Customer engagement: best practices and trends for brands in 2025 for a smooth and personalized experience across all channels

Today’s shopping journeys span the web, mobile devices, marketplaces, and physical stores, making it increasingly challenging for businesses to maintain strong customer connections. Under a unified commerce approach, customer engagement is now integrated into a broader strategy centered on personalization. But how can businesses capture and hold the attention of already highly solicited customers?

This article delves into the top practices and emerging trends for 2025 that can help brands develop a robust customer engagement strategy anchored in strong brand communication.

Maximizing customer engagement in unified commerce

The challenges of customer engagement

With consumers interacting with brands across multiple channels, ensuring a consistent customer experience has become a significant challenge. Without an integrated strategy, the customer journey can quickly become fragmented.

The biggest challenge lies in synchronizing data and interactions across various touchpoints. A customer might initiate a conversation via online chat but complete their purchase in-store. Without a unified customer view, inconsistencies can arise, leading to frustration and a perceived disconnect between touchpoints.

To foster customer loyalty, brands need to integrate touchpoints to ensure continuity of interactions. Customer engagement then becomes a key performance indicator: a smoother, more personalized, and seamless customer journey leads to stronger brand relationships. Every touchpoint—be it a website, app, store, customer service, or social media—must deliver consistent quality to drive engagement.

Levers to strengthen loyalty

Centralizing data allows brands to personalize every step of the shopping journey, enhancing the coherence of the customer experience. Customers interacting with a brand across various touchpoints anticipate continuity—whether on the e-commerce site, in-store, or via a mobile app. Unified commerce facilitates this seamless experience.

Valuing each customer through personalized rewards tailored to their expectations and preferences is essential for fostering loyalty. A thoughtfully designed loyalty program not only bolsters engagement but also promotes recurring purchases. Supported by a powerful CRM, these initiatives optimize customer relationship management and maximize Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), reflecting the value a customer provides throughout their relationship with the brand.

Loyalty has evolved beyond rewards; it now requires brands to build trusted relationships by demonstrating their understanding and anticipation of customer needs. Customer engagement flourishes with this recognition. In a competitive landscape, brands that effectively utilize these relational levers make a more enduring impact on their customers.

Best practices for optimal customer experience

Offering a personalized omnichannel experience

In a unified commerce setting, personalization means tailoring interactions in real-time based on customer behavior, context, and history, necessitating precise data utilization.

The aim is to create seamless continuity between touchpoints. Imagine a customer who discovers a product on a mobile app, adds it to their cart on a computer, and finalizes the purchase in-store. Identifying them and retaining their choices and preferences is crucial. Achieving such continuity necessitates real-time system updates and a centralized customer database, ensuring satisfaction at every interaction.

Personalization relies on subtle signals (page views, purchase frequency, campaign responses) alongside declarative information. Brands can then activate customized scenarios, making customers feel each interaction is specifically designed for them. Further refinement of personalization comes through loyalty tools that centralize data to strengthen individual relationships.

Integrating customer data for an omnichannel strategy

By integrating all touchpoints, businesses can build a unified customer view for comprehensive loyalty. Companies frequently fail to capitalize on their data because of siloed systems. To bridge these gaps, each touchpoint must use a centralized information base, enabling contextualized interactions: a sales associate can access a customer’s in-store purchase history, or a push notification can recapture an abandoned cart. Leveraging this unified vision allows brands to launch more relevant campaigns and enhance performance.

This extensive customer knowledge is vital for identifying high-potential profiles, detecting attrition signals, and refining marketing segments. Data integration transcends operational efficiency; it is pivotal to a customer engagement strategy that can trigger the right actions at the right moments.

Several performance indicators give clear insights into the actual impact of customer loyalty actions:

• Retention rate
• Purchase frequency
• Average basket per touchpoint
• Campaign open rate
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Connecting all touchpoints with a unified CRM enables the creation of a unique, real-time enriched customer profile. Companies gain access to real-time historical data and can set up detailed loyalty programs. You too can boost your offer’s efficiency by precisely targeting your customers with our CRM and loyalty solutions!

Emerging trends in customer engagement

Phygital: the new standard of experience

Phygital is becoming the new norm by harmonizing the physical and digital worlds. In-store, this means incorporating e-commerce technologies (interactive terminals, mobile payments, QR codes, sales associates with tablets) to offer customers autonomy and personalization.

This integration significantly alters customer behaviors. In fact, 88% of consumers desire a seamless and omnichannel shopping experience. They want the ability to reserve a product online, try it in-store, and receive personalized recommendations from a sales associate aware of their history. Thus, the store becomes a strategic touchpoint, emphasizing experience and customer relationship.

Phygital offers brands the chance to boost customer engagement at every touch. By providing seamless transitions between digital and physical experiences, brands show their adaptability to current customer expectations. This fluidity strengthens the emotional connection for greater engagement.

Adapting to changes in the digital era and e-commerce

94% of consumers look for information beyond major sites like Google or Facebook. The shopping journey now includes multiple sources and is more fragmented than ever. To stay relevant, brands must constantly adapt to these new behaviors, rethinking traditional retail models. It’s no longer sufficient to have a good product; it must be well-presented, personalized, and cater to each customer’s preferences.

To tackle these challenges, tools like Tweakwise enhance the online shopping experience with precise and dynamic personalization to improve customer engagement. With functionalities in merchandising orchestration, search, and product recommendations, Tweakwise gives brands comprehensive control over product presentation, aligned with customer profiles, intentions, or browsing history. Enhanced by artificial intelligence, this solution turns your e-commerce site into a powerful conversion and customer engagement tool.

Unified commerce gives brands the tools to create seamless, personalized, and consistent customer journeys across every channel. Centralizing data, integrating touchpoints, and activating appropriate levers at the right moment have become essential elements for cultivating lasting relationships with customers.

Successful brands are those that blend technology with effective relational strategies. Customer engagement is gradually developed, rooted in brand coherence. With the right tools, companies can turn every interaction into an opportunity for customer loyalty. Explore our solutions to enhance your customer engagement.

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