How Enterprise Brands Can Leverage Cross-Channel Engagement to Thrive in a Challenging Marketplace

It's no easy feat working behind the scenes running the marketing, growth, and customer engagement efforts powering today's leading enterprise brands. You not only have to capture your customers' attention, but hold it in an increasingly noisy and competitive landscape.

Making a difference for both customers and your brand takes a thoughtful approach. It takes effectively listening to what customers are saying—what they need, what they want more of, what they don't like—and then acting upon these insights so messages feel timely, relevant, and impactful at the 1:1 level. Not just once, but every time, across all channels.

It’s a lot of work, but the payoff can be tremendous. That's because excelling at customer engagement translates into long-term, capital-efficient business growth, according to the findings of our 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review, an annual study conducted to quantify the impact of investing in customer relationship-building strategies.

Cross-Channel Customer Engagement: The Competitive Advantage of Leading Global Brands

When you invest your time and resources in a new approach or strategy, you need to be able to measure the ROI and see the value over time. And that's why enterprise-level brands are increasingly prioritizing and investing in cross-channel customer engagement, the value of which is easy to not only measure but also to grow over time.

As part of our 2022 Customer Engagement Review, we analyzed Braze data aggregated from over 5.4 billion global users to provide insights on how customer engagement can improve activation, retention, and monetization metrics. We found that a cross-channel engagement strategy that combines both in-product messages (like in-app messages) and out-of-product messages (like email and push) increased a user’s likelihood to buy by 3.1X, compared to a single-channel approach. But while combining in-product and out-of-product channels sees top results, even adding one more channel has an impact: On average, each additional channel you add to your messaging mix results in 4.3X more purchases per user and a 2.8X lift in likelihood to buy.

And the growth impact of customer engagement doesn't stop there. Brands who take things one step further and expand beyond single-channel engagement to begin sending outreach in a second channel see even more gains across purchases, customer lifetime value (LTV), and retention.

Beyond these increases in customer engagement KPIs, customer-centric brands are more likely to report overall revenue growth as well. The majority of brands (98%) that self-rated their customer engagement efforts as "excellent" exceeded their revenue goals in 2021, according to our study.

How to Achieve Effective Cross-Channel Customer Engagement at the Enterprise Level

As part of our Global Customer Engagement Review study, we created a new framework for evaluating the effectiveness and maturity of brands' customer engagement strategies. We found that the most advanced and successful brands are ahead in three key areas:

1. Delivering customer engagement campaigns built around and in support of the customer lifecycle
2. Ensuring customer engagement is a cross-functional effort where all key stakeholders collaborate together to optimize the customer experience
3. Investing in customer engagement technology platforms powered by real-time, streaming data to ensure the right messages make it more swiftly to the right customers

What Cross-Channel Engagement Success Looks Like at the Enterprise Level: Overstock and Pizza Hut

From retailers to technology giants, building out systems, strategies, and campaigns in support of customer engagement has helped Braze clients improve conversion rates, transactions, revenue, profits, and more.

Check out our customer case studies to see just what enterprise-level customer engagement done right looks like. Discover how Braze teamed up with:

• Overstock to deliver stronger open rates, engagement, and conversions using real-time customer lifecycle marketing packed with powerful personalized product recommendations
• Pizza Hut to launch key new messaging channels and support a sophisticated multivariate testing tool powered by machine learning to increase transactions by 30%, revenue by 21%, and profits by 10%
• Sephora SEA to increase purchases by 132% with a gamified in-app message based on streaming data

Next Steps

If you're ready to see firsthand how the Braze customer engagement platform can support your goals of growing your enterprise's revenue, retention, and more, connect with our sales team and get a complete walk-through of our product, a breakdown of the channels and platforms we support, and our expert recommendations for how you can increase the impact of your customer engagement and retention efforts.