Businesses are in a constant battle for customers’ attention. With endless choices at their fingertips and rising expectations for convenience, personalization, and responsiveness, standing out—and keeping customers engaged—has never been more challenging.
It’s no longer enough to simply offer a great product or service. Today’s consumers expect timely, seamless experiences built specifically for them. They want real-time support on their preferred channels and tailored recommendations from brands that understand their wants and needs. If you’re not delivering that level of engagement, you’ll struggle to attract and retain customers.
To deliver the curated experiences customers demand in 2025 and beyond, your customer engagement strategy needs to blend forward-thinking strategies with modern tools.
Keep reading to learn how.
What is customer engagement, and why’s it so important right now?
Customer engagement is the process of building meaningful connections and long-lasting relationships with your customers. Your customer engagement strategy is about more than just getting people to buy your product—it’s about delivering exceptional experiences that keep them coming back long after their first purchase.
Consider two similar haircuts with drastically different experiences. Would you rather return to a salon or barber that:
- Sends convenient text reminders for upcoming appointments, greets you by name, makes style suggestions based on past appointments, and talks with you throughout the haircut
OR
- Doesn’t send appointment reminders, asks what you want in the chair, and talks with coworkers throughout the haircut
This customer engagement strategy example makes the choice clear: one option prioritizes the customer experience as a whole while the other focuses on the result—a sale.
So, why is customer engagement more important now than ever? Competition has grown across the board, and consumers’ expectations have changed. If you don’t meet them, another company will.
Your customers want instant responses, seamless interactions across channels, and brands that understand their needs. Now that more businesses are adopting tools like AI-driven personalization, automation, and omnichannel communication, those that don’t evolve risk falling behind.
Excellent customer engagement is even more critical in an age where social proof is one of your most powerful sales tools. Delivering exceptional experiences helps build brand advocates and generate word-of-mouth marketing that 88% of consumers use to make buying decisions. In other words, happy customers are a worthwhile investment.
6 customer engagement strategies to help you build better relationships
Customer engagement isn’t something you can just switch on and off. It takes a concentrated effort to make every interaction and touchpoint memorable and engaging.
Here are six ways you can create better experiences—and build better customer relationships.
1. Humanize your brand with an identity, voice, and personality
Customer engagement revolves around connecting with your customers—and it’s hard for customers to feel a personal connection to a faceless business.
Humanizing your business by sharing your story and goals helps establish a brand identity that feels authentic and relatable. You can also implement a brand voice that aligns with your identity—whether that’s fun and conversational, professional and authoritative, or warm and empathetic.
Once you have established a brand identity, look for opportunities to use it to build trust. Connect with customers on social media and use branded storytelling in your marketing to increase conversion rates by 30%. Be sure to keep your brand identity consistent across all platforms—from your emails to social media posts—so customers recognize you and feel familiarity in every interaction.
You can also input information about your brand to any AI-assisted messaging tools you’re using so its responses are on-brand. This process is called training AI.
2. Understand who your customers are and what they want
It pays to know who you’re communicating with. What are your customers’ interests? What problems are they trying to solve? What does their customer journey look like, and where do you fit into it? All of these questions and more will help direct your efforts to meet and exceed customers’ needs and expectations.
You can learn about your customers in a few ways:
- Analyzing marketing and customer data. Use analytics tools to track customer behavior—what they browse, how they interact with your site, and what content they engage with. Look for patterns in purchase history, marketing open rates, and social media engagement to learn what resonates with your audience and focus your strategy on what’s already working instead of guessing.
- Reviewing existing conversations and other interactions. Customer service chats, support tickets, and social media interactions offer insight into real customer questions, problems, and sentiments that you can’t get from engagement data. With this information, you can target common issues with content marketing and adjust your messaging based on what customers respond best to.
- Asking them. There’s no better way to learn about your customers than to ask them directly. Send customers a survey after a successful order, collect feedback on customer service cases, and reach out to your best customers to see what they love, don’t like, and want from your business.
The more you know about your audience—both in terms of data and feedback—the easier it is to build tailored experiences and personalize your interactions to boost engagement.
3. Personalize every interaction using customer data
Customers don’t just want personalization; they expect it. Eighty percent of consumers are more likely to buy from brands offering personalized experiences. Nobody wants to feel like just another ticket number or email address in a mass marketing blast—they want tailored experiences that make them feel valued and understood.
In the past, inserting your customers’ names from Salesforce into your marketing emails may have been enough to make an impression. But today, personalization needs to go deeper.
Modern data collection and analysis tools can help you segment your audience into groups of similar leads or customers. Here are a few ways to segment lists:
- Customer data: any information about the people behind each contact, including age, location, gender, job title, or income. You can use customer data to identify pain points or make messages relatable.
- Sales data: information about a customer’s purchase history, order frequency, average order value, and product preferences. This can help you recommend relevant products and time your marketing messages.
- Behavior data: metrics showing where customers come from, how they interact with your website, and what pages they visit. This information tells you how ready they are to buy and what their potential interests are so you can send them the right content marketing or offers.
Segmented lists empower you to write highly relevant marketing messages with language tailored to specific segments, like moms or new customers, to boost engagement. It can also tell you the best time to deliver a message for maximum impact based on a customer’s normal buying cycle.
But personalization isn’t just for marketing—it’s also critical for customer service. It makes conversations smoother, more efficient, and meaningful.
When your customer service team can access a customer’s past interactions, purchase history, and preferences, they can provide faster, more relevant solutions without making customers repeat themselves. Plus, tools like AI-powered assistants and chatbots help summarize cases and past conversations quickly so getting context doesn’t slow agents down.
4. Implement an integrated omnichannel messaging experience
Your customers aren’t sticking to a single channel—and neither should you. Whether it’s for marketing or customer service, covering as many channels as possible means you’re less likely to miss an opportunity to delight customers. But that doesn’t mean you should assign team members to run each channel individually. It means you need omnichannel messaging.
Customer buying journeys are fractured. Seventy-three percent of retail consumers use multiple communication channels before completing their purchase. They might discover your brand on Instagram, ask a question via live chat, read a follow-up SMS, and receive a personalized email reminder before completing a purchase.
If you’re not on one of their preferred channels, you risk losing the opportunity to close the deal. Even if you are, an inconsistent brand experience or data silos that isolate customer data between channels can add friction that costs you sales.
With an omnichannel messaging strategy, all communication channels connect, allowing you to access conversation histories and deliver consistent brand experiences across all channels. For example, customers can start a conversation via email and continue it via SMS without losing context or needing to repeat themselves, providing a seamless and more cohesive customer service experience.
Omnichannel messaging also improves marketing engagement by allowing you to build campaigns across channels, known as waterfall campaigns. These campaigns start at a specific channel and move to the next channel when certain conditions are met, like an unopened or undelivered message.
For example, if a recipient doesn’t respond to a marketing email, you can trigger a text follow-up (as long as they’re opted-in) that’s different from the original email so it doesn’t come across as spam. Plus, you can use multi-channel engagement data to prioritize which channel you target based on the channels specific recipients respond to best.
5. Make it as fast and easy as possible to get help
When customers need help, they don’t want to wait. Most expect a response within an hour (less for instant messaging channels), and 9 out of 10 expect you to have multiple customer service channels. Accessible and responsive customer service is essential for keeping customers happy.
Fortunately, innovative business messaging solutions make it much easier to stay on top of your customer service requests with features like:
- Shared inboxes: Centralize customer conversations from email, SMS, and social media into one platform so your team can respond faster and prevent duplicate replies.
- Programmed auto-replies: Instantly acknowledge inquiries, reply to common FAQs, provide estimated response times, or direct customers to helpful resources while they wait.
- AI-assisted texting: AI can suggest replies or refine your message so it’s relevant and on-brand, reducing response time and ensuring consistency in customer interactions.
- Message routing and reassignment: Automatically direct messages to the right team or agent, ensuring that requests don’t get lost and customers get the right help quickly.
- AI chatbots: Provide 24/7 instant responses to common questions, guide customers through troubleshooting, and escalate complex issues to human agents when needed.
- Phone support integration: While digital channels dominate, some issues require human interaction. Offering phone support—especially for urgent or complex inquiries—gives customers peace of mind and ensures they can always speak to a real person when needed.
With a customer engagement strategy powered by cutting-edge business communication tools, you can provide quick, efficient, and personalized support—meeting customer expectations while keeping teams productive.
6. Track engagement metrics before and as you make changes
A great customer engagement strategy isn’t something you set up once and forget—it’s a constant cycle of testing, measuring, and refining your approach based on what’s working. But if you’re not tracking performance, how do you know if your changes have any impact? Without the right data, you could be investing time and resources into strategies that aren’t resonating with your audience.
Before making any changes, establish a baseline for key engagement metrics so you have a clear starting point to measure success against and identify trends over time. The exact metrics you need to track will depend on your business, but some of the most important are:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Retention Rate
- Engagement Rate
- Response Time & Resolution Time
- Customer Churn Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Once you’ve chosen your metrics and benchmarks, change the way you engage with customers. After some time, compare your new metrics against the benchmarks to see if your new approach works. If not, look at the lagging metrics, identify which strategy affects them, and try something new.
Position your business for success with a comprehensive customer engagement strategy
While every loyal customer starts as a first-time buyer, customer engagement isn’t just about generating new business—it’s about building lasting relationships that drive loyalty and growth for higher-ROI, long-term success. But it’s easier said than done.
With rising expectations for personalization, real-time support, and seamless experiences, you need to stay up to date on the most effective customer engagement strategies and use smart tools that make it easy to form lasting connections with customers.
Remember: great customer engagement is all about constantly improving and innovating as the landscape—and your business—evolves.
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