From Audit to Action: A Strategic Braze Optimization Roadmap

BLADE partnered with VGV to unlock the full potential of their marketing stack and lifecycle campaigns.

‍

Through a comprehensive audit of their Braze implementation, VGV delivered a strategic playbook with technical optimizations, new campaign use cases aligned to business goals—driving first purchases, encouraging second purchases, and optimizing the passholder experience—along with recommendations to leverage underutilized features for greater personalization, scalability, and automation.

‍

The Challenge 

After launching its redesigned Flutter-powered app with Very Good Ventures (VGV), BLADE—the pioneer in premium urban air mobility—focused on maximizing user engagement. With over 100 million miles flown and a growing customer base, the company had already invested in a best-in-class MarTech stack, including Braze, Segment, BigQuery, and GA4, in order to enable personalization and scalable engagement.

‍

Despite these tools, BLADE saw an opportunity to maximize Braze's advanced capabilities. With evolving business priorities and a lean marketing team, they recognized the potential to deepen personalization, unlock additional features, and drive more repeat purchases.

The engagement strategy focused on driving repeat behavior—increasing the number of users completing their first and second purchases while reducing the number of passholders who purchased a flight pass without booking a trip. The goal was to encourage more customers to book their second ride sooner, shortening the time between their first and subsequent flights.

‍

A Premium Customer Journey

Encouraging incremental purchases in BLADE’s premium market presents a unique challenge. With flights priced as a premium travel experience—and demand heavily shaped by seasonality, geography, and key events—converting even a single additional trip represents significant business value.

‍

At the same time, BLADE customers expect a premium, personalized experience—not just during their flight, but throughout every interaction with the brand. This means their lifecycle messaging must be impeccably timed and context-aware, adapting to where each customer is in their journey.

The challenge lied in balancing precision, personalization, and timing—crafting campaigns that feel effortless and exclusive, while driving meaningful business growth.

But First, What is Braze? 

Braze is a leading customer engagement platform built for enterprise-scale, cross-channel communication. Designed with a mobile-first foundation, it empowers organizations to deliver personalized messaging across email, push, in-app, SMS, and more—all in real time. Its scalability and orchestration capabilities make it ideal for enterprises seeking to enhance customer retention, boost customer lifetime value (CLV), and unify customer experiences across every touchpoint.

‍

Our Solution 

VGV delivered a Braze Playbook with 34 recommendations, crafted during a six-week engagement that moved through three phases: audit, playbook development, and early execution. 

‍

The recommendations were staged using a clear framework designed to evolve with BLADE’s technical maturity:

‍

• Takeoff: Immediate wins launched with the existing setup—no extra tools, data, or development required.
  
  
• Hover: Intermediate campaigns requiring moderate development effort and enriched data.
  
  
• Fly: High-value, long-term opportunities demanding deeper integration, cross-team collaboration, and more investment—but promising the most transformative results.

This phased approach gave BLADE a staged roadmap—balancing tactical quick wins with strategic initiatives to deliver both immediate impact and sustainable growth.

We also built and launched a handful of priority next-gen campaigns, leveraging advanced Braze features, including behavior-driven messaging and AI optimization.

‍

As part of this initiative, VGV also designed and developed a Braze Design System—a custom set of drag-and-drop components hard-coded for Braze. These components dynamically adapt based on the recipient’s profile, ensuring offers, rewards, and action nudges are tailored to each customer’s journey stage. The system was engineered for maximum efficiency, enabling BLADE’s marketing team to build and launch campaigns faster while maintaining consistency and precision.

"VGV took our lifecycle marketing to a new level. A fresh audit and playbook gave us a clear, prioritized roadmap, and their execution unlocked use cases we hadn’t been able to activate on our own.” - Christiana Weller, VP of Marketing

How We Did It

The engagement began with a comprehensive audit of BLADE’s CRM ecosystem. VGV evaluated active Braze campaigns, assessed adoption of key features, and benchmarked performance against best practices across email and push channels. This diagnostic phase uncovered gaps in data architecture, campaign orchestration, and feature utilization—insights that directly informed the roadmap ahead.

From there, VGV delivered a staged playbook that balanced tactical quick wins with strategic, transformative opportunities.

‍

To maintain momentum, our team immediately began implementing select recommendations while developing a comprehensive Braze data tracking plan. This plan not only provided the data needed to power the recommended use cases but also optimized BLADE’s data structure to reduce data point consumption—making their Braze implementation more cost-effective, personalized, and automation-ready.

‍

Key lifecycle campaigns and use cases included:

‍

• Post-flight return booking nudges to drive repeat rides
• Enhanced experiences for Pass holders, strengthening loyalty
• Contextual permission requests for location and push notifications
• Enhanced flight receipts with dynamic, personalized content
• Post-booking add-on upsells to increase average order value
• Geo-triggered offers for BLADE helicopters when customers land at select airports
• “Surprise & delight” campaigns for loyal customers
• Live Notifications (Android Live Updates and iOS Live Activities) for real-time flight and service updates
• Pet-centric messaging for travelers flying with animals
• Birthday campaigns to foster personalized engagement moments

Together, these initiatives created a highly personalized, end-to-end lifecycle strategy that elevated BLADE’s premium customer experience while unlocking measurable growth opportunities through Braze.

“The custom Braze Design System they built has made our team faster, more efficient, and far more personalized in how we communicate with customers.” - Christiana Weller, VP of Marketing

‍

The Result 

The Playbook engagement provided BLADE with a clear path forward, transforming their Braze setup from underutilized tools into an actionable growth engine. 

‍

Before partnering with VGV, BLADE had invested significantly in Braze but was only scratching the surface of its advanced capabilities. As first-time Braze users, their initial data architecture limited what was possible. The Playbook brought clarity—outlining unlockable use cases, untapped features, and a prioritized implementation path that empowered the team to use Braze to its full potential.

‍

In just six weeks, VGV:

‍

• Delivered a prioritized roadmap showing what to do first and why
• Surfaced data gaps to guide engineering priorities
• Implemented a component-based email system for faster builds, consistency, and scalable personalization
• Launched a revamped welcome series to improve new user onboarding
• Built optimized engagement flows for BLADE Airport passholders to enhance the experience
• Upskilled the team on Figma and HTML, increasing self-sufficiency

“VGV combined strategic clarity with exceptional technical expertise, and they were an incredible partner every step of the way."
- Christiana Weller, VP of Marketing

‍