10 Real-Life Examples of Customer Engagement Marketing

Customer engagement marketing is an especially fruitful marketing tactic. But pulling a good customer engagement strategy off can be very difficult. It requires an entire process to be put together and optimized.

We understand that original, fresh customer engagement marketing takes overcoming many roadblocks. But the reality is that many other companies have already engaged customers with tested, quality strategies.

In this article, let’s look into those examples of customer engagement marketing that can provide you with some inspiration. We will break it down for you, showing examples of the best practices at each important stage of engagement marketing strategy.

First impression examples 

First impressions are everything. Without a good first impression, there is no more engagement and no more marketing.

SBC Digital

During the SBC Digital Summit, attendees were placed in a virtual space resembling the infrastructure of an office building. The first stop was the lobby, where they could interact in a fully interactive virtual environment.

The entire event mimicked a physical conference space in many ways. The lobby served as the event’s central hub. But attendees could freely navigate from there to the auditorium to join live conference sessions. They could even just choose on-demand content to watch from the lobby and see content from the previous sessions.

A big part of making this kind of impression work is ensuring attendees feel comfortable and don’t get confused or lose engagement. This freedom and the well-designed introductory lobby space was complimented by well-designed interfaces that were easy and welcoming for users to navigate through. They could even wander through the virtual space to learn about new products and interact with staff.

There are easy ways to recreate these successes yourself. Think about the power of breakout rooms and how you can leverage them in so many ways. Create dedicated spaces for networking, for specific purposes or products, etc. Make sure the introduction is strong and the event spaces are intuitively designed. Then, you can provide a truly freeing and valuable experience.

Engagement Through Personalization

Personalization is a key part of customer engagement marketing and is widely utilized in engagement marketing across the board. That means if you want to stay competitive, you need to tailor experiences as well as the best companies!

Amazon Virtual Summit

Likely no one engages through personalization as effectively as Amazon. The company leverages customer behavior to tailor their interactions with shoppers, a mentality they apply to their virtual events as well.

Amazon had to transition to virtual spaces for their summits starting in 2020. Their hybrid events are informative and enable AWS users to gain the most out of Amazon’s services. Attendees learned how to leverage omnichannel strategies, understand the customer journey, and capture new opportunities.

Their live, hybrid, and virtual events normally feature limited-time deals, performative product launches, personalized presentations and deals, influencer collaboration, contests, and all kinds of gamification. Their excellent social media engagement compliments these efforts during events, maximizing their reach with an omnichannel outlook.

Quintessa Estate

You rely on wine tourism to your estate in Napa Valley, California, and suddenly, there’s a global pandemic raging and customers are unable to visit and support your business in person. What do you do?

The Quintessa Estate case shows how important creativity is and that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Normally, people who attended their events would receive a tour and taste their excellent wine. So, when the inevitable shift to hosting virtual events took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, they made a few changes to enable them to deliver a similar experience online.

Quintessa Estate began offering virtual tours through Zoom. The tour featured several samples of the favorite wines grown there. The wine samples were shipped to attendees’ homes ahead of the event, along with a complete tasting kit. The tour was virtual, the wine was real, and the change ended up being a smashing success.

Of course, Quintessa Estate stated this isn’t the ideal way of doing business for them, as there are no perfect virtual replacements for wine tasting tours. However, the virtual events served as excellent substitutes amid movement restrictions and were great distractions for the staff and customers alike. They also produced enough revenue to ease the economic burden of the pandemic.

Tomorrowland Around the World

One of the largest music festivals in the world provides several lessons on customer engagement strategy. They were uniquely successful with their last event, where a digital space was built with eight stages for over 60 artists to use.

For an event like this to go well, a lot has to go right. Over one million people attended the event, with a clear infrastructure that enabled everyone to create the ideal experiences for themselves. The whole platform was alive, with attention to the smallest details making the event feel as close to reality as possible. Each breakout space was complete with its own fireworks, light shows, and special sound effects.

While the main event — the music festival — ran, other spaces also played a part in producing a flexible experience for all. Webinars, game sessions, and workshops were also being held inside the same event so attendees always had something to do, as so many exciting opportunities were placed clearly in front of them.

Omnichannel Engagement Strategy

Omnichannel engagement strategies focus on interactions through well-integrated experiences to enable consistent experiences across channels. Normally, an omnichannel engagement strategy must take into consideration a mix of web pages, social media, email, desktop and mobile apps, and other elements.

Warby Parker

Warby Parker is a good example of an online eyeglasses company coming out of nowhere. The company came to dominate a large segment of the eyeglasses industry. For the most part, the eyeglasses business was assumed to be a strictly brick-and-mortar one. But Warby Parker managed to change that outlook and create an online eyeglasses superstore. 

The path Warby Parker took is a bit more creative than most other examples you can find. What they offer is an augmented reality (AR) location for trying on eyeglasses. Customers can virtually test new eyeglasses from home. But from that point, the company can easily fulfill a request and deliver eyeglasses for testing.

This process required Warby Parker to try out some unique engagement strategies online and offline. When trying on glasses at home, the company sends automated emails that are well crafted and lighthearted. They work through the testing process and prompt customers to complete their purchase in real time if they’re satisfied. This online-to-offline engagement provides them with a unique customer retention advantage that most companies could not easily recreate. But it took some professional crafting to ensure users were guided through their buyer’s journeys properly.

Planet IMEX

Planet IMEX events are crash courses for all virtual event planners. As with so many event holders, IMEX was forced into the virtual space during recent years. But they haven’t let that slow them down.

IMEX created a vacation archipelago featuring all sorts of interactions, sounds, and spaces. It hosted three islands, each with its own podcast rooms, blog libraries, and videos.

Customer needs for events like this are easy to understand. But it’s the small touches that often count the most, such as each island having its own soundtrack.

These kinds of touches are applicable for virtual events of all sizes (in this case, it was a three-day conference).

Loyalty Development Examples

Loyalty development is one of the more easily implemented ways to engage customers. Keep in mind that this doesn’t refer to loyalty programs alone. As we show in the examples, there are other incentives, and you can create many unique customer loyalty development tactics.

Loyalty development is a marketing strategy that is centered around fostering stronger long-term relationships with customers. It’s a low-cost path to maximizing the lifetime value of each customer while keeping them engaged and building brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty extends beyond rewards programs and can be built up through several tactics. Think personalized rewards processes, advanced customer service tactics, and customer experiences overall. Anything that helps develop a more positive experience that gains their trust and respect.

Loyalty development also takes place in a broader context. Rewards sent via email alone don’t cut it. The strategy should include some mix of in-store, social media, website, app, and other engagement. These can and should then be supported by loyalty/rewards programs.

When crafting your own tactics, think about new customers and old ones alike. Create a tier system that addresses everyone, to an appropriate extent.

Google Sheets

Google’s Google SheetsCon 2020 was the first dedicated event for Google Sheets users. It provided attendees with knowledge, pro tips, expert panel discussions, and lots of freebies.

The organizers of the 2020 SheetsCon event leaned heavily into user engagement through giveaways. The move was simple: incentivize attendees to publicize the event before, during, and after. In exchange, many creative giveaways, of varying levels of value, were distributed. For example, they asked the audience to post on social media or visit 5 sponsor pages during the event.

While this last move falls under a different category, they also provided a well-designed and thorough walkthrough of the event. An intro video was shown following initial guest logins, walking everyone through the itinerary so that even the least engaged attendees could be brought into the experience with a greater understanding.

Gamification Examples

Gamification is the application of concepts from video games into regular marketing campaigns. You incentivize customers into taking desirable actions by gamifying their interactions. For example, adding a points system to a webinar experience adds the psychological effect of earning points in a game, with the anticipation causing a dopamine spike.

Salesforce

Salesforce was one of the first large companies to make a significant pivot into the virtual event space during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like other companies at that time, they needed a way to deal with the damage caused by movement restrictions and economic pressure on their customer base.

The shining achievement of these efforts ended up being a one day event during their World Tour Sydney event that drew in 80,000 Livestream viewers plus another 1.2 million views on social media platforms.

The livestreamed event’s secret sauce was nothing extraordinary. Instead, it was an extraordinary focus on the reliable resource that is customer engagement. The event was highly interactive, taking all opportunities to keep viewers awake with games, notifications, questions, requests, and more. Every few minutes at most, viewers would take one action or another while watching an energetic and well-planned presentation. For example, participants were asked to showcase their apps during a three-minute real-time demo. During that time, participants shared their own apps then got to scrutinize others and vote on a winner.

The lesson here is to always try to make each planned slide, segment, speech, or whatever else more engaging for the audience. Follow the Salesforce example and find creative ways to draw everyone into the experience.

Interactive Marketing Examples 

Interactive marketing describes marketing activities that demand customer engagement. Customers are encouraged to participate in some part of the marketing experience. If the strategy is sound, their active involvement should lead to a higher rate of conversions. Customers become more invested in their experiences with your brand, fostering loyal customers through engagement-centered events.

Demio

Engagement is at the core of the Demio webinar platform, making it a strong option for effective interactive event marketing. It offers a suite of features designed to move people further down your business pipeline, including polls, featured actions, handouts, and a chat with emojis and @ mentioning capabilities.

The platform also tracks critical metrics like who participated in specific activities, how many people downloaded a resource or clicked on a featured action, and who displayed the greatest focus during a virtual event so you know which leads to focus your efforts on. 

Thanks to these robust features and the post webinar engagement analytics, Demio customers enjoy exponentially higher results: For instance, Nutshell improved their conversion rate by five times after adopting Demio. They wanted to inject more entertainment into their virtual events, and the included polls, live chat, and other engagement elements proved to be the solution they needed.

Demio believes so wholeheartedly in their product that they put it on full display in their Game Show Demo. In these on-demand events, people can witness the platform’s interactive power in action by playing games, winning prizes, and participating in other activities built on its robust engagement features.

Best Customer Engagement Campaigns

There are good examples of customer engagement campaigns across industries. These practices can help you ensure your marketing campaigns are more successful, netting you more attendees. They are all-around great business lessons to apply.

Dominoes

Not all interactive marketing needs to be so thorough, demanding, and complex operationally. Domino’s simple “Tweet to Order” gimmick was never super complex, but it did the job.

Dominoes customers could order a pizza by simply tweeting the pizza emoji to the Dominoes Twitter page. This made it easy, fun, and convenient to order a pizza with a single tweet.

Needless to say, strategies like this work wonders for business social media presence. User-generated content and hashtag marketing with every order!

Sephora

Sephora provides an excellent and simpler example of omnichannel customer engagement strategy that is perhaps more widely applicable.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider program is a multichannel one that offers highly personalized experiences. It can be accessed in-store, online on the web pages, or through the mobile app. The rewards that can be claimed through the program are accessible through any of these channels. No matter where customers interact with Sephora, they are presented with tailored offers, rewards, and other Beauty Insider benefits.

Similarly to Amazon, and most companies to some extent, Sephora integrates customer data to create personalized recommendations and unique new product offers to customers. Then, those experiences are consistent for Sephora customers no matter what channel they are using.

Engagement Marketing Takeaways

Engagement marketing is as much about target audience research, respect for analytics and metrics as any other kind of marketing. What’s different with engagement marketing is the focus on interactivity and functionality. Customer interactions are designed to lead to greater customer satisfaction. New and existing customers are incentivized to take actions that make them more likely to convert. In other cases, such as with our last example, there are many other corresponding benefits such as better brand awareness at a low cost.

Frequently Asked Questions About Engagement Marketing Examples

What does engagement mean in marketing?

In marketing, engagement refers to the level of interaction and involvement that individuals have with a brand, product, or marketing campaign. It measures how effectively a company or marketer is able to capture and maintain the attention and interest of their target audience. 

Marketers often strive to increase engagement by creating compelling and relevant content, fostering two-way communication, personalizing experiences, and providing value to their audience. By focusing on richer interactions, marketers can build strong relationships with their customers, increase brand awareness, drive conversions, and ultimately achieve their marketing goals. 

What does brand engagement marketing look like?

A few examples of brand engagement marketing are:

• Interactive Content: Brands often incorporate interactive content, such as quizzes, polls, surveys, and interactive videos, into webinars and other virtual events to engage their audience. These types of content encourage users to participate and provide their input or opinions. 
• Experiential Marketing: Brands create memorable experiences that allow consumers to engage with the brand firsthand. This can include pop-up events, brand activations, immersive installations, or interactive demonstrations in online sessions. 
• Influencer Partnerships: Brands collaborate with influencers or content creators who have a significant following and influence over their target audience. By partnering with influencers, brands can reach a wider audience through sponsored content, product reviews, or influencer takeovers. This approach leverages the influencer’s credibility and engages their followers in a more authentic way.
• Gamification: Brands incorporate game elements into their marketing campaigns to make them more engaging and interactive. This can involve creating online games, challenges, or rewards systems. 

Why is customer engagement important?

Customer engagement is essential for fostering customer loyalty, driving growth, and building a strong brand reputation. By prioritizing engagement, businesses can cultivate a community of satisfied customers who not only continue to support the brand but also actively promote it to others. Other advantages include:

• Build Stronger Relationships: Engaging with customers helps build stronger relationships based on trust, loyalty, and satisfaction. When customers feel valued and connected to the company, they’re more likely to become repeat customers and brand advocates. Engagement allows businesses to understand customer needs and preferences better, leading to improved consumer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. 
• Increase Customer Lifetime Value: Engaged customers tend to have a higher lifetime value for a business because they’re more likely to make repeat purchases, refer others, and try new products or services. By actively engaging buyers, businesses can increase their customer retention rates and maximize the individual potential revenue over their lifetime with the company. 
• Enhance Customer Feedback and Insights: Engaged customers are more likely to provide feedback about their brand experience. By actively listening and responding to consumer feedback, businesses can gain valuable insights into buyer preferences, pain points, and expectations. This information then helps inform product development, marketing strategies, and overall business decision-making. 
• Drive Word-of-Mouth and Referrals: Engaged customers are more inclined to share positive experiences with others, leading to word-of-mouth marketing and referrals. This type of organic promotion can be highly influential and cost-effective, as potential clients often trust recommendations from friends, family, or peers more than traditional advertising. 

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