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Key Takeaways
- Liquid templating is the foundation, master conditional logic and null value handling before layering anything else.
- Connected Content solves the staleness problem, pulling live data at send time regardless of when the campaign was built.
- Braze Catalogs centralize product data so your team manages one source of truth, not forty separate campaign assets.
- Content Cards extend dynamic content into the in-app surface without interrupting the product experience.
- Content Blocks eliminate inconsistency and maintenance overhead across high-volume campaign libraries.
- BrazeAI Item Recommendations move personalization beyond rules to true machine-learning-powered individual relevance.
- Intelligent Delivery makes timing and channel dynamic, the essential last mile of any great content strategy.
At Customerik, we work with growth and CRM teams every day, and the single most common gap we see isn't a data problem or a channel problem. It's a content problem. Specifically, teams sending the same static message to everyone and wondering why engagement is declining.
The fix isn't more messages. It's smarter ones.
Dynamic content is the practice of making your campaigns adapt, to who a user is, what they've done, where they are, and what they're most likely to need next. And Braze is one of the most capable platforms we've seen for delivering this at scale. The challenge, in our experience, is that most teams use only two or three of the tools Braze actually provides.
This guide breaks down all seven. A 2024 personalization study by Deloitte Digital found that brands classed as personalization leaders were 48% more likely to exceed their annual revenue goals and 71% more likely to see stronger customer loyalty. These are the methods Customerik uses to help clients get there.
Why Dynamic Content Has Become Non-Negotiable
When we audit a new client's Braze setup at Customerik, one of the first things we look at is how their messages are constructed. Are they built once and sent to everyone? Or are they adapting to the individual?
The difference in outcomes is stark. Research has found that when marketers use tools like dynamic content to personalize the messages they send to customers, they see more than a 27% increase in related conversions compared to messages without personalization. That's not a marginal improvement, that's the difference between a campaign that pays for itself and one that doesn't.
Beyond conversions, dynamic content changes how users perceive your brand. A message that feels relevant builds trust. One that feels generic, or worse, off-target, erodes it. Between January 1 and December 31, 2025, the Braze platform processed 25.8 trillion data points from a variety of ingestion sources and made 8.7 trillion profile updates. The data infrastructure to make every message individually relevant already exists inside Braze. The question is whether your team is using it.
Here are the seven methods Customerik recommends, and implements, for dynamic content delivery in Braze.
1. Liquid Templating, The Foundation of Everything
Every dynamic content strategy Customerik builds on Braze starts here. Liquid is the templating language that powers personalization across every Braze message type, email, push, SMS, in-app, and Content Cards.
Liquid is an open-source template language developed by Shopify that you can use in Braze to pull user profile data into messages and customize that data, for example, using Liquid tags to create conditional messages such as sending different offers based on a user's subscription anniversary date.
But in our work at Customerik, we push Liquid well beyond first-name personalization. The real leverage is in conditional logic, building a single email template that renders a completely different experience depending on a user's lifetime value tier, loyalty status, last purchase category, geographic region, or any custom attribute your team has defined. One template. Every segment. No duplication.
You can use for loop logic in your Liquid snippets to cycle through blocks until a condition is met, useful for checking whether a product is in stock or whether a product has a minimum rating before surfacing it in a message. This is something we implement for clients regularly: ensuring that product emails only ever surface in-stock, eligible items, no broken experiences, no irrelevant recommendations.
Liquid also handles null value defaults, date formatting, currency localization, and conditional send logic (abort messaging), making it the glue that holds every other dynamic content method together.
Customerik tip: Before building complex Liquid logic, map out every user state your template needs to handle. The most robust templates we build at Customerik account for five to eight scenarios, VIP, mid-tier, new, lapsing, re-engaged, locale variants, and null/empty data fallbacks, all within a single template.
Best use cases: conditional offer messaging, loyalty tier personalization, multi-segment templates, localized content, date-triggered messaging.
2. Connected Content, Live Data at the Moment of Send
One of the most powerful capabilities we activate for Customerik clients is Connected Content, and it's consistently one of the most underused tools we find in new audits.
Braze Connected Content is used for personalization, but unlike Liquid templating, this data comes from an external endpoint rather than stored data within Braze. In plain terms: Connected Content lets you make a live API call at the exact moment a message is delivered and inject the response directly into the content.
Why does this matter? Because campaigns are built hours, days, or even weeks before they're sent. Product recommendations that were accurate when the campaign launched may be out of stock by send time. Prices change. Loyalty balances update. Store hours shift. Connected Content means none of that creates a bad user experience, because the data is always pulled fresh, right at delivery.
Canva used Connected Content alongside a new localization strategy to automate content translation via Google Sheets API, ensuring relevant experiences in over 20 languages, achieving a 33% increase in open rates and a 2.5% lift in engagement while maintaining 99% deliverability across their massive global audience.
At Customerik, we use Connected Content to pull live inventory and pricing from client backends, real-time loyalty balances and tier statuses, location-specific store data, weather-based contextual content, and personalized event or booking details. We also implement Liquid abort logic alongside Connected Content calls, using Liquid templating, you have the option to abort messages with conditional logic and specify an abort reason that will be saved to the Message Activity Log, so messages are never sent if the API returns insufficient or broken data.
Customerik tip: Always build a fallback template for Connected Content calls. We design every Connected Content implementation with a primary dynamic version and a clean static fallback, so no user ever receives a broken or empty message if the API response is delayed.
Best use cases: live product recommendations, real-time pricing, loyalty and account data, weather-triggered content, appointment and event reminders.
3. Braze Catalogs, One Source of Truth for Product Content
Before Braze Catalogs, the teams we worked with faced a familiar problem: product-level personalization required Liquid scripting embedded directly inside each campaign. When a product name, image, or price changed, every campaign referencing it needed a manual update. At scale, that's a significant risk and a constant time drain on the team.
Catalogs solved this. Braze Catalogs act as dynamic repositories adept at efficiently handling and disseminating content across various campaigns and channels. By storing non-user data separately from profiles, Catalogs provide a streamlined alternative that reduces dependence on IT and code development. Updates can be managed from a single centralized location, and Catalogs uniquely enable content management without consuming data points.
At Customerik, we build Catalog structures for clients that serve as the single source of truth for all product, offer, and location data referenced across Braze. When data changes, it changes once, in the Catalog, and propagates instantly across every active campaign and Canvas.
Catalog data can be used to personalize cross-channel messaging including abandoned cart reminders, new product alerts, and 1:1 product recommendations. For example, if you have a custom attribute called "LastOrdered" with a nested property of "product_id," you can personalize post-purchase messages with the product name, description, and image of the last item ordered.
The zero-data-point cost is also a meaningful operational advantage for clients managing large user bases, product personalization without the data point overhead.
Customerik tip: Structure your Catalogs with downstream campaign use in mind, not just data architecture logic. We help clients design Catalog schemas that make Liquid lookups simple and maintainable, so the marketing team can build new campaigns without engineering support each time.
Best use cases: abandoned cart emails, post-purchase upsells, new product alerts, inventory-triggered notifications, personalized recommendation content.
4. Content Cards, Dynamic Content Inside the Product Experience
Most of the brands Customerik works with initially think of Braze dynamic content as something that happens in email and push. Content Cards open a completely different surface: persistent, in-app content that is personalized, targetable, and non-interruptive.
With Content Cards, you can send a highly targeted, dynamic stream of rich content to your customers within the apps they love without interrupting their experience. Content Cards are embedded directly into your app or website, letting you create message inboxes and custom interfaces that extend the reach of other channels. Content Cards support personalized features including card pinning, card dismissal, API-based delivery, Connected Content, custom card expiration times, and card analytics.
A key implementation detail Customerik emphasizes with every client: always use the "at first impression" creation setting for Content Cards. When cards are created at first impression, Braze calculates audience eligibility when the user enters the Canvas step. When the user next opens the app, Braze templates any personalization like Liquid or Connected Content and creates the card, this option usually delivers better performance. This ensures personalization reflects the user's current state at the moment they see the card, not a static snapshot from campaign build time.
Content Cards can be leveraged to create dynamic and interactive experiences, such as a Content Card pop-up at checkout providing users with last-minute promotions, well-placed cards like this are a great way to give users a nudge toward specific user actions.
We often use Content Cards at Customerik to create a persistent in-app notification center for clients, a feed of relevant offers, product updates, and onboarding milestones that updates as the user progresses, without any push send required.
Customerik tip: Coordinate Content Cards with your email and push strategy inside Canvas, rather than running them as standalone campaigns. A user who ignores a push notification may still engage with a Content Card the next time they open the app, and Canvas lets you orchestrate both from one flow.
Best use cases: in-app notifications inbox, loyalty program updates, onboarding milestones, checkout promotions, personalized product spotlights.
5. Content Blocks, Reusable Dynamic Modules at Scale
One of the operational wins Customerik consistently delivers for high-volume Braze clients is Content Block architecture. It sounds unglamorous. The results are significant.
Content Blocks are reusable content modules, built once, maintained in one place, referenced across every campaign and Canvas that needs them. They can contain Liquid logic, HTML, images, and links. When a Content Block is updated, every active campaign using it reflects the change automatically.
For clients running twenty, fifty, or a hundred active campaigns simultaneously, this is mission-critical. A loyalty tier banner, a localized footer, a personalized product recommendation grid, a promotional terms block, all managed centrally, all always consistent, all individually personalized at render time through Liquid.
The Customerik approach is to audit every new client's Braze instance for repeating content elements, headers, footers, offer blocks, disclaimer text, loyalty status displays, and migrate them into a structured Content Block library. This typically reduces campaign build time significantly and eliminates the category of error where the same promotional terms are updated in thirty-seven campaigns but accidentally missed in three.
Content Blocks also extend the power of Liquid personalization. A single Block can render differently for every user who receives it, VIP versus standard treatment, localized language, different imagery, while the marketing team maintains one version.
Customerik tip: Name your Content Blocks with a consistent taxonomy from day one. We implement naming conventions like [CB] Loyalty_Banner_v2 or [CB] Footer_UK_Legal for clients so the library stays navigable as it grows.
Best use cases: loyalty tier banners, localized headers and footers, promotional terms, brand elements, personalized product grids reused across multiple campaigns.
6. BrazeAI Item Recommendations, Machine Learning at the Message Level
Rule-based personalization has a ceiling. You can build Liquid logic and Catalog lookups for patterns you've already identified, but you can't build rules for the individual behavioral nuances of millions of users. That's where BrazeAI Item Recommendations come in, and it's one of the most impactful capabilities Customerik helps clients activate.
BrazeAI Item Recommendations use machine learning to analyze each user's individual behavioral history, views, clicks, purchases, wishlists, browse patterns, and automatically select the most relevant items from your Catalog to surface in a given message. No manual curation. No segment-level approximations. True 1:1 relevance at scale.
24S used BrazeAI and Canvas to launch eight personalized triggered campaigns alongside Braze AI Item Recommendations, boosting the brand's add-to-cart rate by 7% and purchase conversion rate by 35%. Those results reflect what Customerik consistently sees when clients make the shift from rule-based to ML-driven recommendations, a meaningful lift in both engagement and downstream revenue metrics.
Recommendations update continuously as user behavior evolves. A user who shifts their interests from one category to another sees updated recommendations that reflect where they are now, not where they were six months ago. Combined with Braze Catalogs and Connected Content, AI recommendations power fully automated, individually personalized campaigns with minimal ongoing maintenance.
Customerik tip: Start BrazeAI recommendations with your highest-intent campaign, typically post-purchase or browse abandonment, where recommendation relevance has the most direct impact on conversion. Validate performance against a control group before rolling out across all campaigns.
Best use cases: post-purchase upsell emails, browse abandonment campaigns, personalized weekly digests, in-app product spotlights, re-engagement campaigns.
7. Intelligent Delivery, Making Timing and Channel Dynamic
Dynamic content strategy doesn't end with what's inside the message. When and where it's delivered is equally important, and often overlooked. Braze's Intelligent Delivery suite makes both adaptive rather than fixed, which is something Customerik bakes into every mature campaign architecture we build.
Intelligent Timing learns each individual user's optimal send time based on their historical engagement patterns and delivers messages at their personal peak window. Not a single send time applied to a whole segment, each user's message lands when that specific person is most likely to open it. Two users in the same campaign can receive the same email hours apart, and both experiences are optimized.
Intelligent Channel selection takes this further, automatically routing each step of a Canvas journey through the channel where a specific user historically engages most. Rather than manually deciding push versus email versus SMS for each step, Braze evaluates individual channel preferences and delivers through the path of least resistance.
Using reinforcement learning integrated with Braze and AI-driven personalization, one brand analyzed individual behavior and preferences to determine the optimal message, creative, channel, timing, and frequency for each subscriber, scaling from 300 variations of communications to 1.2 million, creating true 1:1 marketing personalization at scale, driving a 14% increase in subscriptions, an 8% lift in average annual occupancy, and a 105% boost in cross-sells, even as average subscription prices rose 20%.
At Customerik, we treat Intelligent Delivery as the final layer of every dynamic content strategy, ensuring the right content, built with all six methods above, actually reaches each user through the right channel at the right moment.
Customerik tip: Activate Intelligent Timing in combination with a quiet hours window. We configure both for clients so that Braze optimizes toward each user's peak time without ever sending during late-night hours, balancing personalization with brand experience.
Best use cases: lifecycle campaigns with mixed engagement patterns, re-engagement flows, high-frequency sends where timing sensitivity is high, cross-channel Canvas orchestration.
How we Put All 7 Together
Understanding each method individually is the starting point. The real competitive advantage comes from layering them together, which is exactly how Customerik architects client campaigns.
Here's a real-world example of all seven working in a single post-purchase flow: Liquid logic personalizes the opening copy based on purchase category and loyalty tier. Connected Content pulls live inventory to validate recommendations are available. Braze Catalogs supply the product details and images. BrazeAI Item Recommendations select which products each individual user is most likely to purchase next. A Content Card surfaces additional recommendations the next time the user opens the app. A Content Block maintains the brand footer and promotional terms consistently across every campaign. Intelligent Timing determines when the email sends, and Intelligent Channel selects whether the re-engagement nudge goes as email or push.
That's a single campaign that feels individually crafted for every user, and it runs automatically, without your team manually touching it for each cohort.
This is what Customerik means when we talk about building CRM that scales. Not more campaigns. Smarter ones.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is dynamic content in Braze and how does it work?
Dynamic content in Braze refers to message content that adapts in real time based on user data, behavior, catalog data, live API calls, or AI-driven decisions, rather than being static and identical for every recipient. Braze delivers dynamic content through seven primary methods: Liquid templating, Connected Content, Catalogs, Content Cards, Content Blocks, BrazeAI Item Recommendations, and Intelligent Delivery. Customerik helps brands implement and layer all seven within their CRM strategy. - Which Braze dynamic content method should I start with?
Customerik always recommends starting with Liquid templating. It's built into every Braze message type, requires no additional setup, and delivers immediate personalization impact. Once your team is comfortable with conditional logic and Liquid, layer in Braze Catalogs for product data, then Connected Content for live API personalization. - What is the difference between Liquid templating and Connected Content in Braze?
Liquid templating pulls data already stored within Braze, user profile attributes, custom attributes, event properties, and catalog data. Connected Content makes a live API call to an external endpoint at the moment of send and injects the live response into the message. Both use Liquid syntax. Customerik uses both together regularly, Liquid for user-level personalization, Connected Content for product- and context-level live data. - Do Braze Catalogs consume data points?
No, one of the key operational advantages of Braze Catalogs is that they store non-user data separately from user profiles, meaning catalog usage does not consume data points. This makes them a cost-efficient alternative to storing product data as custom attributes. Customerik specifically recommends Catalogs to clients who are managing large product inventories and watching data point consumption closely. - How does Customerik approach BrazeAI Item Recommendations for new clients?
We start by validating that the client's Catalog data is structured correctly and that sufficient behavioral event data is flowing into Braze for the recommendation engine to learn from. We then activate recommendations in one high-intent campaign first, typically post-purchase or browse abandonment, and measure lift against a control group before expanding across the full campaign stack. - Can small CRM teams implement all seven dynamic content methods?
Yes, with the right prioritization. Tools like Braze Catalogs and Content Blocks are specifically designed to reduce operational overhead, making sophisticated dynamic content achievable without heavy engineering involvement. Customerik works with lean CRM teams regularly and prioritizes the methods that deliver the highest return on effort first, typically Liquid, Catalogs, and Content Blocks, before layering in Connected Content, AI recommendations, and Intelligent Delivery as the team's capability grows.
Customerik is a Braze specialist consultancy helping growth and CRM teams design, build, and scale campaigns that perform. From dynamic content architecture and Liquid strategy to full lifecycle program design, we turn Braze capability into measurable business results.
CTA: Ready to unlock the full potential of your Braze setup? Let's talk.
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