Many businesses today face a subtle yet significant challenge—disengaged customers. Despite offering high-quality products or services, they struggle with low interaction, declining loyalty, and an absence of genuine connections with their audience. This lack of engagement often results in missed opportunities, increased customer attrition, and stalled growth.
According to studies, businesses with highly engaged customers achieve revenue growth rates that are significantly higher than those with less engagement, highlighting its importance in sustaining competitive advantage and long-term growth.
Let’s explore the nuances of customer engagement through real-world examples, the channels it can be carried through, the metrics to track and analyse it, and how you can improve it.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement refers to the process of building meaningful interactions between a business and its customers across various touchpoints.
A key focus of customer engagement is fostering brand loyalty by understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors to deliver personalized experiences and solutions. Let’s discuss more about these focus principles.
The 4 Ps of customer engagement
Customer engagement runs on some basic principles. We call these the 4 pillars of customer engagement:
Personalization
Personalization is the art of delivering messages, recommendations, and offers tailored to individual preferences, behaviors, and needs. For instance, you can use customer data to send personalized email campaigns that highlight relevant products or services. Imagine receiving a curated email that speaks directly to your interests—it feels less like marketing and more like a thoughtful suggestion.
Proactivity
Brands today need to anticipate customer needs and offer solutions before they even ask. Whether it’s sending a reminder email about a soon-to-expire subscription or offering tips to make the most of a newly purchased product or newly introduced features, proactive engagement is a must. It builds trust and positions your brand as one that genuinely cares.
People
The most impactful emails and marketing campaigns thrive by embracing a genuine human touch. Customers seek authentic interactions and appreciate knowing there are real people behind the brand, rather than solely relying on machines or algorithms. Over-reliance on AI can weaken this connection, as it often falls short in delivering the emotional depth needed to build trust and loyalty. While automation plays a vital role, meaningful engagement stems from relatable communication, shared values, and sincere care. This can be achieved by nurturing connections through initiatives like events, webinars, community-building efforts, and personalized customer support, all of which help bridge the gap between your brand and its audience.
Problem-solving
Every customer has a pain point, and your brand should be the solution. By addressing problems efficiently and adding value at every touchpoint, you turn their challenges into opportunities for engagement. For example, a timely troubleshooting guide or a quick response to a query can leave a lasting impression. Customers remember brands that solve their problems with ease and grace.
By focusing on personalization, proactivity, people, and problem-solving, you’re not just engaging your customers—you’re creating experiences they’ll remember and return to.
How to build a customer engagement strategy
Building a customer engagement strategy requires setting actionable goals, identifying key touchpoints, and continuously gathering feedback to refine your approach.
Let’s break down these steps to understand how you can drive engagement effectively.
Set goals
Start by defining what you want to achieve. Different departments within your business may have varying objectives, and aligning them is key to building a cohesive strategy. To do this, you can define specific engagement goals. For example, is the product team looking to upsell or cross-sell? Does the service team want to strengthen the subscription model?
Identify touchpoints and engagement channels
Understanding where, when, and how customers interact with your brand is critical to optimize engagement. Once you map the various customer touchpoints and engagement channels, you will have better visibility on designing marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience, and the stages at which they need to be deployed.
To carry this out, you can use dynamic segmentation to segment your audience based on factors like demographics, behavior, and preferences. This ensures that your campaigns are highly targeted and relevant to each customer group.
Here are some common customer engagement channels you can use:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Live chats and chatbots
- In-person interactions
- SMS and push notifications
- Phone calls
- In-app messaging
- Direct mails
Related guide: 8 Customer Engagement Channels to Use
Collect feedback and refine your engagement strategy
Customer engagement is not a one-time effort—it’s an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and iteration. Feedback from external customers and internal teams is invaluable to improve your overall engagement strategy.
Once your campaigns go live, you can start to monitor key metrics to see how customers are interacting with your content. Depending on the industry and goal of your campaign, you can have a separate set of metrics that you’d want to track. Some common metrics that businesses track are:
- Conversion rate
- Active users count
- Click through rate
- Email open rate
Related guide: 14 Key Customer Engagement Metrics to Track in 2025
Once, you’ve gathered the data you use it to understand how your engagement efforts align with customer needs and tweak your marketing efforts to make them more effective.
Customer engagement strategies to help your brand succeed
Having impactful strategies is essential for engaging with your customers. Here are some strategies that you can implement using Mailmodo as your main driver.
Create interactive onboarding journeys
You can simplify the onboarding process by sending automated interatve emails that guide the customers in their onboarding journey. With these interactive emails, your users can take key actions like setting up accounts, exploring features, or scheduling product demos—directly within their inbox. This reduces friction, eliminates unnecessary steps, and encourages immediate engagement with your product from the very beginning.
Deliver hyper-personalized campaigns
Leverage Mailmodo’s personalization features to segment users based on behavior, preferences, or their stage in the customer journey. Targeted emails—such as tailored recommendations for inactive users or usage tips—can reignite interest, driving engagement while building a sense of connection with your brand.
Use interactive emails to collect feedback
Collecting feedback and insights allows you to refine their product and continuously improve their service. You can embed surveys and polls within emails that customers can open and immediately respond to without leaving their inbox. For instance, you could ask customers to rate a new feature or provide feedback on their previous purchase.
You can analyze the feedback to identify trends or areas for improvement, such as solving a pain point, or introducing another new feature or improving an existing one. This keeps customers actively involved, showing that their opinions matter while fostering loyalty and engagement over time.
Run gamified campaigns
Incorporate gamification elements into your email campaigns to make interactions fun and rewarding. Use Mailmodo’s interactive features to create quizzes, polls, or contests that users can participate in their inbox. For instance, offer points or rewards for completing challenges, making customers feel invested in your brand. You can also give them reward points that they can redeem when they’re making their next purchase.
Reinforce retention with re-engagement emails
Automated re-engagement emails are an effective way to maintain user interest. Use Mailmodo’s dynamic capabilities to create visually appealing, action-oriented emails. For example, you canighlight underutilized features with in-email tutorials or use-case examples.
These targeted nudges can reignite interest and encourage users to continue interacting with your product.
Create and send interactive emails without coding in minutes
Real-world examples of top customer engagement strategies in play
The most successful companies actively implement creative and effective strategies to connect with their audience. Let’s take a closer look at some top-notch examples and how they create lasting impressions:
Mindspace
Mindspace, a global coworking space provider, excels in customer engagement by regularly checking in with customers. They utilize a mix of follow-up emails, in-app notifications, and surveys to ensure that customers feel heard and that their needs are being met. These interactions not only enhance customer satisfaction but also build trust, showing customers that their well-being and success matter.
Starbucks
Starbucks has mastered the art of digital engagement with its rewards program. Customers earn points on every purchase, which can be redeemed for discounts or free items. Their app makes it easy for customers to track rewards, reload funds, and even place orders. By gamifying the experience, Starbucks keeps customers engaged, encouraging frequent visits and building brand loyalty.
Spotify
Spotify’s ability to personalize its offerings is a game changer. The platform uses data on listening habits of the users to deliver curated playlists, such as Discover Weekly or Your Daily Mix. Spotify also runs personalized email campaigns to notify users about new releases or playlists tailored to their preferences. This level of hyper-personalization keeps users engaged and coming back for more.
Amazon
Amazon’s cart abandonment strategy is a classic example of effective customer re-engagement. When users leave items in their carts, Amazon sends timely email reminders with visuals and purchase links. The ease of completing the purchase directly from the email helps reduce friction and recover potentially lost sales.
Slack
Slack, the popular B2B communication tool, engages new users with an interactive onboarding experience. New customers receive step-by-step guides, product tips, and personalized emails to help them get the most out of the platform. By simplifying the onboarding process, Slack ensures users quickly understand its value, leading to higher adoption rates and long-term loyalty.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn takes engagement to the next level with its focus on community building. Features like LinkedIn Groups, interactive posts, and personalized job recommendations make users feel part of a professional ecosystem. Additionally, its in-app notifications and tailored emails keep users informed and active on the platform.
Using Mailmodo to create a winning customer engagement strategy
As you craft your engagement strategy, keep in mind the pillars of customer engagement discussed above, and how these play a crucial role in your campaign’s success. With Mailmodo as your go-to tool, you not only have the power to engage your audience but also to drive tangible outcomes. Plus, by learning from the real-world examples shared, you'll gain insights to refine your approach and optimize your customer engagement efforts.
