How to Solve Retailers’ Top Customer Engagement Challenges

Savvy retailers know that fostering deeper customer relationships is the key to sustainable, long-term business success. To build these relationships, brands need to take a comprehensive, thoughtful approach to creating their customer engagement strategy. It’s the art and science of growing brand loyalty by providing the best in user experience across all relevant channels. Customer engagement is inclusive of any effort your organization’s teams take to nurture relationships on an individual, one-to-one level.

Customer engagement matters for retailers because success in the digital age is no longer solely defined by foot traffic and sales. As more consumers become digital shoppers, success means driving user lifetime value (LTV), reducing customer acquisition costs, and generating capital-efficient business growth, all of which are possible when brands invest in personalized customer engagement strategies.

How to Solve Retailers’ Top Customer Engagement Challenges

It’s clear that customer engagement offers retailers plenty of advantages, but not all brands excel at customer engagement. Here are three areas where retailers struggle when it comes to customer engagement — and the solutions they can use to address each challenge:

No. 1: Navigating the Data Shift

As marketing channels proliferate, customers are generating more data than ever before. Without a proper strategy in place, brands often miss the opportunity to collect and store critical customer insights that have the potential to drive engagement, conversions and LTV. That’s a problem since accurate zero- and first-party data is growing in importance as third-party data becomes obsolete.

To learn more about your customers directly, without relying on third-party platforms, you can ethically and transparently gather zero-party data from your shoppers directly via:

• polls;
• quizzes;
• customer preference centers;
• forms; and
• surveys.

Once you gather these insights, you can use the information you collect to personalize your in-app and in-browser messaging, emails, SMS campaigns, push notifications, and other customer messaging channels.

No. 2: Eliminating Channel Silos That Frustrate Customers

Running a sale on your website but not your app? Promoting a discount via social but not to your email subscribers? It’s not enough to have a presence across various popular customer communications channels; you need to ensure a cohesive experience across these touchpoints. But according to a Braze study of 1,500 marketing executives, more than half (51 percent) of retail and e-commerce brands use channel-specific solutions to engage with customers instead of cross-channel customer engagement technology — i.e., they’re more likely to communicate with customers in silos.

Breaking down channel silos and using cross-channel customer engagement helps brands attract more buyers, generate more purchases per user, boost 30-day retention, and drive higher customer LTV.

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No. 3: Missing Opportunities to Personalize the Customer Experience

A study from Shopify finds that nearly all (85 percent) brands believe they’re offering customers personalized experiences. However, consumers feel differently, with only 60 percent reporting that they feel they’re receiving a personalized experience.

When customers share information such as their location, preferences, interests, and buying and browsing history, brands can use this data to tailor the experience so it’s contextual and relevant to the moment. Dynamic content personalization enables brands to personalize customer messaging in real time at scale using internal data sources — e.g., data from in-store POS systems, customer loyalty program databases, and website and app engagement data sources — as well as external data sources, such as local weather APIs. This technology solution gives retailers the ability to send meaningful campaigns with personal recommendations that resonate.

How Braze Can Help Retail Brands Improve Customer Engagement

The world’s leading retailers have teamed up with Braze to personalize the shopper experience and drive customer engagement using zero- and first-party data strategies, cross-channel customer engagement, real-time dynamic content personalization, and more. These tech tactics complement long-term brand building by consistently delivering the brand promise at the most meaningful moments in each user’s journey. See how retail brands that leverage Braze can boost 90-day retention by 73 percent and customer lifetime value by 3.2X.

Sharon Panelo is senior director, strategic consulting, Braze, a customer engagement platform.