Selling a standout product isn't enough. Customers now expect AI-driven personalization and consistent experiences across every channel. 78% of consumers demand it, but only 45% of brands deliver even baseline consistency.
A good customer engagement strategy starts to stitch those (and other) gaps together. This post will walk you through ten methods for crafting a customer engagement strategy that actually works, with evidence from brands that have executed them well.
What Is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is a roadmap for transforming casual buyers into repeat customers who genuinely enjoy your products or services. These loyal users stick with you because of what you sell and how you make them feel.
You can think of how a gaming application hooks its players through:
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Login and Gameplay Rewards: Daily login items, streak bonuses, and achievements.
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Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): Limited-time quests, seasonal events, and monthly or quarterly battle passes.
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Multichannel Reminders: Push notifications and emails, some of which have in-game bonuses as incentives for re-engagement.
10 Ways to Create a Customer Engagement Strategy (+ Examples)
Here are ten approaches to keep your customers engaged and build a stronger relationship:
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Understand the User Journey
The first step in launching an effective customer engagement strategy is identifying all touchpoints, goals, and challenges in the user journey. That way, you can predict the user's every move and find ways to keep them engaged at each stage.
Chip Bell, senior partner at The Chip Bell Group, noted during an interview with CXL:
"[The intent of understanding the user journey is] to 'get inside the customer's head' to 'see,' and therefore, understand the customer's experiences. Armed with that perspective, organizations are better able to craft or recraft processes and encounters to become more customer-centric."
To do this, you can use story mapping to uncover your customers' needs at each stage. It involves organizing different user stories in one visual dashboard. These user stories include information on the goals that the customer wants to achieve and the problems they experience.
To write your user stories, you'll be using the following formula:
"As a [type of user], I want/need to [perform an action] so that [the intended result]."
Let's say you're building a job recruitment platform. Here's an example of what a user story can look like for your business:
"As a [developer recruiter], I need to be able to [easily connect with candidates] so that [my company can hire high-performing, loyal engineering talent]."
You then want to divide these user stories into different group activities based on which step of the customer journey they refer to. For each activity, identify solutions that you can include to meet the user's needs at every step.
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Integrate Chat Messaging
52% of customers from a report by Kayako say that they're more likely to buy again from a company that offers live chat support. That isn't the only use case, though. When integrated well, it can boost engagement by strengthening in-app communities, connecting sellers and buyers on marketplaces, and more.
In-app chat also elevates quick commerce experiences, as Astro, Indonesia's leader in this industry, saw firsthand.
Drivers and customers were communicating off-platform on social messaging apps, causing potential privacy and security concerns that Astro couldn't monitor. After implementing chat (with strong content moderation), they reduced customer complaints, had fewer issues after delivery, and boosted user engagement by 30%.
AI-powered chatbots can take the chat experience even further for your customers by handling many of the basic questions support agents receive, providing 24/7/365 service to your customers, and even automating some aspects of customer engagement strategy implementation.
For example, Alibaba increased customer satisfaction by automating the majority of its responses to their questions, saving human agents for more complex customer concerns.
Unless your company's entire value proposition is based on creating a messaging platform or chatbot, you can save time and money by utilizing third-party APIs and SDKs. They help you ship this feature faster and more reliably than building it in-house.
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Celebrate Milestones
Celebrate milestones to remind users of the value they receive with your product. What you choose to celebrate as a milestone is largely irrelevant, says Sofia Quintero, CEO of EnjoyHQ, in an article from UX Planet — as long as you celebrate something.
"It could be logging in for a certain number of consecutive days, the anniversary of the first time they logged in, a certain number of actions completed — the achievements themselves are less important than how you choose to commemorate and celebrate the accomplishments."
Each time a customer makes progress on their tasks, you can improve their product experience and give them a reason to come back by celebrating their wins, no matter how small they might seem.
It could be as simple as sending them an in-app message when they complete a new task. Duolingo, a language, music, math, and chess learning platform, is an exemplar of recognizing user progress. Users are not asked to complete the French course in a week, just to show up, do a few lessons, and maybe earn a badge or some extra XP.
The app uses fun, lively animations of its characters to celebrate unit and fluency milestone progress, lesson completion, and significant streaks for both individual and paired activity.
When their users hit a 365-day streak, they earn VIP status, which comes with a new app icon, in-app items to freeze progress if they miss a day, free trials of their premium plan, and a shoutout on a friend's list social feed.
It may sound trivial, but the effort their product and design teams put into creating elements like character animations and a special app icon motivates users to keep coming back to the app. It fosters daily learning habits in users while boosting app engagement and revenue for Duolingo.
Another way to apply this strategy is by celebrating the first anniversary of the user being with your company by giving them a discount, just like electronics product company Wemo does below in this email:
You can also celebrate the user's small wins by sharing reports on the progress they're making. It's something Grammarly often does with the weekly writing updates it sends:
The user gets to view metrics like how long they've been writing and how their productivity matches up against other Grammarly users.
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Create Content for the Customer's Needs
Content marketer Irina Weber at SE Ranking says in an article for Keap: "[You] need to tailor content to a specific audience to hook and keep their readers' attention." And in order to do that, you need to "understand their pain points, habits, and preferences."
Like understanding the buyer journey, creating the most relevant content for your audience starts with a clear buyer persona. It requires deep research on your customers' needs, pain points, and goals throughout the customer journey stages.
Another way to create content for the customer's needs is to use topic brainstorming tools. BuzzSumo, for example, comes with a research feature to find out if a particular topic is popular with your audience based on the number of social media shares.
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, can accelerate the content creation process when used effectively. They can help with finding relevant topics, pulling recent stats, and more. Research from Ahrefs shows that Google doesn't punish or reward AI-generated content, although it rarely reaches the top of the results pages, so keep that in mind if search rankings matter to your business.
Beyond blog posts, creating self-service knowledge stores can also drive engagement, serving a similar function to chatbots. Over 9 out of 10 users showed their strong preference for using a knowledge base (if it's tailored to their needs) over calling an agent.
The brands that get this right, like Shopify, Notion, or Canva, don't treat knowledge bases as static repositories. They treat them as dynamic onboarding tools. Content is surfaced contextually and updated based on what users are actually searching for.
Google is a reliable partner for both types of content. You can find out what your customers are looking for by entering a keyword or idea and checking Google's People Also Ask questions. The Reddit threads and Quora discussions that appear on the first search result page are also fantastic sources for authentic user discussion.
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Listen and Gather User Feedback
Whether it's good or bad, you must frequently listen to what customers have to say about their product experience. It keeps you up to date on their expectations, so you can continually make changes to satisfy them.
There are many ways to listen and gather customer feedback. The best methods include:
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Customer surveys: You can conduct short surveys to collect customers' feedback on their product experience, needs, and expectations. The questions in your customer survey should revolve around how satisfied they are with your current product, what features they like the most/least, and what they want to see within your product in the future.
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User interviews and focus groups: Another option is to set up interviews either remotely or face-to-face and talk to them directly. The right questions can allow you to gather deeper, more candid feedback than surveys.
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Review previous customer service interactions: Your customer support chats can be a goldmine when it comes to gathering users. Going through live chat conversations helps you uncover frequent complaints or challenges that users often struggle with.
Walmart provides two effective real-world examples of the methods above:
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Email surveys: Shoppers can respond to email-based surveys about recent transactions to enter into sweepstakes for $1,000 in-store gift cards.
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Invite-only feedback program: Users complete surveys and interviews to provide input on products and services, earning points that can be redeemed for digital gift cards.
You must be consistent in gathering feedback for it to have a real impact. In an article with Forbes, Joel Matthew, CEO at Fortress Consulting, recommends that you set up weekly touchpoints and surveys to help you "be in the know in real-time so you can make course corrections."
Teams can use tools like Qualtrics, UserVoice, and SurveyMonkey to automate regular check-ins with customers. They can also use webhooks to send questionnaires after specific user moments (like transactions or support ticket resolutions) and implement recurring in-app surveys.
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Follow Up with Inactive Users
If you're not taking the time to reconnect with inactive users, you're missing out on countless opportunities to win back lost customers. Sometimes, all it takes is following up to get them to give your product a second chance.
If a user signs up for your platform but doesn't go past the first step, you can reach out to them via push notifications or email to give them context on the next step to take.
Busuu, a language learning platform, reaches out to users who drop off after their first day, encouraging them to try again and aim for a two-day streak.
What do you do if a user gets through the end of your free trial but never purchases? You can follow up and win them over with a discount. Here's an excellent example from website-building platform Squarespace:
To encourage users to sign up, Squarespace offers a 10% discount on their website. All they have to do is enter the code at checkout to benefit from the offer.
Another way to win back lost customers is to personalize your follow-up message based on their previous activity or interests. Canva, the graphic design platform, tailors their re-engagement emails based on customer data collected when they were subscribed. This approach feels more relevant for the user and increases the chances of them clicking it to get started on a fresh new template.
You can also lure disengaged users back with free items or subscriptions.
For instance, Blizzard, the team behind the digital card game Hearthstone, offers a free ready-to-play deck of cards worth real-world money for players who haven't logged in within 90 days.
Similarly, SaaS companies and other subscription-based platforms often offer a month or more for free to bring back lost subscribers, as seen with LinkedIn, Uber, and Audible.
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Implement a Customer Loyalty Program
According to an EY report, 76% of the respondents in the 25-44 age bracket agree that loyalty programs make their opinions of a brand "generally more" to "far more" positive. Another report shows that inflation is causing 78% of consumers to reduce the number of shops and brands they buy from, leading them to favor those with better pricing and stronger loyalty rewards programs.
Bath & Body Works is an excellent example of how to drive positive growth with a loyalty program. Their approach is simple: customers get $10 off for every $30 they spend. They also get early dibs on limited-edition holiday scents and a birthday gift.
This low-effort personalization pays off big. In 2024, they reported 38 million active program members, up 4% from the previous year. More importantly, those loyalty members made up over 80% of the year-to-date sales.
Starbucks runs another successful loyalty program. In Q1 2024, the platform reported 34.3 million active U.S. members, up 13% over the previous year. The members aren't just showing up; they're spending more per visit and coming back more often than ever.
To create a loyalty program, follow these three steps:
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Choose a goal: Think about what you're trying to achieve from your loyalty program. Is it to increase revenue? Drive more referrals? Boost in-app metrics?
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Identify your type of rewards: Based on your goals, you have various ways to reward your customers. It can come in the form of discounts, freebies, or access to special VIP features of your product.
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Identify which customers to target: After defining your goals and the types of rewards you'll offer to customers as part of your loyalty program, identify which customers will be more interested in your program. These will be the customers who are the most active and have shown a solid track record of loyalty.
As you launch your loyalty program, make sure to measure its results over time to see if it's having a direct impact on customer retention.
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Host Interactive Events
According to Bizzabo's 2025 State of Events Report, 83% of businesses noted that in-person conferences, summits, and conventions are the most powerful way to build and grow a community.
When you invite users to create a shared moment, that's where genuine engagement starts to take shape.\
Red Bull is a classic example of using sporting events to engage customers. It's famous for hosting in-person events, such as Red Bull Rampage, Red Bull Flugtag, and Red Bull 400. With its latest 2025 Wings for Life World Run events, 310,719 people laced up on the same day, setting a new record as the world's largest running event.
Peloton follows a similar approach, but it brings people together digitally. What made it popular was the live experience layered on top. You're not pedaling alone in a spare room. Instead, you're riding with thousands of others, watching your name climb a leaderboard, or getting an offhand shoutout from the instructor. It's a reminder that in-person isn't the only way to build real customer engagement.
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Offer Exclusive Early Access
Early access brings exclusivity and a sense of partnership among a user base.
When early adopters discuss their positive customer experiences on places like LinkedIn and Discord, those left out want in even more. This turns early access into an organic marketing engine.
Nike has practically perfected this. With Nike's membership program, users often get to shop limited sneakers before they hit the public. Walmart and Amazon follow a similar approach with Walmart+ and Amazon Prime members by letting them slip in early to the biggest sale events, like Black Friday or Prime Big Deal Days.
Gaming companies often use early access to capitalize on the FOMO effect, relying on the word-of-mouth marketing that comes from content creators on livestreaming and other video content services, reviews on news sites, and player discussions on gaming marketplaces, social media platforms, and other digital communities.
The team behind Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor leveraged this effect by releasing the game in early access in February 2024. They were able to sell over 500,000 units in its first week, due in part to its positive reception and the success of the first Deep Rock Galactic game.
However, early access only works when what you're offering is genuinely worth the investment. The product should be far enough along to deliver real value, priced appropriately, and aligned with market demand. Otherwise, excitement can quickly turn into backlash.
Google Glass' Explorer Edition is a prime example: released in 2013 for $1,500, it was buggy, lacked clear use cases, and hit the market before consumers were ready. Instead of building hype, the early access program created skepticism that lingered for years.
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Build a Community Space
Many modern buyers are savvy and take the time to research their options.
They trust the words of other customers over marketing copy, driving them to Reddit, Discord, Slack, YouTube, TikTok, and smaller platforms to learn what real people are saying before spending money or time on something unfamiliar.
They want to see themselves in the story through the features they influence, the content they create, or the peers they meet along the way. While shameless infiltration into these spaces will backfire, you can bring the community to you by building a platform that fosters open conversation about your products, providing benefits for you and your base.
Let's examine two distinct brands that build belonging and customer loyalty with user-generated content.
LEGO's online platform turns casual fans into co-creators by letting them pitch their own ideas and vote on others. If an idea gains enough traction, LEGO actually manufactures it as a real product. For the fans, it's a moment of recognition, and it fundamentally builds a stronger customer relationship than what most brands manage to achieve.
Sephora's Beauty Insider Community is one of the rare branded spaces that actually feels alive, especially the groups "Insiders", "Makeup is Life", and "Trending at Sephora." As of September 2025, "Trending at Sephora" had 179,329 members and 2,930 active discussion threads, while "Makeup is Life" had 76,029 members, 7,440 conversations, and countless user-uploaded photos of real makeup and honest product shots.
Personalization and targeted ads are effective for certain segments of a customer base, but community building reaches those who want something more authentic. It can be more time-consuming, but it leads to long-term brand loyalty and higher lifetime value when executed well.
Go Beyond Satisfaction with the Right Customer Engagement Strategy
Customer engagement isn't just about closing support tickets fast or sending out a polished newsletter once a month. Brands need more than just a solid app or useful product; they need to provide additional value and build connections that feel personal and ongoing.
Combine the approaches discussed above for a strong customer engagement strategy. Create newsletter content to update disengaged customers on what's happened since they left. Conduct in-app surveys via chatbots and reward users for completing them.
A good engagement strategy uses all necessary methods to create a sense of trust and make customers feel like they're part of the story rather than just on the receiving end of it.