Customer engagement is how customers interact with your brand across all channels, starting with their very first impression and continuing long after they’ve made a purchase. It’s why companies like yours invest in advertising, conduct follow-up surveys, and maintain an open line of communication. Customer engagement activities should work together to keep you at top of mind and ultimately boost revenue and loyalty.

In this blog, I’ll walk you through how our global team thinks about customer engagement for our clients. Then, I’ll go through eight proven examples, along with some case studies from our clients like Walmart, DocuSign, and more. Who doesn’t love that? Let’s get started.

Need to Skim? Key Takeaways:

  • Customer engagement is the intentional and unintentional effort you put towards strengthening relationships with customers beyond transactions.
  • Brands can drive engagement through strategic customer engagement activities like gifting programs, sponsorships, personalization, thorough customer service, and more.
  • Leveraging technology such as AI or integrative channels is the hottest new trend in customer engagement. Partnering with a tech- and platform-driven agency is the most effective and convenient way to stay ahead of the curve.

Table of Contents

  1. How Our Team Thinks About Customer Engagement
  2. Why Customer Engagement Activities Are Important
  3. 8 Proven Customer Engagement Strategies

How Our Team Thinks About Customer Engagement

Engagement is quite literally the heart of what we do at Imprint Engine. We believe strategic brand experiences offer countless, invaluable brand touchpoints for our clients to engage with people.

By building, implementing, and managing meaningful brand experiences — both online and offline and tangible and intangible — companies are able to make personalized and long-lasting impacts on customers (and even their employees).

Not to get too cheesy, but it’s about so much more than the products and experiences we help create; it’s about the connections and loyalty they inspire. 

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement influences customer loyalty, brand image, new customer acquisition, and of course, revenue. One example according to Twilio: Brands with mature digital engagement report a 123% increase in revenue. 

Customer engagement strategies not only boost referrals and brand awareness, they help you optimize your relationships with existing customers. It’s over five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than engage with existing ones, so effective customer engagement is a practical way to build your tribe of loyal customers.

Our Favorite Customer Engagement Activities Examples

Go Puff

To celebrate the excitement of “back to college” season, Go Puff wanted to engage new and existing customers through targeted marketing both on and off campus. There was just one small obstacle: they had a tight three-week deadline to plan over 4 million units of 40+ SKUs to be delivered to over 300 college campuses (plus a couple additional hinges with supply chain issues and last-minute design edits).

Unlike other distributors who rely on their existing supply chains, we source materials directly and take a hands-on approach to production, reproduction, and distribution. Our brand experience solutions made it possible to manage communications with 500+ contacts and produce and distribute 4 million promo items within Go Puff’s desired timeframe.

In turn, Go Puff achieved outstanding brand exposure and customer engagement at more than 300 universities across the country.

DocuSign

For DocuSign’s 20th anniversary, we helped them honor the achievements of their thousands of employees through a memorable, hassle-free gifting program. To do this, we securely collected and stored employee data, curated and sourced a desirable gift selection, and executed timely and budget-friendly international deliveries with zero logistical efforts needed from their team. I

n turn, DocuSign saw participation from over 5,000 team members, achieved 30% cost saving on product spend, and pulled off a 99.98% success rate (due to just one user selecting the wrong size).

Our team’s brand experience expertise from platform development to global logistics made it possible for DocuSign to engage thousands of valued individuals. 

8 Proven Customer Engagement Activities

Engaging new and existing customers can be done a number of ways. I’ll walk you through eight strategies that have proven effective for our own business as well as our clients’ businesses.

1. Create Seasonal & Thematic Product Promotions

One of the best ways to drive engagement is through thoughtful gifting. This is relatively easy to do and ensures that we’re creating products/gifts that people actually want.

Another way is leading with value; we do this by creating custom catalogs and samples so that a customer can see what their logo and branding would look like once the design is brought to life. In my opinion, a well-executed, custom product promotion is one of the best engagement tools out there.

2. Collaborate With Brands & Influencers

Your customers and clients are part of your business, and collaborations do a great job of showcasing that while capturing new audiences. Endorsements from influencers or other brands can help build trust and credibility, which ultimately leads to increased loyalty and engagement.

3. Partner With & Sponsor Events

Partnering with or sponsoring events is another great way to capture new audiences and open up new markets. The most popular options include digital sponsorships (e-newsletters, event apps, Wi-Fi access, etc.), print sponsorships (show dailies, show directories, floor maps, etc.), and signage sponsorships (show boards, elevator wraps, digital signage, etc.). Once you’ve found a sponsorship that aligns with your values and goals, the provided visibility will help boost customer engagement with your brand.

4. Align Your Brand Values 

One of the most important ways to drive engagement right now is Purpose-Led Branding (and hopefully it’s not just a trend). Millennials and Gen-Z are flooded with more messaging and options today than ever before, and the majority of them (70% and above) would rather buy from, and even pay extra, to brands that have a mission bigger than themselves — one that aligns with their audience’s values.

That doesn’t mean weighing in on every single issue or faking support by changing your brand’s profile pic for a month. It means having an authentic brand compass and sticking to it within your storytelling. If you know your audience, and it’s a real purpose/cause/passion, engagement will be a natural byproduct. 

5. Build a Gifting Strategy for Loyal Customers & Clients

Loyal customers are 64% more likely to purchase more frequently than non-loyal, non-engaged customers. Building a gifting strategy for repeat customers or valued clients is an effective way to establish loyalty and boost engagement.

We helped Walmart develop a gifting program for this year’s Year Beginning Meeting (YBM) along with a Shareholders event and holiday party. We sourced and produced high quality products and successfully delivered all requested SKUs to each event. This success set new benchmarks for Walmart’s on-site gifting activations, with the 2024 YBM doubling the sales of the year prior!

We’re not your average promotional product vendor, we take time to fully understand your brand and audience to create a gifting strategy that’s as efficient as it is powerful.

6. Personalize Your Communications

86% of consumers say that personalized experiences increase their loyalty to brands. Conversely, 66% of consumers say they will quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. That number rises to 75% among Gen-Z consumers. Obviously personalization makes a difference, and it’s easier than ever to achieve it based on data such as customers’ names, ages, genders, locations, interests, and more. 

7. Prioritize Customer Service & Conduct Frequent Customer Surveys

Another big thing I see trending for brand engagement, which we at Imprint Engine have always understood, is a return to quality customer service.

Not only are customers DYING to speak with real humans that can help them with support (seriously, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience), it’s actually a major component of your brand story. It’s an opportunity to have multiple, engaging brand touchpoints while also offering the service every customer wants. Every step in the process for providing support can be an impactful brand touchpoint. A few things to consider:

  • How easy do you make it to reach out?
  • What unique or brand tone of voice is being used?
  • What kind of visual elements are introduced in the process?
  • How does the call, chat, or email leverage the brand voice or approach?
  • What brand elements come through in the follow-up?

That doesn’t mean these things need to be artificial or robotic, but customer service and surveys are often overlooked as touchpoints. Send post-transaction surveys, offer engaging elements throughout the customer support journey, and don’t forget to apply provided feedback to improve your ongoing brand strategy.

8. Measure Your Engagement

It’s difficult to know what’s working or which next steps to take if you’re not following the metrics. Measuring engagement is a key step in our Enterprise IEX platform. Our clients who utilize our platform can not only manage online stores, automate and integrate workflows, and track inventory all in one place, they have access to custom analytics so it’s easy to pivot and make informed decisions based on trends.

Based on what I’ve been seeing and hearing amongst our peers and global clients, AI-powered personalization and customer support, integrative channels, and subscription models are hot in the customer engagement world.

Customer feedback is as important as ever, with the majority of companies collecting feedback to gauge customer satisfaction. If you aren’t already, take this as your sign to read up on new technologies that can increase and leverage customer engagement. Or just ask us! We’ve got a team of tech nerds — I mean experts — eager to help you stay on-trend and ahead of the engagement game.

Have Ideas? We Want to Hear ‘Em!

These are just a few strategies and activities we’ve taken part in. We’re eager to help expand your network and boost your customer engagement. Start a conversation with our brand experts today.

Quick start by filling out this form!

We can’t wait to connect with you.