5 engagement marketing strategies for in-house teams in 2026
By Laura Ojeda Melchor●7 min. read●Nov 25, 2025
Ad buys are getting more expensive. Customers expect more. And your competitors aren’t slowing down.
If you want 2026 to feel like a year of real progress, not just increasing spend, it’s time to strengthen your customer engagement marketing tactics.
Explore five marketing engagement tactics that winning in-house teams are using to drive consistent results this year and beyond.
Key takeaways
Engagement marketing focuses on building ongoing, lasting customer relationships that grow beyond an initial sale. In 2026, it’s a foundational strategy for stronger marketing returns.
The five highest-ROI engagement plays work together to improve activation, early retention, repeat purchases, and reactivation across the customer journey.
Welcome and first-run activation programs
Onboarding nurture campaigns
Milestone and loyalty tier rewards
Churn-save and winback promos
Review and referral programs
What is engagement marketing?
Engagement marketing means building relationships with customers instead of focusing on one-and-done conversions.
While customer engagement marketing has some of the same goals as experiential engagement marketing, the two differ in a key way:
Experiential marketing centers on experiences like live events, activations, and in-person brand moments.
Customer engagement marketing focuses on personalizing the customer journey throughout their entire lifecycle.
Experiential efforts help kindle emotional connection between brands and customers. Lifecycle engagement sustains this connection over time.
Why engagement marketing matters in 2026
Customer acquisition costs are steadily rising. Brands that used to rely on organic search traffic are feeling the pressure from LLMs as consumers turn to tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for product research and discovery.
While generative engine optimization (GEO) provides a new way to connect with consumers, it requires new investments. The average customer acquisition cost (CAC) for GEO is $559, according to data from First Page Sage’s survey. This is 14.4% more expensive than traditional search.
According to the 18-month analysis, costs are increasing across all marketing channels every single year. Winning customers is still important, but keeping customers matters more than ever.
That’s why marketing teams are focusing on intentional actions that build connections, drive repeat engagement, and offer lifetime value.
The engagement ladder
The engagement marketing ladder moves customers through four rungs, each with its own north-star metrics.
Attention: Initial brand awareness or high-intent reach
Activation: First conversion (typically an initial purchase)
Retention: Customer lifetime value (CLV) or repeat-purchase rate/active-user frequency
Advocacy: Net promoter scores (NPS), positive reviews, and referrals
When you’re working this customer engagement marketing ladder, choose the stage where your drop-off rate is the most dramatic. Make that stage your focus.
This keeps your intent sharp and your marketing efforts oriented on long-term outcomes rather than quick wins.
5 marketing engagement strategies to test
1. Welcome and first-run activation programs
Engagement strategy goal: Give new customers a great initial impression of your brand. For product sales, this could be as simple as a heartfelt welcome email and discount for their next purchase. For services, design your welcome flow and in-product onboarding experience to help set user expectations, guide next steps, and drive full product activation.
Key metric: Activation rate, the percentage of new users who complete the actions that predict long-term customer retention.
Top tips: Strong programs focus on one primary activation path to avoid overwhelming new users. They also use first-party data to hyperpersonalize early steps and remove friction so new users see value from their very first interaction.
Strategy in action:
Gunnar Blakeway-Walen, Marketing Manager at FLATS®, built a frictionless activation experience for prospective renters and warm leads.
“At FLATS, we create unit-level video tours paired with Engrain’s sitemap integration. We create every video in-house, store them in a YouTube library, and link them directly to specific units on our website. There’s no vendor overhead. It’s just our team and a camera.”
This is different from a generic property tour because it’s specific to an actual unit.
“We don’t want prospects to have to guess which unit matches the floorplan they like,” explains Gunnar. “They get to see a unit’s real finishes, lighting, and layout.”
The result: unit exposure time dropped by 50% and the lease-up timeline accelerated by 25%.
“Our prospects could see the exact unit they were considering leasing before they ever scheduled a tour,” he says. “That meant the people who did show up were already ready to convert.”
2. Onboarding nurture campaigns
Engagement strategy goal: Guide new customers through their first days and weeks with your brand using a short sequence of messages — usually email, SMS, or push — to reinforce your product value and share essential onboarding steps.
Key metric: Early-stage retention, the number of customers who are still active at Day 7 or Day 30, and are therefore more likely to stick around in the long term.
Top tips: Avoid overwhelming users with too many messages, resources, and offers at once. Focus your nurture series on a few high-impact recommendations that support meaningful actions.
Strategy in action:
Cal Singh, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Equipment Finance Canada, uses behavior-based email sequences to accelerate new customer activation.
“In our team, we nurture email sequences triggered by client behavior like submitting their lead, viewing product pages, or making demo requests.”
These sequences automatically deliver relevant content and offers based on what the customer is doing.
However, Cal says they only work if they’re consistent and relevant to client behaviors.
In one campaign for small equipment financing inquiries, his team saw qualified lead conversion rates increase 37.42% over eight weeks, with a 52.6% open rate and 18.9% clickthrough rate.
Because Cal's behavior-based nurture sequence helps folks take the right steps at exactly the right time, retention stays high.
3. Milestone and loyalty tier rewards
Engagement strategy goal: Reward your customers for the meaningful actions they take like making repeat purchases, referring new customers, or reaching spending thresholds.
Key metric: Repeat engagement measured by how often customers make purchases, move between reward tiers, or actively use your service.
Top tips: Make your tiers and milestones easy to understand, offer meaningful reward choices, and focus on perks people actually value.
Strategy in action:
Microsoft Rewards offers users points for everyday actions, like searching with Bing or making Xbox purchases. Users can then redeem their points for gift cards to brands like Amazon, Target, and Starbucks.
The program’s power comes from how frequently and predictably users hit small milestones.
Points accumulate quickly, the reward catalog is valuable, and the gift cards are worth doing all those little tasks for.
4. Churn-save and winback promos
Engagement strategy goal: Re-engage customers who are slipping away or have already churned by offering incentives, abandoned cart reminders, or testimonials that highlight the value of your product.
Key metric: Reactivation rate, the percentage of at-risk or inactive customers who return and complete a meaningful action, like logging in, making a purchase, or engaging with a core feature.
Top tips: Look at product usage data to spot early signs of churn. For subscription brands, this could look like a canceled auto-renewal. Retailers may notice fewer monthly purchases. To win customers back, deliver targeted messages and offers at key moments.
Strategy in action:
Adam Bocik of Evergreen Results, a digital marketing agency, has seen a ton of success using personalized email flows triggered by customer behavior.
“My team and I set it up so that when someone browses a specific product category but doesn’t add to cart, they get a 3-email series that shares how other customers use that gear. We also address common hesitations and include UGC photos,” Adam explains.
This email series drove 18% of total email revenue with a 42% open rate, far above the brand’s average of 22%.
Adam says the revenue lift came from making people feel seen more than sold to. They received answers to questions they hadn’t asked yet, and that made them feel a genuine connection to the brand.
5. Review and referral programs
Engagement strategy goal: Turn satisfied customers into advocates by making it easy and rewarding them for leaving reviews, sharing feedback, and referring new customers.
Key metric: Advocacy rate, the percentage of customers who leave a review, submit a rating, or successfully refer someone to your brand.
Top tips: Ask for reviews or referrals at high-intent moments — for example, after a successful purchase or positive support interaction. Keep your referral steps simple and easy to follow, and offer meaningful rewards for both referrers and new customers.
Strategy in action:
Matthew Marshall, Operations and Marketing Director at Wright Home Services, has found success in a referral program with tiered rewards tied to the value of the customer’s invoice.
“We launched a structured referral system where existing customers earn up to $200 in digital gift cards when they refer family or friends who then complete a paid service,” says Matthew.
With custom links, QR codes, and auto-tracking, Wright Home Services makes sure referral program participants never miss credit.
“Referred customers convert to our yearly HVAC memberships at nearly 2x the rate of cold leads,” he says. “They come in already trusting us, and that’s highly important in a business where people are inviting you into their home.”
Measuring engagement tactics
When you’re measuring the effectiveness of your customer engagement tactics, it’s critical to build a tracking framework that protects user privacy and supports meaningful insights.
Use first-party data and consented analytics to gauge impact. Test your program on a portion of your customers first and track that segment’s engagement before rolling it out to everyone.
Look at incremental uplift and multi-touch attribution to understand what changed because you ran the tactic. Last-touch metrics may give credit to the wrong touchpoint.
How to stand up your engagement program: a quick guide
|
Timeframe |
Activity |
| Day 0-30: Build the foundation |
Set up tracking, consent collection, user segments, and one activation test to learn from. |
| Day 31-60: Launch your first engagement plays | Run an activation flow, a win-back sequence, and one loyalty or referral program. Add limits so people don’t get too many messages, and check your play regularly to make sure everything’s running smoothly. |
| Day 61-90: Measure, adjust, and expand | Automate the strategies that are working, use a small group of holdouts to see real impact on your sales, and create a weekly dashboard that tracks your main KPIs. |
Level up your marketing with a new focus on customer engagement
With consistent engagement marketing, your in-house team can win and keep customers despite rising acquisition costs, competition, and consumer demands.
By applying each tactic to the rungs of the engagement ladder — Attention, Activation, Retention, and Advocacy — you can focus on the stage where customers drop off and make smarter investments.
Using these five engagement tactics, your team can find new ways to improve retention, increase brand advocacy, and achieve sustainable growth.
