to help personalize the way brands interact with their customers.
This is critical as customer behavior can often be erratic and layered with multiple different intents. For instance, if a user is looking at a product page, are they looking to purchase, seeking support, or looking for specs on what they just bought?
The platforms help to piece data and channels together to follow customers on their true journey, rather than trying to fit customers to what marketers think their journey looks like.
Long story short, brands can’t take interactions at face value, and solutions like Braze and Sailthru help to respond effectively. No more sending a pushy promotion email for a product your customer just bought (both inopportune and formulaic).
But which one is the best choice for your business? Let’s compare…
Round 1: Features and Platform
What is Braze?
Braze is a type of Customer Engagement Platform. It sits in the middle ground between a marketing automation platform and a customer relationship management system.
Braze offers a suite of features and integrations, allowing you to customize your brand messaging to specific customers based on your chosen triggers and campaigns. Braze AI uses machine learning to optimize marketing delivery.
The platform at this time offers over 140 integrations, including Shopify, Amplitude, Segment, Meta, and Zendesk.
The Canvas Flow customer journey tool allows for complex cross-channel journeys to be made quickly and easily.
Real-time data streams allow for fast user event triggers to engage your customers or users on your terms.
Braze is made for fast and complex customer journeys. The speed of real-time triggers for your marketing channels allows you to capitalize and respond in the most effective way possible to engage your customers.
The machine learning and AI functionality helps to time marketing delivery for the most opportune time based on when users are likely to engage with it most. No more blanket email sending at a fixed time.
This helps brands to connect with their customers when it suits them best, using behavior triggers to suit marketing around them.
The software offers powerful tools for push notifications, in-app messaging, and dynamic content cards in apps. This is perfectly suited for mobile users.
Whether at home, at work, or on the move, Braze can help brands connect and engage with customers appropriately.
What is Sailthru?
Sailthru is a type of marketing automation and customer engagement platform. From humble beginnings as a pure email marketing solution, like a shiny Pokémon, it has evolved into a fully fledged multichannel platform.
Like Braze, Sailthru collects customer data and uses machine learning to adapt campaign delivery. However, the system’s proprietary AI offers additional powerful functionality, such as the ability to predict future customer behavior (such as purchasing or subscription cancellations) to alter the content sent or shown for the best results.
Sailthru offers functionality for email, web, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages, allowing for comprehensive control of your digital marketing channels. Like Braze, this helps to prevent insular marketing efforts and hone in on customer-centric targeting.
Sailthru also offers integrations with a number of large marketing platforms, including Shopify, Magento, Meta, Google Tag Manager, and more.
The proprietary AI predicts purchase and churn risk, then automatically tailors messaging and marketing based on existing, historical data.
Acquiring new customers can be costly and consume significant volumes of time, budget, and resources. Sailthru helps to maximize the CLTV of your customers by tailoring the messaging to them.
A visual builder focused specifically on customer retention and re-engagement.
Helps to extend the lifetime value of a customer to support your business goals.
Sailthru’s origins stemmed from email marketing. The software offers powerful and easy-to-use support for advanced email personalization, helping to connect with customers in a human-first, authentic way.
Even in high-volume emails, emails can be tailored to be personalized to the recipient. Their inbox is personal to them, and with Sailthru, you can make the most of the 1:1 brand connection that it offers.
Round 2: Usability and Flexibility
Features matter in a customer engagement platform, but their effectiveness depends on how easy you can use and work with them to achieve your goals.
Let’s compare both Braze and Sailthru in terms of ease of use:
The Usability and Flexibility of Braze
Braze has a modern interface that gives marketers a large degree of control over their campaigns and channel usage.
The Canvas Flow editor, its most powerful feature in our opinion, is great for building basic journeys, but the platform comes into its own with its extensive range of in-depth features. Granular real-time triggers can be set for powerful, behavior-driven marketing with complex logic branches. The system even supports open-source languages such as Liquid for dynamic personalization on Shopify and in messages.
SDK integrations for apps and custom event triggers offer significant potential for cross-channel marketing to users. But complex setups do require a high level of technical expertise to get the most out of the platform.
At CodeCrew, we consider Braze in a league of its own, simply because it’s way more than an ESP. Braze is a true customer-centric platform that brings data together and delivers personalized experiences across numerous channels. If your business needs to create highly-targeted, multichannel customer journeys, then you’ll want to take advantage of Braze’s features.
With Braze, you can integrate the Google PostMaster tool, use multiple conversion events, and update flows without affecting the live version. Other features that we love include Braze’s ability to have multiple open tabs without the need for a browser and its ability to integrate seamlessly with apps.
That said, Braze’s segmentation feature feels unnecessarily complex compared to Klaviyo or Sailthru, and its more advanced UX places it at a higher entry point.
The Usability and Flexibility of Sailthru
Sailthru appeals to marketers primarily because of its focus on delivering personalized content through familiar channels.
Emails can be easily made using drag-and-drop functionality, and the lifecycle optimizer allows for intuitive journey flows for customer retention and engagement.
Customizing data flows via its API can be more rigid for custom data flows, and advanced personalization often needs to use the system’s Zephyr scripting language, which will add a layer of complexity for brands aiming to make full use of the platform’s potential.
Sailthru is a darling ESP at CodeCrew, offering smart personalization at high volume. While Braze integrates numerous platforms for a holistic journey, Sailthru has zoned in on email as its primary platform and dedicated itself to singular excellence. It’s a Jack-of-one-trade, but a master at what it does.
If content-heavy ecommerce summarizes your business, then Sailthru is the first ESP you should be looking at. It auto builds interest profiles, based on customer behaviour, features a personalization engine, a dynamic email composer, and strong identity resolution.
We absolutely love Sailthru’s marketer-focused UX, and consider this one of the most underrated ESPs on the market.
Sure, it’s less suited for real-time, app-driven engagement, but when it comes to email, Sailthru delivers specialized features that will put a smile on any marketer’s face.
Round 3: Price and Value
Both Braze and Sailthru are aimed at medium to enterprise-level businesses, with cost structures typically built from quotes.
While the potential ROI and success from the platforms are high, the solutions are primarily only accessible to large, high-profit businesses. Entry-level costs range from around $60,000+ annually for Braze, with Sailthru typically upwards of six figures per year. The platform costs also scale with usage and functionality, depending on what triggers, events, and cross-channel marketing you wish to run.
Looking for budget-friendly marketing support with high ROI?
At CodeCrew, we are the experts you need for email results, as our clients make a 1,300% ROI on average from our email marketing services. Talk about explosive ROI!
Round 4: Use Cases, Clients, and Data
Now, while features and dashboards are important, the proof is in the pudding (no, not banana pudding, although if we got some with the software, that would be nice!).
All of the integrations and setups need to have real-world uses, so let’s look at how each could stack up for different business uses:
A custom card or dynamic web copy based on a trigger of how many articles have been read could be used. For instance, “5 articles read per day” may trigger dynamic content prompting the user to sign up for direct newsletters to their email inbox.
Consumer profiles and data could be used to send recommended newsletters and articles based on their reading interests to increase engagement.
The software could be used to re-engage web or app users based on the products they have visited before leaving the browser or system. A delay could be set to prompt again after 30 minutes through the app or SMS to re-engage the customer.
Past data from purchases and viewing could be used to customize content cards or recommended products based on what the user is likely to purchase or would like next to support business goals.
Could be used to trigger in-app push notifications or SMS messages based on a triggered event (such as a failed transaction or security check)
Predictive churn could be used to assess and re-target any customers who are inactive or unlikely to stay with the business, activating re-engagement methods through emails.
Braze has helped to deliver significant results for its clients, including reducing churn rate by 50% and seeing an ROI of 840% from implementation for a North American B2C company. The platform is used by numerous high-profile brands, including KFC, Rightmove, Burger King, Canva, Joe and the Juice, and more.
Sailthru reports an average 100% increase in conversion rates, with a substantial 27% increase in subscribers for its publishing clients. The software is used by several internationally-recognized brands, including Hot Topic, AXA, Halfords, Metro, and BBC Studios.
The Judges’ Decision: Braze or Sailthru, Which Delivers Better ROI?
If your business lives and breathes real-time user behavior, we’re talking app events, in-session triggers, cross-channel nudges, then Braze is the heavyweight built for velocity. It rewards teams with deep technical resources, strong lifecycle strategies, and the desire to experiment at scale. For brands that want to orchestrate journeys with precision and respond the moment intent changes, Braze isn’t just a tool – it’s a weapon.
Sailthru, meanwhile, plays the long game with predictive intelligence and retention-first personalization, making it perfect for win-back or re-engagement campaigns designed to recover inactive email subscribers. If your primary metric is CLTV and your growth relies on repeat purchase, loyalty, and higher CTR, then Sailthru is hard to beat. It shines where customer depth matters more than campaign speed.
But here’s the real verdict… neither platform wins without a strategy behind it.
Most CEPs don’t fail because the tech is weak – they fail because no one is using them to their full potential. The brands that get the best ROI aren’t the ones with the biggest software budget, but the ones with the sharpest execution.
And that’s where CodeCrew comes in. We turn expensive automation systems into revenue engines, and whether you’re considering Braze, Sailthru, or trying to translate “machine learning” into miracles, we help you actually use these platforms to your advantage.
We offer a full suite of email marketing services, including email marketing strategy, automation setups, and email marketing designs, through to full-service email marketing support and SMS campaigns.
What are you waiting for? Get in touch with our friendly experts today!
