How to Improve Customer Engagement & Build Advocacy

Is it really that important to improve customer engagement? We talk a lot about customer experience and how it helps attract and convert customers. While acquiring new customers is great, forward-thinking brands now focus on creating powerful user experiences that naturally drive brand advocacy.

Customer engagement strategies are central to establishing strong customer relationships that lead to true brand loyalty. They help identify pain points proactively, resolve them efficiently, and create customer-centric experiences that keep people enthusiastically interacting with your brand.

In this post, we’ll explore how you can improve customer engagement to turn customers into advocates.

What Is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the sum of intentional interactions between a customer and a brand across the full lifecycle. This includes pre-sale, purchase, post-purchase, and renewal stages.

To better understand what customer engagement is, let’s distinguish it from similar terms:

• Customer experience is the overall perception of the brand, while customer engagement focuses on actual interactions between a customer and the brand.
• Customer satisfaction is the emotional response to individual touchpoints, like how they feel about a particular purchase or support interaction.
• Marketing engagement is usually confined to awareness and conversion campaigns and focuses on specific interactions like clicks, sign-ups, or purchases.

What does customer engagement look like today?

Successful customer engagement today is:

• Omnichannel: Engagement spans multiple communication channels, including social media platforms, email campaigns, live chat, and SMS push notifications.
• Continuous: Ongoing efforts to build relationships and keep users coming back are critical.
• Personalized: Experiences account for current and past customer behavior, delivering relevant content at the right time.
• Data-driven: With so many platforms offering advanced analytics, your engagement strategy must be based on data and tested thoroughly.
• Strategic: Nothing is incidental when it comes to customer engagement, with brands strategically refining CX and developing touchpoints to keep customers returning.

Why Improving Customer Engagement Matters

There are many compelling reasons to improve customer engagement:

It drives retention

Engaged customers churn less — it’s a simple fact. The more someone interacts with your brand, the longer they stay, and that’s huge for your bottom line. Harvard Business Review famously reported that even a 5% increase in retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.

It increases customer lifetime value (CLV)

Engaged customers spend more on average than new customers, with data showing that repeat customers spend an average of 67% more than new customers. This increases both average order value and LTV. Engaged customers typically not only buy more, but they also upgrade more often and are less price-sensitive. They trust your brand and are often willing to spend more as a result.

It boosts referrals and advocacy

An initial conversion is great, but true value comes from customer advocacy. Once customers are loyal to your business, they’ll tell friends, family, and colleagues.

Brand advocates can drive significant referrals, which are more valuable than new customers acquired through other channels and marketing efforts. People are four times more likely to convert when referred by a friend. They also retain longer and have higher LTVs.

It reduces acquisition costs

Loyal customers will continue to return to your business; acquisition costs aren’t necessary to replace them, only to scale. Additionally, the people they refer to your business are often much cheaper to acquire than those coming from other platforms, as they have shorter customer journeys and fewer touchpoints.

This is great for your bottom line, even if you’re using paid referral programs as an incentive to existing customers.

It improves product usage and feedback loops

Engaged users often adopt new products or features faster. They may be more enthusiastic beta testers, too. This can give you invaluable early feedback that you can use to improve your products, increasing overall customer satisfaction.

10 Ways to Improve Customer Engagement

Improving customer engagement means considering the entire customer journey, including marketing campaigns, digital CX, multiple communication channels, and even in-person interactions.

Let’s discuss 10 effective customer engagement strategies that can help you boost engagement and the overall brand experience.

1. Build a frictionless onboarding journey that drives early value

A customer’s first experience with your product or service will set the tone for the entire relationship.

Prioritize customer success efforts that will help them get value out of your product or service quickly.

These tactics can help:

• Create onboarding flows segmented by customer type or use case.
• Use a checklist or progress bar to visually encourage completion of key tasks.
• Trigger in-app tooltips or emails when customers stall or skip critical steps.
• Deliver small wins early, including congratulating users on completing specific tasks, to reinforce success.

Why it matters: The faster a user sees value, the more likely they will remain engaged. Poor onboarding is one of the most common root causes of churn. Anticipate your customer’s needs, and find ways to ensure they’re using the full functionality of your product. This should be an important consideration when setting CX team goals.

2. Personalize engagement across the entire lifecycle

Generic outreach erodes trust, and research shows 81% of customers now prefer companies offering personalization. Modern engagement demands contextual relevance powered by customer data.

Try these tactics:

• Use CRM or CDP data to tailor messaging by behavior, role, purchase history, or geography.
• Dynamically insert product recommendations, guides, or case studies based on usage.
• Deploy predictive content or outreach based on likely intent, using renewal nudges or upsell prompts based on customer behavior.

Why it matters: Personalization can drive 40% more revenue for brands that implement it effectively. It also keeps users interested and engaged with relevant content that speaks directly to their needs and interests.

3. Automate triggered communications that respond to behavior

Reactive communication leaves too much to chance, especially if you’re relying on manual processes. Automations based on behavioral triggers ensure consistent, timely touchpoints that move users toward action and remain relevant to their customer journey stage.

Test these tactics:

• Use automated messaging based on your industry, like abandoned cart reminders for e-commerce or inactive user nudges and renewal countdowns for SaaS.
• Implement in-app pop-ups that appear when users complete milestones or achieve usage thresholds.
• Create “We miss you” campaigns triggered after 30+ days of inactivity or a delayed purchase.

Why it matters: Trigger-based campaigns generate significantly higher engagement compared to “batch-and-blast” approaches. One study saw a 468% higher click rate and a 525% higher conversion rate in triggered email campaigns.

4. Use conversational interfaces to engage in real time

Live chat and AI-driven bots aren’t just support tools — they’re engagement accelerators. When implemented effectively, they reduce friction and increase conversion, offering customers convenient options to get help quickly.

Give these tactics a try:

• Route pre-sale questions to knowledgeable reps instantly.
• Set up conversational bots to qualify leads or answer FAQs 24/7.
• Use live chat data to enrich CRM records for future personalization.

Why it matters: Chatbots can resolve most routine questions quickly, freeing representatives to focus on high-value tasks while increasing customer satisfaction. Look for customer engagement software that includes robust live chat functionality.

5. Create self-service opportunities to ease customer choices

Customers don’t always want to talk to you, and that’s okay. It’s why we have both high-touch and low-touch customer engagement models. A strong self-service strategy invites engagement on customers’ terms through knowledge bases, FAQ sections, and AI-powered assistants.

Try these tactics:

• Build an intuitive knowledge base with categorized, searchable content, updating it as your product evolves.
• Add video tutorials and visual walkthroughs for popular topics, especially technical ones.
• Set up self-service interactive voice response for basic tasks like making payments or checking account balances.
• Embed help widgets in-app or on-page for real-time contextual support.
• Always provide easy access for customers to shift to human support when needed.

Why it matters: Nextiva’s CX Trends Report found that 67% of consumers prefer self-service over speaking with a company representative, and 89% of brands either currently use or plan to use self-service AI tools like chatbots.

6. Design engagement loops with gamification principles

Gamification is a proven way to increase product stickiness and make customer interactions feel more rewarding. It keeps users coming back and can increase purchases, product usage, and feature adoption.

These tactics can be highly effective:

• Use progress bars, badges, or streaks to encourage recurring behaviors.
• Recognize milestones (like “You’ve completed 10 sessions!”) with subtle animations or celebratory modals.
• Tie points or levels to meaningful benefits in customer loyalty programs, including discounts, VIP gifts, or access to premium features.
• Use a customer engagement platform that tracks gamification and milestones to personalize interactions.

Why it matters: Gamified systems increase customer engagement across all industries by tapping into natural human motivations for achievement, status, and rewards.

7. Collect and act on feedback throughout the customer journey

Feedback is a signal, not engagement itself. To improve customer engagement, you need to respond to that input.

Companies that regularly collect, analyze, and close the loop on customer feedback build trust over time as they increasingly meet customer expectations.

These tactics can help:

• Use customer satisfaction surveys after support requests to assess individual interactions.
• Implement quarterly net promoter score (NPS) surveys to assess overall customer sentiment.
• Include short polls during onboarding or post-purchase moments to identify potential bottlenecks.
• Turn negative feedback into a personal outreach opportunity and rectify the situation.

Why it matters: Customers are more likely to stay loyal if they believe a brand listens to them, especially when they see that their feedback leads to tangible improvements.

8. Run events, webinars, and community programs to deepen connection

High-engagement brands don’t just build customer lists — they build communities. Events, marketing campaigns, and value-adding content deepen relationships and transform customers from users to advocates.

Test these tactics:

• Host monthly live Q&As, product training sessions, or user panels.
• Leverage value-centered content marketing that educates customers on topics they care about.
• Spotlight customer success stories in community newsletters or webinars.
• Use communities like Slack, social media groups, or forums to encourage peer interaction.

Why it matters: Customers who participate in brand communities are 60% more loyal to a brand because of that connection and the added value they receive beyond the core product.

9. Design cross-channel experiences that feel cohesive

True engagement doesn’t happen in silos. Customers move between email, social, product, and support channels, and they expect brands to maintain context throughout their journey. Omnichannel customer engagement is now a priority for all brands that want to offer a seamless experience.

Try these tactics:

• Use a unified CRM or engagement platform to track all interactions across platforms.
• Ensure consistent tone and branding across emails, SMS, product interfaces, and chat.
• Stitch together workflows where an in-app action might trigger an email, which leads to a social offer and then a webinar invitation.
• Consider a customer’s entire journey and all past interactions when offering support.

Why it matters: Research shows that companies with omnichannel customer engagement retain 89% of customers, compared to only 33% for companies without integrated approaches.

10. Optimize continuously through data and A/B testing

Engagement strategies aren’t “set-it-and-forget-it” initiatives. The best brands treat engagement like product development — they test, measure, and iterate continuously.

Use these tactics:

• Run A/B tests on subject lines, in-app messaging, CTA placement, and sequence length.
• Track customer engagement metrics based on audience segment, including DAU/MAU, product engagement score, NPS, and time to value.
• Use funnel analysis to identify drop-off points and repair weak links.
• Implement customer experience management strategies based on customer feedback and A/B tests.

Why it matters: Customer expectations shift over time, and your audience comprises diverse segments with different needs. Tracking which tactics truly work allows you to continually improve and maintain hard-earned loyalty.

Increase Your Customer Loyalty With Nextiva

Companies that excel at engagement start by treating every interaction as a value exchange. This goes beyond having strong customer experience management — you need to proactively create meaningful touchpoints that keep users coming back.

Empower your teams to collaborate across departments, including sales, product, marketing, and customer support. Together, they can effectively measure what matters and make appropriate changes to keep customers excited about interacting with your brand.

This can start with a unified customer experience management platform like Nextiva. Our CXM software makes it easy for cross-departmental teams to monitor the full customer experience. You can test and implement engagement strategies more effortlessly, making it essential for CX-focused businesses that need streamlined processes.

True engagement drives loyalty, profitability, and sustainable growth — it’s worth the investment.

Ready to implement new engagement strategies to boost retention and brand loyalty? Check out Nextiva’s CXM to get started.