6 Powerful Customer Engagement Strategies to Drive Growth in 2024

Is customer engagement moving away from being insights-led? Or is data still central to an effective customer engagement strategy? With customers raising questions about privacy, how can organizations deliver a personalized user engagement strategy?

These are some important questions we’ll address in this advanced guide. You’ll also learn how to increase customer engagement strategies with a robust customer engagement plan.

What is a Customer Engagement Plan?

A customer engagement plan is a strategy to help brands deliver a continuous positive experience that leaves customers coming back for more. The plan outlines key actions you’ll take and the resources required to set it in motion and increase customer engagement.

6 Winning Customer Engagement Strategies to Drive Growth in 2024

What does customer engagement look like in real life? It goes beyond brands interacting with the customer support team via emails and phones. Organic customer engagement leverages creative ways to make the customer feel connected to the brand.

Here are six winning strategies on how to increase customer engagement:

Strategy 1: Treat Every Customer as a VIP = Loyalty-Driven Engagement

Would you believe that a dog services, products, and experiences company is worth $1 billion in market value? How did BarkBox achieve this remarkable feat? Simple. By treating their customers like VIPs.

Here are a few lessons in customer engagement to learn from this innovative brand:

• Collaborate with the customer: BarkBox provides personalized customer experiences in the form of “themed” boxes for the customer’s pet—not a novel concept. The true magic lies in the brand’s promise, “Scout’s Honor,” where it promises to work with the customer if the puppy is unhappy with the dog treats and toys:

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This is an example of how you can take personalization to the next level by partnering with the customer to listen to their feedback and needs. It makes the customer feel special and heard.

• Appreciate customer feedback: It is one thing to put up a question on your brand’s social media handle and another to respond to every query promptly. If you want to boost interactivity, be prepared to engage consistently and meaningfully with every post.
• Talk in the customer’s language: The best way to connect with your customers is to speak their language and add a little humor if your brand personality allows it. The idea is to converse with customers and showcase the brand in a playful light (if possible):

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The takeaway: Treating your customers like VIPs sets the stage for meaningful relationships. This can mean talking to customers one-on-one, responding to and embracing their feedback, and offering personalization that centers around the customer’s immediate needs. All this effort will not go to waste. Reportedly, 82% of customers will willingly open up to a brand and share personal data in exchange for a better customer experience.

Strategy 2: Be Where Your Customers Are = Omnichannel Engagement

A true superpower for brands is meeting customers anytime, anywhere, considering customers are platform and media-fluent today like never before. The proof is in the pudding—46% of organizations are experiencing an increased customer lifetime value due to the depth of omnichannel customer engagement. Needless to say, going omnichannel is not an effort in vain.

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But how do you become omnichannel as a brand? Here are three strategies worth embracing:

• Customer-centricity: Prioritize customer needs in leadership, strategy, and operations to deliver a cohesive customer experience and become agile—both core components of an omnichannel presence. Effective strategies include consistently listening to customers, interpreting insights, and acting on customer feedback in real-time.
• Use AI and machine learning: Omnichannel customer engagement is complex and layered. It uses data from teams to get a unified view of the customer. However, data silos prevent organizations from getting an accurate picture of the customer. Using strategic AI tools can bridge this informational gap and ensure 360-degree customer understanding.
• Don’t simply coordinate campaigns; connect with customers: An omnichannel customer engagement strategy means analyzing data to understand your customer’s preferred channels like email, direct mail, and loyalty programs. If you want your business to grow, deepen your customer understanding and personalize smarter—exactly what Blibli did to build a unified omnichannel customer engagement strategy.

Use-case: How Blibli Drove a Seamless Omnichannel Commerce Journey for Its Anniversary Sale

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The Challenge: Blibli was struggling to innovate its customer engagement process and create a seamless shopping ecosystem, be it offline or online.

The Solution: The brand leveraged MoEngage to:

• Analyze customer behavior, understand their interests and pain points, and create segments to engage customers better
• A/B test the communication to each segment and choose the best version,
  enabling meaningful conversations
• Deliver a seamless, contextual, and trustworthy customer experience, driving loyalty in the process

The Results:

• Reduced customer drop-offs leveraging customer journey orchestration, smart recommendations via cart abandonment campaigns, etc.
• Improved campaign performance, owing to consistent A/B testing of customers’ communication preferences and buyer affinities
• Advanced segmentation capabilities led to the creation of effective customer cohorts who were sent personalized messages for better engagement
• Improved retention and repeat purchases with push notifications and email

The takeaway: More and more customers are calling brands to be omnichannel. Among the most effective methods for increasing omnichannel engagement is tying your omnichannel strategies to customer lifecycle marketing. Otherwise, you risk delivering fragmented experiences. So, to build trust and gain a competitive advantage, keep customers at the center of your omnichannel customer engagement strategy.

Strategy 3: Build a Tribe Around Your Brand = Community-Driven Engagement

Building a tribe seems like a radical strategy, but trust us when we say it works. Around 91% of customers are more likely to leave a review because they belong to a community.

The idea is to build an interest-based community where like-minded customers can voice their opinions and interests within an intimate space. One brand that prioritizes community-centric interactions is Nike:

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Here’s how Nike drives community-driven engagement by cultivating a tribe of customers who share a passion for sports, fitness, and the brand’s values:

• Nike Run Club (NRC): Nike has created a global community of runners through the Nike Run Club app. Customers can track their runs, join virtual running challenges, and connect with other runners.
• Nike Training Club (NTC): Similar to NRC, Nike’s Training Club app provides customers with workout routines, training plans, and different challenges. Customers can connect with friends, join group workouts, and share their progress on social media. The brand offers valuable content and resources within the app to keep the customers engaged:

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• NikePlus Member Exclusives: Nike also offers exclusive products, early access to new releases, and special events to members of its Nike Membership program. This incentivizes customers to engage with the brand and become part of the Nike community.

The takeaway: Building a tribe of customers around the brand is a customer engagement strategy Nike nails to the T. As a result of its customer-first and community-driven efforts, the brand’s community is deeply engaged and passionate about its products (and values).

Strategy 4: Resolve Customer Issues Proactively = Retention-Focused Engagement

The best way to build an emotional connection with a customer is to ease the customer’s pain with prompt customer service. Customers want help at their fingertips. Unsurprisingly, 42% of customers want to use self-service checkout kiosks:

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In technical terms, we call this proactive customer engagement. Here’s how you can retain customers with exceptional customer service:

• Engage with customers before issues arise or things escalate. At this point, measure KPIs such as number of customer complaints and escalations and first contact resolution rates.
• Curate customer interactions based on real-time needs and journey stages. KPIs to measure include Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc.
• Use proactive communication to show customers they are valued and increase loyalty. Effective KPIs at this stage include upsells, cross-sells, customer reviews, etc.
• Predict customer needs based on their journey and assist their buying experience, from onboarding to retention. Important KPIs for this stage include product adoption, churn rate, referrals, and so on.

Gartner’s latest survey claims these are the priorities for customer service leaders in 2024:

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The takeaway: Younger customers, particularly Gen Z, will “give up if they can’t resolve an issue on their own,” as per the Gartner report. Around 38% of millennials and Gen Z customers expressed a “self-service or no-service” mindset. Integrating a self-service strategy within your customer engagement plans is key. Moreover, brands must use AI technology, such as GenAI chatbots, to assist representatives and scale customer service support.

Strategy 5: Personalize Customer Interactions = Relationship-Driven Engagement

No doubt, improving your customer experience leads to higher engagement and reduced drop-offs. But how do you enhance the quality of your customer interactions? Personalize your communication but make it more targeted. A spray-and-pray method will no longer cut it.

Use-case: How Domino’s Pizza Experienced a 20% Uplift in Revenue with a Personalized Loyalty Management Program

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The Challenge: The brand wanted to deliver a cohesive customer experience across its app, website, and in-store platforms, drive engagement, and boost market share.

The Solution: The brand created a personalized customer experience strategy, which involved:

• Clocking when the drop-offs were about to happen and re-engage customers with meaningful, personalized nudges and alerts
• Setting up 6-7 automated journeys as a part of the ‘Cheesy Rewards’ loyalty program
• Building custom customer segments
• Driving personalized content campaigns

The Results:

• Automated multiple customer journeys for millions of customers
• End-to-end management of the Loyalty Program at one click
• 20% uplift in revenue from increased engagement via the loyalty program

Let’s look at a few tips on how to personalize your customer engagement strategy:

• Invest in a customer engagement platform to maintain contextual and accurate customer profiles, segment audiences accurately, and execute personalized marketing campaigns
• Use AI tools to automate personalization at scale; however, maintain responsible data privacy and security and train the team to use these tools effectively
• Offer custom deals, rewards, and discounts based on the customer’s interests and shopping habits
• Elevate your personalization strategy by using predictive analytics and offering future recommendations to customers
• Keep improving data quality and drive transparency on how your brand is using customer data
• Give customers more control over how they want their information to be used

The takeaway: Knowing what your customers want now is not enough; brands must also preempt their needs in the future. Amazon’s Anticipatory Shipping Program is an excellent example of this. In this forward-thinking program, the brand predicts customer orders and ships products to fulfillment centers near those customers. This accelerates delivery times and improves customer experience.

Strategy 6: Use User-Generated Content = Advocacy-Driven Engagement

If your customers are advocating for your brand’s products, congratulations. You’ve hit gold.

However, user-generated content is much more than asking customers to put up online reviews of your product/service. It’s about using every opportunity available to communicate one-on-one with customers. One brand that consistently sees an uptick in customer advocacy is Starbucks:

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Starbucks has earned a reputation for its attentive approach to customer feedback. A standout example is its highly successful “My Starbucks Idea” program, which underscores the brand’s commitment to listening—and responding—to its customers’ suggestions:

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Another excellent example of a UGC-driven customer engagement strategy is Red Bull’s #PutACanOnIt campaign. It all started when a member of the public posted a photo of a Red Bull can on a Mini Cooper:

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Inspired by this, Red Bull encouraged others to replicate the idea using the hashtag #PutACanOnIt. The campaign gathered 10,000+ original and creative photos and videos, resulting in free advertising for the brand! The best part? It was 99% user-driven and 100% organic:

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The takeaway: Customers trust the word of other customers. Period. In other words, UGC has emerged as a gold standard for brand promotions. And why not? Authentic and unpaid reviews command instant trust as opposed to sponsored ads. However, to make the most of this type of customer engagement, complement it with your community-building efforts to ensure it doesn’t look purely transactional or, worse, ad-hoc.

Improve Customer Engagement with Personalized, Omnichannel, and 1:1 Interactions

Today, customers are hyper-connected virtually. They use a multitude of devices, channels, and platforms to interact with the brand at their convenience and pace.

In this reality, your brand’s quality of experience should be a prime differentiator—relying solely on price is an archaic approach. In fact, 73% of customers confess to customer experience being an important factor in their purchasing decision.

But where do you begin? A customer-first experience starts with crafting the perfect customer purchase journey. To create an accurate journey, you’ll need to understand your customers’ wants, how they move along the buying lifecycle, and anticipate their next move.

This is where a customer engagement platform can scale your customer engagement efforts. Invest in the right platform to put your customers first—all with an orchestrated customer journey that transforms transactions into deeply meaningful customer relationships.