A Complete Guide to Customer Engagement

At Braze, we consistently see that companies that practice effective customer engagement can deliver valuable messaging experiences to customers across all relevant channels while still respecting their privacy. In short, they’re the companies that use customer engagement technologies powered by live consumer data to listen to their customers, understand and interpret their actions, and act quickly and in real-time to improve their experience.

But what exactly is customer engagement, what does an effective strategy look like, and what impact can it have? In this guide, we’ll walk through:

• What is customer engagement?
• Why is customer engagement important?
• Customer engagement vs CRM: What’s the difference?
• How did we get here: The evolution of customer engagement
• 5 real-life examples of customer engagement
• How to create a best-in-class customer engagement campaign
• Top 5 customer engagement metrics to measure
• 3 ways a customer engagement platform maximizes your results
• Top customer engagement FAQs
• Featured customer engagement resources

What Is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement refers to the full set of activities that companies use to build and maintain direct, meaningful relationships with their customers.

Simply put, customer engagement is about nurturing meaningful relationships with consumers that drive higher customer lifetime value and lower acquisition costs, resulting in deeper loyalty and stronger business growth. Unlike traditional marketing, customer engagement allows brands to speak directly to individuals by understanding their unique needs, which contribute to better business outcomes. From personalized email campaigns to responsive, multi-step customer journeys based on an individual’s past purchase behavior or preferences, the possibilities you can unlock with this approach are both effective and endless.

So, what’s holding so many top companies back from achieving best-in-class customer engagement? The reality is that many struggle to define customer engagement and understand how to do it exceptionally well. And the stakes could not possibly be higher. For one, acquiring new customers is more expensive than ever, with over 30% of marketers reporting they experience average-to-no returns on their investment. Add to this compounding pressure on companies to foster their already established connections. Even for leading brands, it’s not easy to cut through the noise in such a crowded marketplace or navigate the sea of data challenges in the lead up to the elimination of third-party cookies. Lastly, the range of tech solutions available to marketers has exploded in recent years—making it downright confusing for companies to know which platforms are worth their investment.

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

Brands aren’t just in competition with other brands in their vertical anymore. The average consumer is bombarded daily with 4,000 to 10,000 ads, meaning companies compete with every other brand out there to earn consumer attention and then keep it. Customer engagement can help cut through the noise by flipping the typical consumer interaction into relationship-building. It does so by personalizing every message around the individual: Their preferences, behavior, and desires. Customers are savvier than ever before, and they’re looking for brands that understand not only who they are, but can anticipate their needs in advance.

Customer engagement has become the deciding factor in pulling some businesses into the lead while others fall behind. We found 98% of companies that ranked their customer engagement as excellent or good exceeded their revenue goals.

Here’s a breakdown of 5 reasons why customer engagement should be a priority for businesses across all industries.

• Customer Engagement Drives Brand Loyalty. With such a noisy market, building brand loyalty can be the difference between stagnation and growth—and 88% of consumers say it takes three or more purchases to build brand loyalty. That affinity for a brand influences our decision to buy from one business over another. Brands must deliver 1:1 experiences that engage customers directly, leverage data, personalize their experiences, and interpret their data.

• Customer Engagement Increases Customer Lifetime Value. What’s the only thing better than acquiring a shiny new customer? Keep the ones you already have, especially since increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits up to 95%. After all your hard work in winning them over, customer engagement can help you reduce costs by effectively retaining them. For instance, encouraging more persistent interactions with your brand via personalized recommendations can provide valuable insight into which segments to re-engage with before they churn.
• Customer Engagement Unlocks Higher and more Consistent ROI. Knowledge is power. When budgeting your marketing spend, it’s crucial to understand which marketing activities will move the needle most successfully. The right customer engagement platform can help businesses understand how consumers interact with their brands. For instance, you can learn which channels resonate best for specific message types and which campaigns successfully reached your goals—knowledge which actually impacts higher ROI.
• Customer Engagement Activates Word-of-Mouth. An effective customer engagement strategy not only enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty but can push fans of your brand to become your most vocal advocates—ultimately helping to acquire future customers. From social media to incentive-driven referral programs, a customer engagement platform can help unlock marketing creativity to ensure no endorsement goes to waste.
• Compliance is Top-of-Mind for Everyone. It Helps Navigate Zero- and First-Party Data. Compliance is top-of-mind for everyone. For companies desiring a holistic, real-time view of each customer, the shifting winds of data regulations and the retirement of third-party cookies have become a challenge. Since a third of brands cite this as a top concern, companies should search for solutions built to pull in zero- and first-party data to inform personalization and customer journey management.

Customer Engagement vs. CRM: What’s the Difference?

Here’s an easy way to separate a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system: While “customer engagement” and “customer relationship management” might sound similar, these are two distinct concepts. A CEP prioritizes engagement, while a CRM prioritizes management. The two goals support one another but are quite different on a fundamental level.

What’s a Customer Relationship Management system?

The utility is right there in the name. A CRM system helps businesses manage consumer relationships and collects information to help nurture them. Acting as a centralized record of all customer interactions, a CRM keeps track of everything from individual users’ contact information to their marketing preferences and purchase history. CRM software can also help sales and support teams automate their outreach records but may or may not include messaging functionality, like the ability to send emails en masse to specific audience segments.

What’s a Customer Engagement Platform?

A CEP orchestrates data-informed consumer engagement across multiple channels, like email, mobile push, WhatsApp, and more. A CEP also aggregates data so businesses can interpret and act on it accordingly and effectively segment users to ensure brand experiences remain relevant and cohesive. While a CRM might give you information for reference before you jump on a call with a prospective customer, a CEP allows you to execute and automate messaging campaigns at scale while reducing intrusive interactions. To ensure the most effective personalization at scale, a winning CEP is an all-in-one solution for orchestrating customer journeys, delivering them cross-channel, and enriching those messages with first- or zero-party data. Centralizing your customer engagement in one place is vital because you can easily segment, personalize, and deploy messages to your customers based on a suite of factors, like which channels they prefer, which promotions they acted on, and past purchases they’ve made.

Customer Engagement Vs. CRM Campaign Examples

Now that we’ve established how a CEP differs from a CRM, let’s dive into how campaigns for each one look.

Customer Relationship Management Campaign Example

1. Pyrite Financial is at the top of the heap when it comes to helping people keep their money safe (including by expanding mobile banking offerings), but recently noticed a gap in their growth strategy, especially when it comes to managing B2B outreach and winning large accounts.

2. First, there were many sources of truth regarding outreach. The company’s growth team consistently sent batch-and-blast emails to everyone on their list because they could not segment users. Mostly, they just had users' emails—so outreach was pretty hit-or-miss.

3. Pyrite Financial’s team also noticed in their audit that they weren’t keeping track of who they’d contacted already, meaning sometimes they sent the same or similar messages to users two or three times. This was not a desirable experience for anyone (and a frustrating experience for customers), and was not helping close any big deals.

4. To counter this, Pyrite Financial sought a CRM that would help effectively centralize all of their customer information into one place. They also updated their opt-in form to collect more details they could leverage later in their CEP

5. The benefit of the CRM is that it could integrate seamlessly with the CEP they had in mind and also help track how fast their customer team was closing deals to ensure they stayed on target with their goals. Pyrite Financial’s CRM software also could help maintain the fidelity of their data and automate keeping things up to date—from when a lead last visited their website to when they’d successfully converted.

Customer Engagement Platform Campaign Example

1. MovieCanon is an up-and-coming streaming service that has recently won significant market share. However, when the company looked to expand into original programming with the launch of their first in-house series, they realized they were faced with a big challenge around promoting it. They also identified opportunities where they could reduce churn, which had been increasing as they grew.

2. First, they dug into the consumer data they had on hand from their CRM, from full names to contact information like their email address. This data would be critical to building a customer journey focused on activation.

3. Next, they fleshed out an entire customer lifecycle stage in their CEP’s customer journey orchestration tool. Within the first two weeks of signing up for the platform on any device, they would receive an onboarding flow populated with the app’s most popular content as well as recommending the new series. These types of rich experiences help build better relationships with users for the long term.

4. To directly target customers at risk of churning, users whose activity lapsed after 30 days were sent messages personalized to their viewing history, featuring recommendations for their favorite shows.

5. Within Braze, their CEP, MovieCanon could easily segment customers and schedule sends for each campaign to ensure each message was delivered to the right person, at the right time, and on the channel of their preference.

6. As they continue to test and learn, MovieCanon built out even more personalized flows targeted for every step in the customer journey.

How Did We Get Here: The Evolution of Customer Engagement

Ten years ago, “customer engagement” was relatively obscure. Was it only mobile messaging? (Short answer: No.)

So, what’s changed in the marketing world in the last 20 years? Just about everything you can imagine. Today, about 7.1 million retailers sell their products online. That’s quite a dramatic shift from when everyone relied on third-party intermediaries to sell their goods, making it impossible to collect the data necessary to build a direct brand-consumer relationship. While historically, people bought products exclusively from physical stores, brands now need to engage their users in-person and online without sacrificing cohesion.

Now, contrast that to the current landscape, where most consumers live on their smartphones—making it possible and advantageous for brands to connect directly with them on the channels where they spend the most time, like email, SMS, in-app messaging, and social media. Engaging with customers directly on these channels can boost sales and give companies a window into understanding what excites, motivates, and (sure, let’s address the elephant) irritates their customers. Ideally, data is crucial in providing insight into what your customers want and what could send them to a competitor.

Want to learn more? Check out the Evolution of Customer Engagement.

5 Real-Life Examples of Customer Engagement

Now that we’ve explored the motivations and benefits behind creating a customer engagement strategy let’s explore how five trailblazing brands lead the way.

1. Burger King: Gamification for the Win

Known for award-winning campaigns and its crave-worthy menu, QSR titan Burger King set out to drive the same peak awareness among new and existing customers to its growing loyalty program, Royal Perks. What better way to up the app engagement than by making a game of it for their most loyal fans?

Burger King partnered with Coca-Cola to develop Thirst for Speed, a retro 8-bit game incorporating a clever cross-channel strategy. Users dared to beat their race time to win prizes they could redeem and pair with items in the app. Users were nudged to join in on the fun using a mix of in and out-of-product channels like push notifications, in-app messages, and email. Lastly, Burger King segmented users to ensure each message was bespoke to their experiences, so new players and returning champions were served up individually relevant messages. By making their strategy fun and effective in service of their growth goals, the brand acquired new users, enticed existing users to engage with the app even more, and drove up digital sales.

Results:

• 19.5% Purchase Frequency Increase
• 210K Unique Players
• 75% of Users Who Played Made a Purchase Within 1 Day Post-Gameplay

2. Quizlet: Leveraging Personalization to Boost Brand Loyalty

Ever feel like you don’t know what to do with all of the data your brand collects? In 2021, the online learning platform Quizlet wanted a better way to engage its loyal following of 60 million users who sign in each month. With a cache of data on their hands around their study habits and app usage, the company’s Growth Platform Team set out to find a way to better use it in their messaging campaigns. Using related content, they could dynamically pull in data to make each message more personally relevant and helpful across many channels, including email, in-app, and mobile push notifications. This enabled the brand to make recommendations for study sets individuals users would explore next based on the courses they previously selected. Quizlet has seen a significant spike in learning sessions and monthly active users by meeting modern consumers' expectations with personalized, progress-tracking messaging.

Results:

• 17 Million Incremental Learning Sessions
• 2 Million Incremental Monthly Active Users
• 2,500 Incremental Subscribers

3. Canva: Leveraging Email to Increase User Engagement

Game-changing graphic design platform Canva uses email in innovative ways to push the limits of what’s possible using today’s technology—much to the delight of their loyal customer base. They’ve embraced experimentation, iteration, and customer-centricity to deliver more value and keep their communications as fresh as possible. What’s their secret to success?

As the world adjusted to stay-at-home orders during the pandemic, Canva set out to put its customers’ needs first. First, they worked to tailor every single message to individual users’ interests, languages, and preferences. To deliver content helpful to users during COVID-19, they also needed to streamline their localization efforts and increase email sends while maintaining 99% deliverability. Using related content, the team could dynamically pull in localized, translated content that saved the team full work days. In practice, that meant using their CEP to initiate an IP warming strategy to safely scale its daily send volume as it ramped up from 30 million to 50 million weekly sends. Next, emails to customers featured helpful, relevant content like a new tutorial on how to use Zoom and upload custom backgrounds—and using their CEP, this email campaign could be seamlessly executed in under five days in 20 different languages. Putting people at the center of their customer engagement strategy enabled Canva to support the global design community in unprecedented ways, leading to higher email open rates and engagement overall.

Results:

• 99% Deliverability While Doubling Down on Email Volumes
• 2.5% Increase in Platform Engagement
• 33% Higher Open Rates

4. Gympass: Driving Revenue, Clicks, and New Users Using Personalization and Experimentation

Getting on the path to a wellness routine can be overwhelming, and staying motivated is a challenge. For wellness brand Gympass, helping customers to make setting better fitness habits a more seamless experience is all in a day’s work, thanks to a customer engagement strategy that embraces experimentation, intelligent automation, and personalization.

With a worldwide network of over 50,000 gyms, their company’s growth specialists sought a low-lift solution to engage users in more hyper-personalized and beneficial ways.

Early on, the team centered its strategy around creating customized messaging campaigns that could be executed without much manual work. This would free up the team to focus on A/B testing and optimization—rather than deploying and managing a high volume of campaigns. They hypothesized that personalizing messaging to individual users throughout the customer journey would be more effective for driving conversions and higher engagement overall. Using a customer journey orchestration tool, the team created a series of multi-staged trips across the lifecycle, each triggered by specific actions taken within the product, like when a user creates their account, searches for a HIIT or yoga session, or explores one of the Gympass’ partners. But they didn’t stop there. Using this flow, the brand could also trigger in-app messages to survey users about their interests and gain insight to make individualized profiles more robust. From there, Gympass harnessed the power to customize campaigns even more deeply, surfacing the types of plans a user would be interested in based on their survey information. As a result of up-leveling its personalization strategy, the team has seen higher net-new revenue within its new subscriber revenue stream and a staggering click rate of 70%. Catering to individuals never looked like a better business bet.

Results:

• 25% Net-New Revenue Associated with New Subscriber Revenue Stream
• 70% Click-through rates
• 3X Increase in sign-up volume

5. Deliveroo: Hungry for Cross-Functional Data at Scale

From its London origins to expanding into 13 countries worldwide, leading food delivery service, Deliveroo is an expert at scaling customer engagement operations. As a provider of direct selections from the most popular restaurants to their hungry following’s doorstep, this brand wisely invested in the latest technology to innovate, expand, and explore new channels and tools that drive more value for customers and couriers alike. Embracing a culture of experimentation can only happen with suitable data sources and management tools.

To provide the rich, relevant messages that customers worldwide crave across multiple channels, their CRM, Data, and Engineering teams joined forces early on in their customer engagement journey. From a data perspective, they needed the most accurate campaign data in real-time to make each experience as personalized and seamless as possible. To do this, they settled on a mix of tools: A built-for-purpose customer engagement platform featuring a high-powered data export tool that automatically moves data between the CEP and each layer of their tech stack. Ensuring the fidelity of their data was critical to producing frictionless experiences for each customer. Still, data visualization was also a factor in ensuring the entire CRM team could gain a holistic view of their customers. Using a trusted partner, all campaign data could be easily viewed in a single dashboard—making it possible for Deliveroo to break down the data silos that often slow brands down while improving their time-to-value.

Results:

• 8X Reduction in Time Spend Fielding Data Requests

How to Create a Best-in-Class Customer Engagement Campaign

Now that we’ve seen how leading brands worldwide deliver world-class customer engagement experiences let’s explore what that looks like in practice. Below, you’ll find a step-by-step breakdown of crucial tactics to implement to take your customer engagement to the next level.

Make a Human Connection

Your customers are individual people, not faceless commodities. Personalization is what sparks these compelling brand experiences. Done correctly, according to McKinsey’s Julien Boudet, “personalization initiatives can deliver significant value, including on average 10-30% revenue uplift and higher customer acquisition rates and engagement.”

To effectively execute a personalization strategy, there are various approaches you can take. The best path forward is to identify which matches your specific customer engagement goals and strategize ways to deliver in those particular use cases. Here are a few examples of personalization that tell customers you are putting their needs and preferences front and center.

Name-Based Personalization

Are your comms still leaning on “Hi there” for copy? There’s no better way to speak to the individual than to address them directly. Name-based personalization automatically pulls in each recipient's name from the customer profile and adds the message wherever you find it adds value.

Event- and Attribute-Based Personalization

Want to build a stronger relationship with your customers? Try leveraging the data you collect on who they are and what matters most to them. For instance, you can infuse a push notification with a person’s most-ordered menu items, their clothing size, or countless other things that add unprecedented value to the messages they receive.

Location-Based Personalization

The best customer engagement is responsive to each user’s physical location. Personalizing customer interactions based on location is also a great way to segment users, ensuring the messages they receive are the most personally relevant to them.

Master Cross-Channel Messaging

To reach customers where they are in the moments that matter most, brands must be able to leverage a cross-channel approach. Done successfully, the impact can be game-changing. Braze research found that when brands embrace cross-channel engagement, they see a 55% increase in 90-day retention.

At the core of any cross-channel strategy is finding the right channel mix. We found using cross-channel messages, compared with only in-product messages, brands saw a 5X increase in customer lifetime value and a 6.4X increase in purchases per user. Think of channels as the messenger for the content you wish to deliver to consumers. Below you’ll find an overview of the channels used today in customer engagement strategies to help businesses extend their reach as wide and effectively as possible. True cross-channel messaging uses in-product and out-of-product channels to ensure a truly coordinated customer experience.

In-Product Channels

These channels have the highest probability of capturing the attention of customers more inclined to want to hear what your brand has to say, like those actively engaging with your website or mobile app.

1. In-App Messages (IAMs)

In-app messages enable brands to send messages directly to active users within the mobile app. This is the perfect vehicle for any messages you’d like customers to see when they’re in your product, like a special promotion or relevant product recommendation.

2. In-Browser Messages (IBMs)

In-browser messages act as in-app messages for web experiences. Use this flexible channel to surface personalized outreach to visitors active with their desktops.

3. Content Cards

Content Cards are persistent messages within websites and mobile apps that enable brands to engage their active users in unobtrusive, compelling ways.

Out-of-Product Channels

Out-of-product channels can reach customers beyond an app or website and engage any users who aren’t currently engaged with your digital platforms.

1. Email

Email is the oldest channel on the market and is still one of the most impactful. Use this flexible channel for messages that take up more real estate or benefit from a bold, visual approach to creativity.

2. Mobile Push Notifications

Push notifications are alerts built to grab consumers’ attention on their smartphone’s home screen and are sent from a mobile app. This is great for time-sensitive or urgent messages you’re nudging users to act on.

3. SMS/MMS

SMS and MMS messages are sent natively via the messaging app on a mobile service. SMS messages are text-focused, while MMS may include visuals.

4. Web Push Notifications

Web push notifications reach web visitors like traditional push notifications reach users on mobile, so you can reach them even when they’re not visiting your website.

5. WhatsApp

WhatsApp lets brand build 1:1 connnections at scale thanks thanks to a range of features designed to help businesses build stronger customer relationships through two-way messaging.

Build Responsive, Data-Driven Experiences

Data drives exceptional customer experiences. Yet, as consumer expectations and global privacy laws and regulations continue to ramp up, prioritizing compliance while ensuring the data you collect is put to efficient use should be top of mind for every business. With 71% of consumers expecting companies to deliver personalized experiences using the data they collect, knowing the three primary considerations you should use data to provide cohesive experiences at scale is essential.

1. Make sure you can activate your data.

Data is only valuable for marketers if it’s actionable. To act quickly and responsibly while reducing tech debt, brands should seek a customer engagement solution with real-time processing and data ingestion capabilities. Partnering with your Engineering, Data Science, IT, and Product teams can make it possible to take advantage of your data in the moment.

2. Prioritize performance at scale.

Broken experiences caused by batch processing are what you want to avoid in any customer engagement strategy. One way to get ahead is to look for a customer engagement solution to scale real-time customer experiences without latency. These platforms should support vertical integration, enabling companies to ingest, classify, and act on their data seamlessly.

3. Unify your customer engagement.

Today’s consumers engage with brands across various devices and digital platforms and are highly attuned to any inconsistency. Unfortunately, most messaging platforms start as point solutions to triage a specific, single channel but aren’t built to integrate with other technologies. This can add unwanted complexity to tech stacks. Teams can easily avoid this by seeking a solution that provides a single, unified view of each customer. These solutions should also be an all-in-one engine for sending messages across multiple in-product and -out-of-product channels so that brands can custom-tailor their communications to the individuals receiving them.

Top 5 Customer Engagement Metrics to Measure

We’ve established that exceptional customer engagement starts with access to extraordinary data. But for marketers wondering what more they could be doing to drive results, here’s an overview of the metrics to measure your performance.

1. Conversion Rate

A conversion is when a user takes a desired action due to a marketing campaign. Examples include when they make a purchase, download an app, or subscribe to a mailing list. Some brands focus on conversions directly tied to revenue, while others look to community growth or media consumption. Conversions measure the most critical actions to your customer engagement efforts, even more so than metrics related to awareness or interest.

2. Retention Rate

This metric tells you what percentage of customers you’re retaining and will help you visualize how many customers you’re losing on churn. Calculating retention is actually pretty nuanced, so check out our article that dives deep into the metric.

3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Businesses eye their CPA metric like a hawk to measure how much they’re spending to acquire new users, which can help dictate where to allocate marketing investments. To calculate a campaign’s CPA, you divide the total costs by the conversions or acquisitions that the campaign produced.

4. Monthly Active Users (MAU)

MAU is used to measure engagement. This metric provides the number of individual users who engage with your app each month instead of a total number of monthly sessions. This means each person is counted only once, whether they use the app once or dozens of times throughout the month.

5. Click-to-Open Rate

The purpose here of measuring how many message opens led to clicks. Brands can calculate their click-to-open rate by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens. This is a great way to measure how strong copy is in a given message or email subject line.

3 Ways a Customer Engagement Platform Maximizes Your Results

Our world has changed dramatically over the last decade. To evolve with consumers' rising expectations, businesses must get up to speed with the latest customer engagement technologies and tactics. The novelty of hearing from a brand you love has worn off for many consumers, and there’s simply too much noise for them to wade through. The best way to avoid this is to steer clear of generic marketing communications that do more harm than good. That means ditching batch-and-blast automation and weaving personal details into every touchpoint to show users their needs and interests are top of mind for your brand.

Here are three ways the right customer engagement platform can help you maximize your investment.

1. Create Deep Relationships With Customers

As ironic as it might seem, investing in technology is the best way to humanize your communication journeys. For instance, customer engagement with tools like advanced machine learning, dynamic content, and Liquid personalization can automate and elevate these interactions for end-users so they feel your brand is speaking directly to them. Brand loyalty is the goal, but you’ll need the right solution to spark those personalized experiences at scale.

The results speak loud and clear. Research shows that using these “humanized” messaging strategies can lead to a 119% increase in mobile push open rates and a 28% increase in email available rates. Moreover, these customers are far more likely to stick around for the long haul—with 2.1X more likely to love the brand, 1.8X more likely to recommend it, and 1.8X more likely to purchase from them.

2. Do More With Less

Even before the economic macro environment drove companies to tighten their belts, being able to do more with less is never easy for marketing teams. A customer engagement platform can help marketers unlock their creativity using a no-code customer journey orchestration tool. With drag-and-drop features and a streamlined visual interface, teams can build complex journeys, compose and deploy personalized messages, and run A/B tests with little to no tech support. Moreover, marketers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make more of those data-driven decisions in a fraction of the time. From predictive tools that can flag customers likely to churn or purchase to more self-service models, a best-in-class customer engagement platform makes it possible for the marketing to add minimal inputs so teams can reallocate their focus on their growth strategies.

3. Drive ROI Faster

With many consumers cutting back on spending, it’s become abundantly clear that companies need to build resilience into their customer engagement strategy to thrive in today’s challenging environment. Businesses that can increase customer retention by just 5% see profits increase from 25% to 95%. Investing in a scalable and flexible CEP gives brands a competitive edge for future growth by leveraging data to effectively activate, engage, and retain customers for the long haul. For instance, if a brand wants to cut overall acquisition costs, ramping up its customer engagement to boost loyalty and customer lifetime value creates a more consistent and scalable business pipeline. The right customer engagement platform also enables teams to carry out a test-and-learn strategy to move faster and more efficiently.

Get Started With Braze and Customer Engagement

Customer engagement remains the most effective strategy for generating long-term customer loyalty. Using personalized, cohesive, cross-channel messaging to reach your customers on the channels and devices they live in can be the deciding factor in taking your business from good to great. And whether you’re looking to expand efforts at your company or get started, we’ve got you covered.

Learn how Braze can help your brand use next-level tactics to meet your business goals.

Top Customer Engagement FAQs

Regarding customer engagement, myths and confusion abound. Based on a few common misconceptions, we’ve outlined the top burning questions we often hear about customer engagement.

1. Is customer engagement less important than customer acquisition?

While customer acquisition costs continue to rise, it’s simply become easier and more cost-effective to engage, retain, and monetize your existing customers. Think about it: Why would you keep paying to acquire new customers repeatedly when you can work with those who’ve purchased from you? Research has found that retaining as little as 5% more of your existing customers can boost profits by 25–95%.

2. Is customer engagement time-consuming to execute?

Not necessarily. You can make your customer engagement as simple or sophisticated as you’d like without writing a line of code. A flexible, vertically integrated interface can help you coordinate any size channel strategy your company has in mind. From a one-time push notification to a more complex cross-channel lifecycle journey, you’ll want to find a customer engagement platform built to help you start anywhere and go everywhere. Let’s say your strategy is simple today, but you’ll want to expand in the future. The right tool is built to grow with the needs of your business.

3. Is customer engagement only about mobile marketing?

Customer engagement is centered around building lasting relationships with your customers, no matter what channels they prefer. For some companies, your mobile app might be the heart of their experience with your brand, so your engagement strategy might be firmly rooted in the mobile marketing space. But for many leading businesses, incorporating email or web push adds cohesion to the journey to stoke connections with customers. It’s less about what channels you use and the kinds of engagement and relationships you want to build.

Featured Resources

For more thought leadership, tips, and tricks related to customer engagement, check out our resources:

• What Is Customer Engagement?
• 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review?
• Mastering Modern Campaign Orchestration
• 5 Ways Yum! Brands Is Optimizing Customer Experiences on a Global Scale
• 7 Big Trends in Customer Engagement in 2023
• The Evolution of Customer Engagement