10 Brilliant Customer Engagement Examples and Why They Are Effective
Customer engagement is an organization's often persistent approach to building relationships with customers, which can result in a positive spike in brand awareness, loyalty, and retention. It can also be considered a measure of a business's success in forming connections with its customers across online and offline mediums.
Customer engagement is an organization’s often persistent approach to building relationships with customers, which can result in a positive spike in brand awareness, loyalty, and retention. It can also be considered a measure of a business’s success in forming connections with its customers across online and offline mediums.
Higher customer engagement metrics indicate that your consumer base is more invested in you, meaning you enjoy more profit and recurring business.
As such, more and more companies have started realizing the importance of tracking and analyzing key customer metrics. For instance, you can look at download patterns, social media responses, email open rates, product adoption, active/non-active users, and much more to identify effective engagement channels and work towards growing them.
This blog will look at 10 customer engagement examples and their benefits for your business.
Why Do We Need Customer Engagement?
Research shows that existing customers spend 67% more on a brand compared to new customers. So, once you gain a customer, it is more profitable to retain them than finding replacements; and customer engagement is the way to do it!
Effective customer engagement strategies create a positive user experience, aiming at maximizing retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue. Here are some of its other benefits:
- Improves customer relationships
- Boosts customer retention
- Promotes upselling and cross-selling
- Streamlines sales pipelines
- Drives up sales and brand value
- Increases customer interest and responses
A good customer engagement score is anywhere between 71 to 100. Higher scores mean more customer loyalty and lower churn. To achieve better scores, you need to collect engagement data, identify business-critical metrics, and analyze them over time to assign a score.
An all-in-one customer engagement platform can help you do all this and more. MoEngage is a 360° customer engagement suite that helps to manage your customer-centric strategies through data-driven insights. You can use it to boost engagement delivery rates, analyze campaign performance, and improve conversions.
If you’re still wondering why you need to take measures in improving your brand engagement, we have 10 examples of customer engagement strategies and how they worked wonders for popular brands.
10 Customer Engagement Examples and Why They Work
The following use cases will give you an idea of how the right customer engagement ideas can help your brand make a noticeable difference in effective marketing.
1. Welcome Screens
When we say welcome screens, we consider everything from welcome emails to UI screens that aim at ensuring a warm and personalized customer onboarding.
A welcome email is the first interaction a user expects after coming into contact with a new brand. They have a 50% open rate, making them 86% more effective than newsletters.
You can send welcome emails for anything, such as:
- Onboarding kick-off
- Purchase confirmation
- Successful subscription
- Registration for a product, and so on
These emails serve as your company’s first impression, and if done right, they make the user feel at home with your brand. Depending on your offerings, you can curate the content of this email however you like.
For example, an eCommerce company may send a gift coupon and an eLearning website may send links to their knowledge base. Petco is a great example of an effective welcome email. Their email is clear, concise, and has a strong CTA. It also has a personalized touch that appeals to your emotion towards your pet.
Other examples of welcome messaging are the welcome screens on the website. These appear during onboarding and are aimed at collecting user preferences and goals. They help in curating personal experiences for customers based on what they want to see. Userpilot has a great welcome setup for new customers.
Welcome screens help:
- Boost retention
- Create strong first impression
- Increase brand recognition
- Improve customer satisfaction rates
2. Social Media
Social media has become a great marketing and customer service channel, as over five billion people around the world use social media. You can engage your customers on multiple social media plaforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Social media metrics (likes, comments, reshares, clicks) can be tracked easily and give a clear indication of customers’ sentiments towards your content.
The key to social media engagement is to remain active and respond to customer inquiries within 24 hours. Lack of responses can increase the churn rate by up to 15%. That said, engaging customers on social media effectively leads to:
- More website visits
- Higher word-of-mouth sales
- Increased brand awareness and loyalty
- Quicker resolution of customer complaints
GoPro’s #HomePro challenge is a great example of social media engagement, where GoPro invited customers on Facebook to share their personal moments captured with the GoPro camera. They had daily winners and prizes to motivate people and build awareness about their brand.
These activities, coupled with social media listening tools enable brands to identify opportunities to reach their customers and gather responses to improve services.
3. Omnichannel Engagement Strategy
Omnichannel engagement is a customer service strategy in which companies interact with their customers through multiple channels, such as online, offline, in-app, email, phone, social media, etc. It is a crucial customer engagement hack, as 74% of customers have used more than one channel to connect with brands and complete a transaction.
For example, you come across a company ad on Instagram, click their website link and initiate a chat on the web page. Then, before buying a product, you use their listed WhatsApp number to gain more information. Later, you come to the website and complete your purchase.
The biggest example of omnichannel service is Amazon. The eCommerce giant engages customers through their website, mobile app, Alexa device, or chat support. You can track your orders on Alexa, place new orders, and even get personalized recommendations based on your search/activity history. This way, they maintain a consistent brand messaging and never let users feel disconnected.
4. Personalized Targeting
Personalization makes customer engagement strategies all the more effective. When you reach out with custom messages or services, your customers feel valued. This leads to more purchases and higher loyalty, generating as much as 40% more value through a personalized approach.
This is especially true for video and music apps, such as Netflix and Spotify. Netflix’s personal recommendations are based on your watch history and often contain offerings that will appeal to specific customers.
Similarly, Spotify has an advanced personalization feature, with customized mixes, playlists, and emails titled “Only You.” Each mix even has the tagline “Made for ” to make the experience more personal.
You can better hone your personalization tactics by identifying user segments, studying their online behavior, and analyzing the data for proper insights. Apple Music uses machine learning to recommend tracks for their user segments. Such tactics help provide customers with what they need, so that they feel more connected with your brand.
5. Feedback Collection
Customer feedback is a direct data source when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction and identifying their pain points. You can gather data on your product’s ease of use, recurring issues, service lapses, and much more.
A popular survey method is to find out how likely a customer is to recommend your product or brand. This feedback is valuable in understanding which areas you need to improve. When a customer sees their issue addressed, they feel more inclined to stay with your brand.
Since most customers do not like to offer feedback on their own, you must have an active survey plan. The Indian beauty brand Nykaa, for example, has an automated rating system in place each time you reach out to their customer support through the phone or app. This integrated feedback loop has more chances of getting a response than sending follow-up emails. It also increases the time spent on your platform.
6. Gamification
Gamification is a new and fun way to engage with your customers through gaming elements, such as coins, badges, leaderboards, points, etc. Studies reveal that gamification can increase customer engagement by 48%. When you add game elements to a non-game environment, it encourages users to spend more time on your platform and make progress through the levels.
Duolingo, the language app, has used gamification to increase their user base to more than 300 million. It has a colorful and appealing interface with animated characters for better engagement, and also provides attractive rewards in the form of badges or coins for completing courses.
UX game elements serve as progress motivators to users who want to maintain their streak and come back every day. This ensures you get more traffic, purchases, and referrals.
7. Loyalty Programs
Efficient loyalty programs build trust in your customers. And trust is a major factor in their remaining loyal to you. Studies say 95% of customers are more likely to remain loyal to a brand that they trust. So, your loyalty programs must target this sentiment.
Mastercard CMO, Raja Rajamannar, believes that brands should be loyal to their customers, not the other way around. And his brand completely embraces this thought by focusing on the creation of relevant experiences for each customer.
They have programs like digital wallets and centralized payments that enables customers to manage payments in an easy way, thus boosting customer satisfaction.
You can optimize your loyalty programs by:
- Offering rewards like stars and redeemable points
- Ensuring unexpected rewards for birthdays and other milestones
- Providing exclusive benefits or services to existing customers
- Holding special promotional offers for old customers
Customer loyalty programs encourage users to stick with a brand and incentivizes them to keep interacting with the company and buy from them to reap these benefits.
8. In-app Messages
In-app messages are notifications sent within the app screen to customers to foster engagement and create a seamless experience. These messages can be announcement bars, tools, offer notifications, asking for ratings, etc.
Jira uses in-app messaging to collect feedback from users, especially about their newly released changes. They collect real-time information to improve their UI and services, based on what customers want.
9. Crisis Management Strategies
A crisis management strategy is the collective body of decisions and choices that a company makes to respond to a crisis. Your responses during a crisis impact your customer base heavily and may lead to massive churn or strengthened loyalty.
A popular example of this is Cadbury. When worms were discovered in Cadbury products in India, 2003, Cadbury withdrew its advertisement campaigns and focused on fixing this issue by introducing imported packaging machinery that was 10-15% more expensive. However, they did not increase product prices and gradually increased their advertising with popular celebrities to win back customer trust.
Similarly, Samsung suffered massive reputational hit in 2016 when their Note 7 phones were reported to catch fire or explore due to faulty batteries. Samsung took full responsibility, identified a manufacturing defect, and recalled all faulty sets with full refund.
They also collaborated with authorities to enforce customer safety guidelines. Their transparency and awareness helped the brand deal with this massive crisis and bounce back as a leading electronics brand.
10. Customer Support Interactions
We have often heard people rejecting a brand saying their customer support is not good. To ensure this doesn’t happen with your company, you must ensure measures are taken to boost customer satisfaction.
Some crucial steps to be taken are:
- Reducing complaint resolution time
- Offering multichannel support, like phone, chat, social media, email, etc.
- Automating basic customer service responses
- Ensuring you are reachable round the clock in some form
- Offering personalized interactions
- Training support teams to handle customer queries effectively
Studies show that 78% of customers are willing to do business with a brand after the brand makes a mistake if their customer service is excellent. An example of that is JetBlue airlines, which is known for their prompt and personalized customer service.
They provided free coffee to a customer and went viral on Twitter. This just shows that if you can make your customers feel important, they will do your marketing and ensure your brand gets the recognition it deserves.
Customize Your Engagement Strategy
While there are many ways to go about your engagement strategy, the key is to customize it based on your business and customers. There are simple ways to do that:
- Identify your target audience and their needs, preferences, and buying behavior
- Conduct thorough market research by analyzing own, competitors’, and consumers’ data
- Track business-specific KPIs to spot patterns
- Implement learning systems to analyze the data and use the insights for performance improvement
- Keep modifying your engagement campaigns based on results
Final Thoughts
Engaging with customers not only increases brand value and recognition but also leads to more purchases, new customers, and higher ROI. As a brand, your goal is to ensure your customers cannot stay away from you. And to do that, you must build a personal connection with them.
The engagement marketing examples mentioned above can work magic for you, depending on your specific needs and preferences. You can create a customer engagement strategy that reflects your company’s goals and values, and love for your customers.
So whether it is through thoughtful loyalty programs or effective feedback channels, the key is to reach your customers where and when they will appreciate most. But first, make sure you understand your business priorities, identify pain points, and then build a strong customer engagement stack to set you apart from the ordinary.
