Ever find yourself constantly recommending that one cafe? Not just because the coffee is top-notch, but because the place just gets you? That cozy ambiance, the barista who remembers your order and greets you with a smile, maybe even surprises you with a freebie now and then. That’s customer engagement in its purest form—you’re not just a customer; you're an advocate, a fan!

Engaged customers experience your brand in a way that sticks with them long after they’ve made a purchase. They’re the ones who come back, who bring their friends, and who shout your praises from the rooftops. That’s why savvy brands are doubling down on crafting customer engagement strategies that resonate deeply and personally.

But how exactly do they do it? It’s more than just the product; it's the whole experience:

• Baristas who spark joy with just a smile
• Remembering your usual order, so it’s ready just when you need that caffeine kick
• Delightful surprises that make your day a bit brighter

Curious about the difference between a regular customer and a truly engaged one? Let’s dive into 3 cost-effective ways to make your low-touch customer engagement strategies feel more personal.

Why customer engagement strategies are essential to your success

Sure, acquiring new customers is thrilling, but the real party starts when those customers become part of your brand's community. That's where customer engagement strategies come into play—turning casual buyers into loyal enthusiasts.

With the right engagement techniques, your customers won’t just buy—they’ll connect, celebrate, and advocate for your brand. These strategies ensure that your product isn’t just something they use, but a part of their daily routine.

Why dive deep into engagement strategies?

• Elevate customer service: It's not just about solving problems—it's about ensuring every support interaction makes customers feel appreciated. Whether it's through real-time in-app chats or personalized follow-ups, showing you care boosts satisfaction and loyalty.
• Expand engagement channels: Use various channels like social media, email, and community forums not just for outreach but as spaces for customers to engage with your brand and each other. These platforms offer rich opportunities for customer feedback and engagement that can enhance customer experiences.
• Apply targeted engagement techniques: Use personalized tactics to make each customer interaction memorable. Simple gestures like sending a birthday discount, celebrating a milestone, or just checking in can significantly enhance the customer relationship. This type of interaction can increase customer retention and while decreasing churn.
• Drive important metrics: Effective engagement strategies lead to improved metrics such as higher cross-selling and up-selling rates and increased average order values. Engaged customers are more invested in your brand and open to discovering what more you have to offer.

Investing in customer engagement strategies is not just about keeping customers happy—it's about creating a loyal customer base that sees your brand as an integral part of their lives. By focusing on customer needs and delivering exceptional experiences, you turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to build lasting loyalty and satisfaction.

3 engagement strategies to start using now

An effective customer engagement strategy is one that applies the importance of customer satisfaction to all marketing efforts. This can’t be done alone. It takes an omnichannel approach with multiple touchpoints to true capture customer loyalty. Let’s breakdown some of these successful customer engagement strategies to get those conversion rates jumping.

1. Use targeted, strategic messaging

Imagine crafting each message so that it feels like a friendly nudge rather than a corporate shout. That's what strategic messaging is all about. It’s like having a cozy chat over coffee rather than a shout across a crowded room. In-app messaging allows us to scale these personal interactions without losing the warmth. Done right, it makes every customer feel like the guest of honor.

Have a personalized in-app messaging strategy 

Personalization is key, and we’re not just talking about sprinkling customer names across your messages. To create true personalized experiences, every message you send users should feel tailor-made to them. And by tailored we don’t mean simply using your customer’s name in a message. Your application captures a ton of user data, and it’s on you to use that data to construct a powerful and personalized customer experience.

Think of strategic messaging like crafting a perfect coffee order for a friend—you know just what they like, how they like it, and when they need that caffeine boost.

How do you accomplish this? By segmenting your messages based on a customer’s actions and inputs. Each message you send should resonate with your customers—where they are in their journey, what their goals are, etc.—and encourage them to engage with your application.

Mailchimp strives to provide a personalized dashboard experience for all of their customers. To achieve this, they use a friendly banner message encouraging customers to answer a few simple questions for personalized recommendations during onboarding:

Once customers answer the questions, their dashboard highlights key insights that are tailored to their business and tips to ensure customers are taking the right actions to optimize:

Behaviorally triggered messages make automation feel more human

Just like a barista might start making your regular order as soon as you walk through the door, automated messages can create a similar user experience that exudes a sense of anticipation and personal care. Triggered by specific customer behavior, these messages deliver timely and relevant content that feels anything but automated.

A very simple example of this can be seen in the UberEats app, which triggers a discount to new customers when they log in for the first time. Since getting new customers to convert is a big hurdle for product owners, providing an incentive is a great way to get them to take the next step:

Customers are welcome to opt out, but this kind of automation—recognizing that the customer has taken an action, registering it, and then responding as necessary—makes the product experience feel more like a 2-way conversation.

Chat tools engage our conversational impulses

With a population practically glued to their cell phones, chat tools have become the new face of customer service engagement.

More and more companies are using in-app chat services as a means of addressing customer service, both for new and existing customers. Chatbots are another self-service tool that helps customers on their path to conversion by answering questions in real-time. Chatbots help alleviate a substantial customer support burden, all while getting customers the answers they need in an efficient and effective manner.  

The elements of a high-touch phone call can still be present in a chat messaging app. Using a live-chat tool or chatbot helps engage our conversational nature and shows customers that you want there to be a dialogue. The key is to make it feel human.

Start the conversation with a greeting before you address the customer’s problem. Drift’s chatbot provides the extra guidance a new users needs to navigate their platform:

2. Give your customer success team the right customer engagement tools

In the new age of customer interaction, the old-school charm of phone calls has its place, but let's face it: modern customer engagement demands faster, more versatile solutions. We're talking about strategies that delight customers and scale effortlessly as your business grows.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham actually instructs startups to do things that don’t scale—and to go out of their way to delight customers, even when they’re desperately racing toward growth. High-touch companies do it all the time. Their CS reps spend a lot of their days calling to check up on customers, whether it’s to explain a new feature or just see how they’re doing.

But as companies grow, that kind of 1:1 attention just isn’t possible for each and every person. Arm your customer success team with alternate ways to connect with customers beyond phone calls. Below are a 3 channels you can use to deepen your customer relationships :

Email nurture

Think email nurturing is only for wooing new customers? Think again! Our approach at Appcues is to use email nurture campaigns to engage with all of our customers, no matter where they are in their journey with us. By tailoring content that's relevant to each stage of their experience, we transform routine emails into personal notes that anticipate needs, celebrate milestones, and provide value that's hard to ignore.

This type of nurture is successful because it’s personalized and beneficial to customers. You’re not asking for anything from them—instead, you’re building a relationship and continuing the conversation.

In-app notifications

In-app notifications are the secret sauce to maintaining an ongoing dialogue with your users. They allow us to reach out with timely messages right where our customers spend most of their time: within our product. Whether it's alerting them to a new feature, a useful tip, or just a friendly check-in, these notifications are about making each user feel like they have a backstage pass to our latest and greatest.

And it's not just about announcements. Personalized messages from our customer success team can make all the difference, letting users know we're here, we care, and we're invested in their success. It’s like having a direct line to support, minus the wait.

Snail mail

We’re digital-first, but who doesn’t love a tangible piece of happiness in their mailbox? Blend, the best of both worlds by sending out occasional snail mail. Whether it's a handwritten note, some cool swag, or a thoughtful gift, these physical tokens of appreciation cut through the digital noise, creating memorable moments that endear customers to our brand.

Imagine the smile when a customer receives a T-shirt or a quirky pen just for being awesome. HubSpot likes to surprise and delight customers and prospects with some swag after they show the company love on social media:

Never underestimate the power a little surprise and delight can have on your customers.

Never underestimate the power a little surprise and delight can have on your customers. 

3. Create opportunities to connect throughout the customer journey

Community forums are another way of adding a hands-on quality to a more low-touch approach, since customers get 1:1 engagement with someone from your company or a fellow user. They keep customers engaged with your product, whether that’s through a Slack channel that you’ve created or something as intensive as Buffer’s community forums.

When executed correctly, forums let your users do the work for you. On the flip side, these channels can also feel like duds if you’re constantly throwing out questions that no one is answering. To get it right:

Incentivize community participation 

When executed correctly, forums allow users to support each other, reducing your workload and increasing user engagement. However, forums can fall flat if they lack participation. Here’s how to get it right:

Some well-crafted forums reward users for consistently using their app. Moz uses “MozPoints” to incentivize, essentially outsourcing the job, and jumping in where they need to, moderating and answering questions where they see fit.  You engage with the product, have a 1:1 conversation with a human being, and your questions are answered.

It’s also a good way to send out content that engages users, whether that’s a push notification or via email saying “Your friend X has answered your question.” If someone has posted a question or response, this can be a way of bringing them back into the app or forum through customer engagement.

It’s a direct, 1:1 response that feels high-touch, even if you’ve outsourced it to the community. 

Community forum best practices:

• Invite users to subscribe to comment threads so they’ll engage when they get a response. 
• Have someone at your company moderate 
• Ask questions to promote user engagement with the service to get the ball rolling. 

Use videos to get the conversation started

Videos can be a great way to connect with new customers and prime the pump to get people excited about being a part of your community. They’re a scalable way to put a human face to your business.

Wistia has a whole host of engaging videos meant to inspire marketers and spark conversations. It’s a perfect way to connect with their audience and create a line of communication in the process.

One of the many benefits of using video is that it’s reusable content. Unlike a phone call, a video is a high-touch customer engagement strategy that you can use over and over again, in different contexts. As Kristen Craft, former Head of Demand Gen & Business Development at Wistia, writes,

“We argue that videos are like blog posts or other content. You don't write one and consider yourself finished. You point back to them, reference them in other content, and ensure they get the mileage they deserve. At the end of the day, it's all about generating good content and distributing it efficiently.”

So if you’ve made a tutorial video explaining how to use an aspect of your product and people in your community forum are asking about that problem, re-posting that video in that thread is a great way to get additional mileage out of that old video. The person posting the question feels like the video was made exactly for them, even though it was a fixed cost for your company.

High-touch customer engagement is a dialogue 

High-touch customer engagement isn’t just about the perks. It’s about building relationships where customers feel valued and heard. Think about it—when companies take clients out for a fancy dinner, they’re not just offering a nice meal—they’re extending their time and attention, creating moments that matter.

Danny Meyer, restaurateur and founder of Union Square Hospitality group says that this is one of the most fundamental elements of customer happiness, and one that a lot of companies overlook. Having a relationship with customers—one in which they receive attention and feel like they’re heard—is incredibly important to keeping them engaged with your company. “While the customer is not always right,” Meyer says, “he or she must always feel heard.”

At Appcues, we believe in this high-touch approach. It’s about more than just solving problems—it’s about creating a dialogue where every customer feels they have a voice. This level of engagement builds trust, fosters brand loyalty, and turns customers into enthusiastic advocates for your brand. Remember, the key to exceptional customer engagement is not just in what you offer, but in how you listen and respond.

By implementing these customer engagement strategies into your marketing campaigns, you can create meaningful connections that go beyond transactions, fostering a loyal community that sees your brand as an integral part of their lives. Say hello to brand awareness on a whole new level. Let's make every interaction count and turn satisfied customers into lifelong fans.