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Customer Engagement: Marketing case studies from Coors Light, a professional soccer team, and a private jet charter

This article was published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter .

“The Marketer needs meaningful work and meaningful relationships,” Flint McGlaughlin taught in Above-the-Fold Energy: How to engage the prospect’s mind with a carefully crafted opening .

Those relationships can be with your business colleagues (a topic we frequently address in the How I Made It In Marketing podcast ).

But you should have a relationship with your customers as well. So you can put yourself in their shoes. So you can better understand the customer experience.

Interact with customers through your social media, mobile, digital, and experiential marketing to strengthen that relationship, to foster an emotional connection between your customers and your brand and improve customer engagement.

To give you ideas for building a customer engagement strategy, in this article we bring you three marketing case studies. First, we start simple – a private jet charter company shows us that even if you don’t have the perfect optimized copy for an opening paragraph, just adding those few lines is more engaging than having nothing at all. Next, we bring you a more complicated tactic – the interactive marketing a professional soccer team used to improve data collection and fan involvement. And finally, the most complex – Coors Light’s experiential marketing partnership.

Quick Case Study #1: Private jet charter company gets 17% more inquiries after adding opening paragraph to homepage

Before we dive into our first case study, a few words about MarketingSherpa case studies in general. When we publish case studies where marketers offer up specific creative samples or strategies, sometimes we get letters critiquing the strategy or offering a reader’s advice on how to improve the creative.

So, a little word of caution. No case study we publish has a perfect creative sample. Or a perfect strategy. However, these case studies do offer real-world examples showing the copy and strategies your peers and competitors are using, how they’re executing their marketing campaigns, and what is actually working for them (or, in some cases, not working).

And each case study offers a broadly applicable lesson for marketers. Not from vague “thought leadership” ideas. From real world, down in the trenches, nitty gritty, do-or-die tactics marketers are using to serve their customers and hit their numbers.

While I might execute any of these campaigns differently, or you might, we’re not in these marketers’ shoes. We’re not dealing with their very real time, budget, and performance pressures. We are not (to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt) in their arena.

Or as Flint put it in Session #15 , “Best is better than better, but better is still better than bad.”

With that said, let’s see what we can learn from how one entrepreneur made his marketing better.

“ The video had lots of great information. Flint did an amazing job explaining the topic,” said Kyle Patel, CEO & Charter Director, BitLux .

“In this video, Flint explained the need for relevancy and urgency in the opening paragraph. In our webpage, we also did that and tried to keep everything relevant to our customer base,” Patel said.

The jet rental company’s homepage had a that read “The Unique Private Jet Charter Experience.”

Below that subhead, the team tried to communicate the company’s unique selling point by adding an opening paragraph that read: “Our clients represent industry trailblazers. We think of ourselves as the same. With an efficient, premium service offering, charter your next journey with BitLux, and experience why we are the first and leading provider of private jet charter services through cryptocurrencies. Click here to check out the locations we serve.”

Creative Sample #1: Jet rental company homepage with sub-headline and opening paragraph added

The team felt that its customers wanted to have the privacy and convenience of making anonymous payments with cryptocurrency. So, they stated that in the opening paragraph to pull the customer’s attention and achieve a "micro-yes" which leads the potential customer to read further down the page.

The added opening paragraph has reduced the bounce rate by 24.9%. The company received 17% more inquiries from potential customers regarding flights. And there was a 12.8% increase in ROI compared to before when the homepage didn’t have the opening paragraph at all.

“It’s actually astonishing that only adding a few lines to gain their attention could lead to such a huge impact. When we didn’t have that section people were coming to our page but didn’t engage any further. It especially helped with our call-to-action rate when someone landed on our page from ads,” Patel said.

Quick Case Study #2: Valencia Football Club leverages interactive content to collect zero- and first-party data, gain 5,808 new newsletter subscribers

Data has been called the new oil of the digital economy.

Sounds good at first, right? But then think about all of the problems that come with oil, from pollution to dependence on other nations. Which is why many businesses and governments are working to shift their economies off of oil.

There are similarities in data, as many businesses and governments try to shift data collection practices away from third-party data (like tracking cookies) towards zero- and first-party data due to privacy concerns.

Zero- and first-party data

Valencia Football Club (Valencia CF) sought to get to know its customers better by collecting zero- and first-party data. Valencia CF is a professional football club (or as we would say in the United States, professional soccer team) in La Liga, the top men’s professional division in Spain.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Valencia CF suddenly felt a significant disconnect from its fans when stadium doors were forced to close. No longer able to interact with them in person, it chose to accelerate its digital transformation, developing a data collection strategy and reinforcing its online presence to meet its supporters’ expectations from afar.

Zero-party data is defined as information that customers intentionally provide (for example, filling out a form, taking a quiz or poll, or entering a sweepstakes). First-party data is defined as information an organization gathers from observing customer behavior on its own properties (such as website traffic or A/B testing).

“Zero- and first-party data collection allows brands to establish more genuine relationships with their audiences. As consumers are involved in data collection and willingly provide information about themselves it becomes part of their experience with the brand,” said Quentin Paquot, CEO, Qualifio (Valencia CF’s data collection and interactive marketing platform).

Data collection and community engagement priorities

In March 2021, Valencia CF decided to start relying increasingly on digital animation to engage with remote audiences while lockdown measures were gradually being eased across Spain. The marketing team of six had four primary marketing objectives:

• Grow its database by collecting new newsletter subscribers
• Know supporters better by collecting valuable insights and feedback from them
• Increase sponsors’ visibility by including interactive advertising formats within its offering
• Engage its database through fun and interactive games

The club uses interactive formats to better get to know, monetize, and engage its community of fans not only on match (game) days but on a recurrent basis. Every week, the marketing team organizes a meeting to discuss the performance of its campaigns, plan the next ones depending on Valencia CF games or the sponsor they want to highlight, and brainstorm campaign ideas.

Collecting email newsletter subscribers

This is Valencia CF’s number one objective.

Originally, the organization struggled to get new newsletter subscribers and found that interactivity was an excellent way to collect first-party data by combining interactive formats such as quizzes, polls, tests and games, with opt-in forms.

For example, Valencia CF launched a poll that asked supporters to vote for their favorite new jersey. To validate their choice, fans had to fill out a form (first name, last name, email, date of birth, city), in which Valencia CF proposed a newsletter opt-in. As a result, the team managed to collect a total of 2,907 new newsletter subscribers in only 15 days.

Creative Sample #2: Favorite jersey poll

“The goal of this campaign was to get as many new subscribers as possible. We knew that creating a short campaign with a new season jersey to be won would be a good incentive. So far, this campaign has been the most successful one for us in terms of subscribers collected,” explained Cristina Garcia, Digital innovation and E-commerce Analyst, Valencia CF .

Getting customer feedback

According to Garcia, listening to the club’s audience and understanding them better must also be a high priority. To achieve this, the football club uses product battles to collect zero-party data, gather customer feedback and find out what they like. The concept is simple: fans vote for their favorite product between two options, with the chance to win one of them.

All the data collected through these battles is then sent to the ecommerce shop’s managers. Thanks to these inputs, they know the fans’ preferences and can adapt their product stock accordingly or launch promotions and specific actions around the most popular products. This is also why Valencia CF launched its first product battle in September around children going back to school when the online and physical shops receive all their new stock.

In addition to the ecommerce shop’s managers, Valencia CF also sends all the data it collects to its mailing tool to send emails tailored to fans’ preferences.

Creative Sample #3: Product battle where fans can vote for their favorite products

Increasing sponsors’ exposure

As a football club, Valencia CF is committed to giving great visibility to its sponsors, both offline and online.

Garcia explains: “We give exposure to our sponsors through an ad disguised as a game. It’s a win-win: we get a lot of participation, thanks to the prizes proposed by our sponsors, and they get the views.”

For its sponsor, Zumub, a supplements brand, Valencia CF created a sudden death quiz promoted via its newsletter with eight prizes, such as vouchers, VIP tickets and signed balls. The quiz mixed questions about the sponsor’s products and the Valencia CF team. To boost participation, the club announced all participants would receive a €10 gift once registered — an incentive to turn anonymous visitors into identified fans and grow the database.

This sudden death quiz has so far been the game with the most participation, with a total of 4,242 participants in eight days.

Creative Sample #4: Sudden death quiz that mixes in questions about sponsor’s products

Creative Sample #5: Prizes for sudden death quiz

Engaging on a recurrent basis

Valencia CF is using interactive formats regularly to keep its supporters engaged. For example, before every match, the organization publishes a prediction campaign with a regular prize.

These prediction campaigns are a great way to interact with audiences and help to build up the atmosphere before the match. As they are the most used campaigns by the club, Valencia CF has gathered excellent data and a few takeaways:

• The club obtains better results when the prize is a free ticket for the next match. The second prize to bring more participation is the jersey, and a football is the prize that brings the least amount of participation
• Instagram is the best channel to drive people to their campaign, but Facebook is the channel that has a better conversion rate, bringing most of the participation
• The club only needs to publish two tweets on Twitter to get good results

In 10 months, the club created 82 campaigns, and collected 5,808 new newsletter subscribers with an average new opt-in rate of 14.3% per campaign.

With the pandemic now in the rearview, Valencia CF is able to strike a solid balance between in-person and digital engagement. Supporters have been back in stadiums for a long time now, but with its new digital engagement efforts, Valencia CF can interact with its global fanbase seamlessly, allowing them to feel more connected and involved with the club than ever before.

“We’re interacting with our fans, giving them occasions to spend great times with us through fun games,” Garcia said.

Quick Case Study #3: Coors Light gets 8M impressions by partnering with podcast for experiential marketing and brand activations

To drive engagement and brand affinity for Coors Light with authentic endorsements, the beer brand became the presenting sponsor of the podcast Pardon My Take’s 5th annual Grit Week in August 2021. “Authentic endorsement is the key to all podcast partnerships,” said Lisa Jacobs, VP of Media, Ad Results Media (Coors Light’s media agency).

Grit Week is an annual Pardon My Take (PMT) tradition. During this tradition, members of the podcast travel to different areas of the country to prove how much grit they have inside and out in an unpredictable fashion.

Marketing campaign objectives

The team at Molson Coors Beverage Company, which owns Coors Light, sought to weave the brand’s presence into the different facets of the show (audio, video, social, etc.) and leverage the loyalty of the PMT audience to help drive consideration across beer drinkers.

Cross-platform integration strategy

The PMT team traveled the country in a co-branded RV. They made stops at places like the Pro Football Hall of fame, at a disc golf course to play with a pro, and at a hot wing restaurant.

Creative Sample #6: Co-branded RV used on nationwide tour by podcast team

Each stop featured brand integrations such as product placement, merchandise, and co-branded logos throughout multimedia elements during the program’s activities and challenges.

Some of these brand integrations were quite simple, like a Coors Light logo on the background of a video interview. Other brand integrations were authentically woven into the content, like the time a PMT team used a member of their team who is colorblind and provided an opportunity to see color for the first time by using special glasses to see the blue mountains on a Coors Light can.

“Knowing that Grit Week is one of PMT’s most hotly-anticipated events, we created custom PMT X Coors Light cans and merch to bring the chill to the events, which received HUGE praise from fans nationwide,” said April Roberts, Associate Marketing Manager, Coors Light .

Brand campaign outcome

In total, 23 million minutes of Grit Week content was watched. The Coors Light brand received 8 million impressions and 166,000 engagements, the majority of which aligned with target demographics and top geographic regions for the Coors Light brand.

Related Resources

How Humana's Strategic Testing Drove a 60% Increase in Customer Engagement

Leveraging User Data: How a Canadian Automotive Maintenance Service Company Achieved Lift in Customer Engagement Metrics by Leveraging Data to Create a Personalized Experience

How to increase customer engagement through target marketing and personalization

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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement in 2024

Updated: October 21, 2021

Published: July 16, 2019

When improving customer relations , we typically think about service and support rather than customer engagement. However, this goes beyond high-quality customer service. Delighting customers and encouraging them to spend more money with your brand isn't enough. In fact, this could make them feel transactional and less meaningful to your company.

Instead, you need to improve the customer experience to strengthen their loyalty to your brand through customer engagement . It needs to be clear that you value your relationship with your buyers and not just the money they spend. That's why you need to consistently engage with customers and demonstrate your dedication to their needs.

In this post, we'll discuss everything you need to know about customer engagement, including industry examples, software, tools, and how it can enhance customer relations in your organization.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers through a variety of channels in order to strengthen your relationship. For many businesses, this process begins with the first interaction and extends beyond the point of purchase. Companies can engage with customers via social media, email, websites, community forums, or any other space where they're communicating or consuming content.

The goal of customer engagement is to offer customers something of value beyond your products and services. High-quality products initially attract customers; relevant content is what keeps them around. Marketers do this through a strategy known as customer engagement marketing.

Customer Engagement Marketing

Customer engagement marketing is a marketing strategy that delivers timely, relevant, and personalized messages to consumers. What sets it apart from other marketing tactics is the personalization element. The relevancy of the content is what makes customers feel like engaged members of your brand's community.

Why Customer Engagement Marketing Works

You want your brand to be omnipresent so that no matter when your customer needs your help, your team is there. However, being omnipresent can become exhausting for even the largest organizations with resources to spend.

Customer engagement marketing works because it takes the pressure off of just one team to produce an exceptional customer experience. This type of strategy encompasses the entire customer journey and every team within your customer that supports it — from customer service, to operations, to sales.

How to Implement a Customer Engagement Marketing Strategy

To implement a viable customer engagement marketing strategy, you'll want to employ the following tactics:

1. Set a goal for successful customer engagement.

Any great strategy begins with a S.M.A.R.T. goal. Start setting your goals by thinking about why your business needs more customer engagement. It's easy to assume that you need it because engagement is good, but what exactly does that mean for your specific organization? Better yet, what's the benefit for the customer to engage with you? Figuring this out before your teams get started designing engagement campaigns will keep everyone within scope, on budget, and producing work that actually matters.

2. Begin cross-functional team collaboration.

As mentioned earlier, customer engagement isn't just one department's responsibility. In the early stages of this strategy, identify which teams have a part to play in engaging customers and get their buy-in. Not only is it easier to spread the workload across departments, but you'll also have a much more comprehensive strategy in the long run that truly serves the customer.

3. Identify where and how customers should engage in both the long and short term.

Later in this article, you'll learn more customer engagement strategies, and you'll see that not all of them will work during every phase of your campaign. Segmenting your efforts into short-term and long-term tactics will help you focus on the right deliverables at the right time. After all, your customers will want to engage with you on more than one occasion, on more than one platform.

4. Gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders as well as customers.

Once your campaign is live, review the goals you set in step number one. Track metrics that align with these goals so that you can monitor the success of your activities. Include internal stakeholder feedback from members of the cross-functional teams on the project as well as external partners who might be involved. Don't forget to gather feedback from the customers themselves so you can identify what's working and what needs work with enough time to make changes.

5. Iterate your customer engagement marketing strategy regularly.

You don't have to wait an entire year to iterate your customer engagement marketing strategy, especially if you have both short and long-term milestones for your customers to hit. Whether you decide to track progress weekly, monthly, or quarterly, stick to consistent intervals so you can easily measure it over time.

In addition to customer engagement marketing, there are a few other ways you can foster customer engagement. Let's take a look at those next.

Customer Engagement Strategies

• Build a brand voice.
• Share your brand voice online.
• Personalize customer experiences.
• Create content based on customer history.
• Use social media contests.
• Meet customers where they are.
• Use relationship marketing.

Based on this guide, it's clear that customer engagement positively impacts your business and ensures a stronger customer base. However, it's not so simple to just jump right in. Consider the following strategies for ways to incorporate customer engagement into your organization.

1. Build a brand voice.

Customers want to engage with a brand that has a personality. Many brands have differentiated themselves through the use of a unique brand voice. This personifies the company making it more relatable and memorable to its customers.

For instance, Glossier is an e-commerce makeup and skincare brand that stands out from competitors by donning a very playful, authentic personality. Women crave being a "Glossier Girl" — someone who embraces their authentic self and uses skincare and makeup as a means of highlighting their existing features, rather than disguising them with other beauty products.

Creating this brand voice establishes your company as a thought-leader in its industry. Customers will look at you as an expert who can give them advice on different products and services.

2. Share your brand voice online.

Your brand voice is more powerful when you share it with others. Start with building a personality on social media, just as you would with a personal account. Post content that aligns with your brand values and share messages that have similar meanings.

If you want your brand to have a more light-hearted personality, consider brands like Wendy's which embraces humor as a means of poking fun, like in the example below. Social media is a great way to engage with customers that may not have discovered or connected with your brand.

Image Source

3. Personalize customer experiences.

Some companies, like Amazon, have software that makes recommendations based on past purchases or search history. Not every company has to invest in such complex technology. There are other ways to personalize customer experiences, including asking customers how you can help.

Some companies start the customer journey by asking them to fill out a user profile or take a quiz that has them select preferences. For instance, Birchbox asks customers what their skin and hair types are, which helps the company personalize products in their monthly subscription boxes. This way, you can obtain customer feedback at the beginning of the experience, then delight the customer from there.

4. Create content based on customer history.

Feedback surveys can help you create and share content based on what customers have purchased in the past. Unlike Birchbox, however, these suggestions aren't vital to the customer experience. Rather, they complement and add a special touch that exceeds your customers' expectations.

For instance, Spotify has a Discover Weekly playlist which is a playlist of songs that it creates for each user. The feature incorporates an algorithm that discovers each user's "taste profile" based on the songs they listen to and similar songs featured in other users' playlists. This campaign is a unique offering that shows how Spotify is helping users discover more music they might enjoy.

5. Use social media contests.

Cultivate customer engagement through friendly competition. The possibilities are endless when it comes to social media contests and giveaways, but no matter which route you choose, this type of activity can spark rapid customer engagement.

Beware that contests and giveaways can result in short-term engagement if they're not done strategically. To combat this, have a comprehensive plan for your social media engagement campaign that gives each customer a place to land long-term.

For example, if you have a new product or service, choose a long-term customer engagement strategy to promote it on — like YouTube. Then use your social media giveaway to drive engagement on your YouTube channel by asking customers to subscribe and watch videos about your new offerings.

6. Meet customers where they are.

An important part of a customer engagement strategy is to share relevant content in a place your customers will see it. That means posting the secret to business success on a billboard in the middle of the desert probably won't yield the engagement results you're looking for.

That's why it's important to meet your customers where they are — and social media isn't always the best way to do it. Sure, many of your customers can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, and even TikTok, but they're probably on other channels too. When delighting your customers, you want to show up in the places they least expect you to be.

Explore options like:

• Murals in places with lots of foot traffic
• QR codes in and on modes of public transportation
• Holiday cards sent the old-fashioned way — in the mail
• Sponsorships on niche YouTube channels

7. Use relationship marketing.

Building relationships between your organization and your customers is a sure way to turn them into advocates of your brand. Relationship marketing is a strategy that can be used at any stage of your business. To implement this strategy effectively, you'll need to incentivize customer engagement. Tools like Rybbon can help you keep track of your outreach efforts and ensure that your customers are hitting the right engagement milestones throughout your campaign.

The use of customer engagement marketing strategies can make all the difference when it comes to reducing customer churn . In fact, let's take a look at a few companies that used this method to retain customers at their business.

Customer Engagement Examples

• Gravity Payments

Every brand has the potential to introduce engagement strategies that benefit its current and potential customer base . This is illustrated in the following examples, which include companies of various sizes and revenue.

For many professionals, Slack has become an integrated part of our lives during the work day, but sometimes we need the app on our mobile phones, too. Slack recognizes the importance of its software in its customers' lives — and how that software can contribute to an "always-on" culture.

In response, Slack shared this gentle reminder to customers who downloaded or updated the app.

Image Souce

What we like about Slack's customer engagement:

If you're anything like me, you're probably wondering "How did they know I needed to hear this right now?" While it's highly unlikely that the company's product team moonlights as mind readers, they are very attuned to their customers in order to spur engagement and interaction. Taking the opportunity to share a customer-centric message in a place they visit quite often is a recipe for delight and engagement.

2. Coca-Cola

As you may have seen, in 2014 Coca-Cola launched a new marketing campaign that took the nation by storm. #ShareACoke removed the company's logo on 20-ounce bottles and replaced it with 250 of the most common names in the U.S. The campaign was successful because of the customer engagement element.

What we like about Coca-Cola's customer engagement:

This wasn't just a typical marketing campaign; in fact, the highly personalized aspect made it even more engaging. Customers could physically see a piece of themselves on a Coke bottle. Even those without common names could follow the "Share A Coke" tour where they could personalize their own cans. This was a simple campaign that related to Coke's target audience and got people talking about the brand.

3. Carhartt

Carhartt , a work apparel company, introduced new technology to its website that helps customers connect with experts and make smarter purchases. When a customer displays a certain behavior, a pop-up appears that asks them if they'd like to chat with an expert.

It was found that when customers clicked "yes," they found the right product, were more satisfied with it, and purchased it again in the future. In fact, this led to a 10-fold increase in conversion rates compared to other self-service options, as well as a 10-25% increase in the average order value.

What we like about Carhartt's customer engagement:

Carhartt's customer engagement strategy proves that your business doesn't have to use the latest technology or even automated tools to provide an engaging customer experience. One-on-one interactions between your service team and the customer is still a viable strategy that can turn passive customers into brand enthusiasts.

4. Gymshark

Gymshark has grown its customer base exponentially through social media, guerrilla, and influencer marketing. The brand has a unique ability to reach its customers with highly personalized and relatable content that's sharable and interactive.

In this example, Gymshark joined the conversation about the gas shortage in the UK by setting up an interactive pumping station. This customer engagement campaign brings both prospective and existing customers face-to-face with the Gymshark brand to build relationships in a way that's authentic.

What we like about Gymshark's customer engagement:

Gymshark balances a serious concern of its UK customers (a gas shortage) with a positive outlet to blow some steam (a popup workout space). This customer engagement tactic is on brand and on time, showing its audience that the company is always listening and showing up when they need it most.

5. Starbucks

How does a company that's already dominating its industry do more for its customers? Well, it comes up with a way to make loyal customers feel special.

Starbucks began a new effort called the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room which lets customers chat with coffee specialists, watch coffee brew from fresh beans, and try a variety of rare coffees.

What we like about Starbucks' customer engagement:

This is a multi-sensory experience that takes customers to the next level. They feel like an active part of the Starbucks journey and are getting an inside look into the company's product development process. It's something exciting and unique that further engages customers and gives them a new appreciation for the brand beyond the same coffee every morning.

6. Gravity Payments

Sometimes, customer engagement can occur as a result of another initiative. After hearing about his employees' struggles, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments , decided to implement a minimum annual salary of $70K. While the move was meant to improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and quality of life, the change also had a profound impact on customer engagement.

Monthly leads grew from 30 to 2,000 inquiries, profits doubled, and customer retention increased from 91% to 95%. It was clear that customer engagement was directly tied to employee satisfaction. When employees are treated better, they want to work harder for their companies, which results in happier customers.

What we like about Gravity Payment's customer engagement:

While these are great success stories, it can be hard to predict whether an engagement marketing campaign will be effective. Investing in an engagement platform, however, can ensure your campaigns will be consistently profitable for your business.

Rybbon walks the walk when it comes to customer engagement. This tool is used by thousands of businesses to manage customer engagement through reward programs, surveys, incentives, and more. But their commitment to the customer doesn't stop when their businesses are onboarded to its platform. The team at Rybbon is committed to engaging their own customers who use its platform, too.

What we like about Rybbon's customer engagement:

In a case study about biotech company Quincy Bioscience, one person said, “It’s been highly successful, we’ve captured thousands of leads, and the conversion rates are very high, almost everyone who receives the module completes it. We’re huge advocates of the platform.”

And that's the goal of customer engagement — to cultivate brand advocacy in your customer base.

Now that you understand the basics of customer engagement, how to use customer engagement marketing in your campaigns, and you've seen some examples of companies that are doing it well, try it on your own. Follow the tactics in this article to build a customer experience that will keep your brand top of mind for new and existing customers.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Experience-led growth: A new way to create value

The world’s largest companies have a thorny problem in common. Airlines, insurers, telcos, utilities, and other major incumbents are all struggling to achieve sustainable, profitable growth in a world in which their offerings are increasingly commoditized. Alongside mounting competition from their peers, they face disruption from nimble digital-native firms that are targeting their customers with innovative, convenient, and often personalized offers.

Frequently, their response is to take on the attackers at their own game—that of acquiring customers as aggressively as possible. But as they obsess about new customer acquisition, many incumbents are neglecting their most powerful competitive advantage: their vast existing customer bases.

Two key numbers from McKinsey’s work underscore the case for a shift in focus. On the downside, compensating for the value of one lost customer can require the acquisition of three new customers. On the upside, 80 percent of the value creation achieved by the world’s most successful growth companies comes from their core business —principally, unlocking new revenues from existing customers.

These companies have honed a powerful strategy for driving profitable growth that their most nimble and disruptive competitors cannot emulate: providing a distinctive customer experience (CX), consistently and proactively, that entices existing customers who choose their brand. These customers change their behaviors, and such behavior changes can be measured by concrete financial metrics like share of wallet, repeat purchases, or net revenue retention (NRR). 1 McKinsey defines net revenue retention as the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a given time period.

We call this strategy “experience-led growth.” To succeed with it, companies start by defining their desired financial outcome and then prioritize the CX improvements that will deliver that outcome. They have the boldness to rethink their corporate culture and operating models, to ramp up innovation and technology adoption, and to build new CX measurement and analytics capabilities. Sometimes they must reexamine and redefine their very reason for being.

Shut up and listen to your customers

A mobile telecom operator faced an existential crisis: its customers were deserting it as competitors promised better network coverage and enticed switchers with cut-price offers. Attempts to use contracts to lock in customers backfired, creating resentment that caused many to defect anyway. The company tried to counter its competitors’ aggressive acquisition tactics with its own eye-catching offers to new customers—but excluded existing customers, compounding dissatisfaction.

The CEO had a wake-up call on his morning commute when he listened in to customers’ calls to the telco’s call centers. Their frustration shocked him—and spurred a turnaround that saw his team line up and tackle pain point after pain point. The company eliminated contracts and allowed anytime upgrades, made every new customer offer available to existing customers, and improved its network. In parallel, the company reinvented its approach to service.

The results were dramatic: as customer satisfaction ratings jumped from worst to first in the industry, customer churn rates were cut by 75 percent. Over a three-year period, the company’s revenues nearly doubled—outstripping its key competitors’ revenue growth threefold. As the CEO said: “It’s amazing the things you can do when you shut up and listen to your customers.”

This story is a classic case of experience-led growth. Growth is always hard to achieve, especially for incumbents. But those that get growth right deliver 30 percent higher TRS and nearly double the shareholder value than their industry peers, on average. 2 Over a ten-year period, more value defined as xTRS (excess total return to shareholders above peers), data 2005–2019, N>5,000. Our research shows that strategies focused on delighting customers allow companies to earn greater value from their current customer base—which results in concrete financial outcomes.

That’s why there is such a strong correlation between companies’ CX ratings and their revenue growth. In the United States, for example, McKinsey analysis shows that companies that are leaders of CX achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021. The revenues of CX leaders also rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic more quickly than those of other companies (Exhibit 1).

Growth outperformers take the long road

Growth outperformers are much more likely to know their customers personally, to have a compelling growth story to tell their employees and shareholders, and to use predictive analytics to deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right time. A clear focus on long-term growth makes them outliers, as most companies optimize for shorter-term profit.

Indeed, a common factor in companies that fail to achieve sustainable growth is that they put too much focus on short-term acquisition measures, and insufficient investment in customer engagement and retention, thereby falling into the “acquisition trap.” CX leaders, by contrast, are masters at the art of “cultivating” growth from existing customers by making it enjoyable to use ever more of the company’s products and services over time (Exhibit 2).

We have observed that successful experience-led growth strategies—those that increase customer satisfaction by at least 20 percent—can deliver a range of significant financial benefits. In particular, they can increase cross-sell rates by 15 to 25 percent, boost companies’ share of wallet by 5 to 10 percent, increase cross-sell rates, and improve customer satisfaction and engagement by 20 to 30 percent.

Experience-led growth strategies, in our experience, rest on three pillars (Exhibit 3):

• Setting a clear growth aspiration and purpose, and a roadmap that links CX to value.
• Committing to transforming the business with decisive action through redesigned customer journeys, products, services, and business models.
• Enabling the transformation through new mindsets, capabilities, technologies, governance, and effective CX measurement.

In the next sections, we shine a spotlight on each of these imperatives in turn—and for each of them we explore the successes and lessons learned from CX leaders across sectors.

Set an audacious aspiration—and link it to value

Leaders of companies executing experience-led growth strategies start by painting a vision—often three to five years in the future—that describes how they will deliver on their brand promise.

These companies do not drive CX for its own sake. Rather, they “flip the script” by starting with the desired financial outcome—for example, improving customer retention by six points—and then prioritizing the customer experiences that will deliver these outcomes. Companies that succeed with experience-led growth also identify the metrics they will use to measure success, such as share of wallet, repeat purchases, or NRR.

As an example of a company that set out a bold aspiration—and linked it clearly to value—consider the story of a major logistics company. After a period of sustained price increases, the CEO realized that his ability to increase prices would soon evaporate. The CEO tackled this issue head on, prioritizing CX as a path to distinguish his company from competitors and to build long-term, value-generating relationships with customers.

The company’s experience-led growth transformation started with a bold vision: to become the logistics player of choice not only for its business customers but also for those companies’ end-customers. It was an audacious goal, as most consumers are oblivious to who delivers their goods. But leaders in the company imagined a future in which their customers would renew larger contracts because their end-customers experienced care and trust.

The logistics company’s bold aspiration has spurred a radical effort to reimagine and redesign customer journeys, and to anchor customer experiences around the personal relationship between end customers and their local drivers. To support a culture of customer care and problem solving, the company rolled out an immersive culture-change program. The entire transformation—and the overarching aspiration—was closely tied to value, with the company targeting hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenues.

Transform the business: Reinventing customer-centricity

Leaders in companies executing experience-led growth strategies take care to understand customer pain points standing in the way of growth—such as complicated buying processes, tracking and delivery issues that hinder recurring purchases, or a lack of integration between channels. They translate their ambitions for experience-led growth into customer-journey redesign and an effective cross-functional operating model for implementing these redesigned customer journeys. They are also savvy at expanding their revenue pools by inventing new offerings and experiences.

As an example of this second pillar of experience-led growth—transforming the business through redesigned customer journeys—consider the case of a global B2B power-tools company. It already had a strong foundation of CX strengths: an iconic brand and products, committed customer-facing teams, engineering “maniacs” who relentlessly focused on quality, and effective digital customer interfaces. But rising customer expectations meant that customers increasingly demanded more effort for their engagement and loyalty. In addition, the company was building an increasingly diverse product and solution portfolio—creating complexity in service, billing, and logistics. A step change was needed in how the company approached CX if it were to remain ahead of its competitors.

The CEO recognized that CX excellence had to become the top priority for his company. It began by setting a clear aspiration for its CX transformation: a commitment to faultless reliability, accessibility, and transparency. To deliver on this commitment, the company set about creating proactive solutions—such as automatic replacement of any tools that needed servicing—that would strengthen customers’ business performance and exceed their expectations.

Where previously there had been over 20 different customer journeys for various categories of client and service type, the company put in place one carefully designed life-cycle journey, and identified several “moments of truth” with the greatest impact on CX—like receiving the order on time and in full, with an easy-to-understand invoice.

To measure impact, the company put in place actionable, real-time “voice-of-the-customer” metrics—as well as relevant operational KPIs that captured process efficiency and effectiveness. Within just a few months, the new focus on CX was widely embraced by the organization. It led to tangible improvements in customer journeys, which in turn supported continued double-digit annual revenue growth.

Enable the change: Reimagining culture and capabilities

Large, incumbent companies implementing experience-led growth strategies must also devote resources to shifting organizational cultures and building new capabilities, both among executives and frontline staff. These new capabilities—ranging from design thinking, to cross-functional collaboration, to effective use of CX measurement insights—help ensure that improvements in wallet share, cross-sell rates, and retention rates are sustained over time.

An example comes from a major regional healthcare provider that launched a multi-year transformation. To enable and sustain the improvements in its financial performance, it trained its employees on agile ways of working while also implementing powerful new advanced analytics capabilities by developing a customer data hub—this aggregated millions of records from multiple data sets across five years. The new predictive analytics capability allowed the healthcare provider to build machine-learning models that use data-driven analysis to trigger proactive interventions—such as following up with patients who hadn’t seen their healthcare provider in the previous 18 months. 3 For further details on predictive analytics, see “ Prediction: The future of CX ,” McKinsey, February 24, 2021. This wholesale improvement in its capabilities enabled the company to sustain the benefits of its transformation over time.

The challenge of achieving sustainable, profitable growth is especially tough for large, incumbent companies. It is tempting to try to kick-start growth through acquisitions, with the risk of feeding an overheating acquisition engine of customers who quickly churn again. Experience-led growth is a radically different approach—providing an exceptional experience to existing customers that delivers improvements in key financial metrics such as wallet share, cross-sell, and net revenue retention along the entire customer lifecycle. These improvements translate directly into sustainable revenue growth.

Victoria Bough is a partner in McKinsey’s Denver office, Oliver Ehrlich is a partner in the Düsseldorf office, Harald Fanderl is a senior partner in the Riyadh office, and Robert Schiff is a senior partner in the San Francisco office.

The authors wish to thank Ewan Duncan, Andreas Giese, Divya Mittagunta, Kevin Neher, and Alfonso Pulido for their contributions to this article.

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