The Shifting Retail Landscape—And How Marketers Should React

The pandemic pendulum swung back from the peak of online shopping to a focus on whatever savvy shoppers expect from their retail experience. That experience includes brick-and-mortar shopping, browsing and buying on multiple devices, 24/7/365 availability for support, and an interconnected customer engagement strategy underpinning all of it to deliver the right messages at the right time.

With the right customer engagement strategy, brands can acquire new customers, engage their current ones, and reconnect with old ones. Doing this properly requires understanding the evolving retail landscape and how to respond to shoppers’ changing needs and habits.

To provide marketers with that key guidance, we asked retailers for their two cents. Braze once again partnered with Wakefield Research to create the Retail Customer Engagement Review, a report on the top trends in customer engagement for retail and the opportunities ahead to connect with customers. We found some interesting comparisons year over year, but consider this just a tease to the complete findings in the 2025 Retail Customer Engagement Review.

What a Difference a Year Makes

The 2024 Retail Customer Engagement Review found that revenue by campaign was the industry’s most popular metric for measuring customer engagement success—39% of respondents named this as number one, with customer satisfaction (38%) and customer retention (37%) rounding out the top three.

While retailers still ranked those among the top four, a sleeper hit crept into the number-one spot in the 2025 report—customer lifetime value, which 38% of surveyed retailers named as most important in determining success. This year’s report explains what that means for retailers looking ahead—not just for the rest of 2025, but to achieve the kind of long-term customer loyalty they’ve identified as a priority.

Last year, we found that surveyed retailers are relatively sophisticated in their segmentation and personalization, but many had yet to tap the opportunity in a unified platform that joins in-store and online data. This year, retailers are increasingly talking about the buzzword "phygital" as retailers blend physical and digital experiences to truly deliver on personalization across every touchpoint. We’re excited that Braze customers can do that with a new-and-improved integration with Shopify, the leading online and in-store commerce platform.

Technology Isn’t at Odds with Human Connection

The year-in-review campaigns get shared over every group chat in December. Those 20% off coupons from your favorite store—or, perhaps your new favorite store discovered on Instagram. The delight of being addressed by name in an email with links to products you actually want. The VIP feeling of being invited to an exclusive event at a store you love in your area. Each of these interactions speaks to the high bar modern shoppers set for their favorite brands, highlighting the opportunities retailers have to foster long-term or even lifetime loyalty. These moments require the right technology partner to execute at scale.

In this year’s data, we found that the vast majority of retailers lean on customer engagement technologies, such as a single platform or multiple point solutions for each channel, to drive emotional connections with their messaging. That includes personalizing shoppers’ experiences with customer data and channel preferences, highlighting community events, or sending those personalized messages we love based on the key milestones or special occasions.

We also found that retail brands are connecting the technology with the creative, human work: the unique brand voice, tone, and personality that allows them to connect with shoppers at every point in their customer journey. While technology allows retail brands to connect with shoppers at scale, the enduring nature of those brands is tied to that brand voice, look, feel, and content customers come to associate with them.

Conclusion

Our perspective has long been to focus on customer needs and preferences as you build your customer engagement strategy, and that hasn't changed. Retailers are making the right moves to build enduring relationships with their customers. Marketers have to balance creativity and brand voice against scalable technologies to ensure that messages reach the customers at the right times in order to create true customer experiences that drive lifetime value.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and partnerships. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.