Problem:

Mercari needed a way to grow its promotional strategy to drive more website traffic without overwhelming the campaign manager workload. How do you achieve higher output and impact without overwhelming operational bandwidth? 

Strategy:

Using a combination of Braze’s native features, as well as advanced automation techniques I’ve developed over time, I transformed a tedious build process (12 distinct canvases per promotion) into a scalable campaign framework powered by content blocks, canvas flows, liquid logic, and automated landing pages.

Results: 

Faster launches, bigger impact: 

• 6x increase in promotional capacity without additional headcount

• Full campaign updates in ~2 hours vs. days

• Landing page build time reduced from 2 weeks to same-day

My Story: 

This is an all-too-familiar story: We can’t expand the team yet, but we still need to dramatically increase our output. My favorite kind of problem to solve. 

I started by breaking down the monthly promotional calendar into its operational components by category of promotion: 

• Lead-up campaigns and launch announcements across our full suite of channels

• Centralized landing destinations

• Frequency and cadence for each series

From there I identified 12 unique canvas builds (some with over 10 steps) and a single promotional landing page as the recurring workload. The goal was to remove duplication and centralize updates.

Key Steps: 

1. Modularizing copy and creative 

   1. Extracted promotion-specific details (event name, promo codes, run times) from campaign copy and creative, replacing the copy with Braze Content Blocks. This enabled instant global updates.

   2. Example transformation:
      Before: Our 2-day flash deal event is too good to last. Browse now, and get ready to buy with FLASH10 before 8/12 11:59 pm PDT.
      After: Our [Promo Name] event is too good to last. Browse now, and get ready to buy with [Promo Code] before [End Date].

2. Streamlined campaign builds

   1. We moved links into content blocks for faster swaps, and saved templates for instant duplication with our modals. 

   2. Shifted triggers from one-time schedules to webhook-based triggers, allowing campaigns to run on a rolling schedule with minimal intervention. 

3. Automated landing pages

   1. Leveraged Braze’s Landing Page feature, which we already customize from the top down, plus a custom JavaScript that dynamically updates based on weekly variables. 

   2. Reduced front-end engineering projects from a two week lead time to same-day execution by campaign managers.

Why does it matter? 

This system allowed Mercari to: 

• Increase promotional cadence before we were able to hire additional staff

• Maintain high-quality creative and messaging consistency

• React to quick marketing opportunities without operational bottlenecks.

How I would improve this in the future:

• AI-driven copy variant testing to optimize engagement at scale

• Individual product recommendations via CDP-integrated AI (a blue sky idea, if there ever was one)

Automated campaign builder AI to create and schedule campaigns based on our promotional calendar without manual campaign work (again I say, blue sky idea if there ever was one)