Messages vs. Experiences: Why You’re Struggling to Turn Customer Engagement into Lasting Loyalty

For years, customer relationship management has revolved around the message. Craft the perfect email subject line, time the push notification just right, segment your audience with precision. While these tactics are undoubtedly important, they often fall short of fostering the deep, lasting loyalty every brand craves. 

The problem? In a world saturated with notifications, promotions and endless scrolling, another message simply adds to the noise, rather than breaking through it. For mobile-first audiences where the smartphone is the de facto choice for brand-customer interactions, the noise is amplified tenfold with every message quickly becoming a mere distraction. 

Understanding the Difference Between Messages vs. Experiences

The need to shift from a message-first mentality to an experience-first mentality has never been more apparent. Success is no longer defined by the delivery of information, but rather than the orchestration of a continuous, personalized and value-driven journey.

Why the Traditional Message-First Approach Falls Short

Think of a message as a single point of contact. It’s a notification about a sale, a password reset or a shipping update. Necessary, yes, but inherently transactional. When your entire strategy is built around sending messages, you’re engaging in a series of one-way conversations. 

Your customers receive disparate messages across different channels, but there’s no cohesive thread connecting them. And, without understanding the full context of a customer’s interactions, these messages can feel generic or ill-timed. The result? Customers might click on a message, but they don’t stay engaged or deepen their relationship with your brand. They’re responding to a prompt, not immersing themselves in a journey.

The Experience Economy and Its Impact on Customer Expectations

An experience, on the other hand, is the sum total of every interaction a customer has with your brand, regardless of channel. It’s the seamless flow from receiving an email or push notification about an abandoned cart, to browsing your app, to getting a personalized SMS follow-up, to ultimately making a purchase and beyond.

Building strategies around experiences means connecting the dots across all channels and touchpoints into a single, intelligent view of the customer. You can deliver relevant and timely messages and interactions because you understand customer intent, behavior and context across channels and destinations. More importantly, you’re not just telling customers what to do; you’re guiding them through a journey that provides continuous value.

Message-First vs. Experience-First

Understanding the Engagement-Loyalty Connection

Lasting loyalty is built on trust, relevance and consistent value delivery — elements that are difficult to achieve with isolated messages. Experiences are inherently designed to foster deeper connections through convenience, value and personalization, reinforcing positive emotional associations with the brand across touchpoints. Customers feel understood and valued, leading them to not only return but also actively advocate for the brand.

The Pillars of Loyalty-Building Experiences

As you begin to shape your strategy around building value-driven experiences, there are a few key pillars you can’t afford to overlook:

Reframe Your Strategy Around the Outcome, Not the Channel

Traditionally, brands have focused on optimizing for engagement. While these metrics can reveal information about a particular message or interaction, they fail to showcase the quality of that interaction or its impact on the overall customer journey. You need to go beyond open rates and clicks to measure conversions and loyalty, bringing greater focus on the holistic customer relationship rather than isolated interactions. 

Think in Terms of Growth Experiments, Not Campaigns

Shift your mindset from one-off campaigns to ongoing growth experiments. Campaigns often have a defined start and end. Experiments, however, are iterative: you hypothesize, test a change to an experience, measure the impact, learn from the results and then optimize. This continuous learning loop is crucial for adapting to evolving customer needs and maximizing the impact of your experience strategy. 

Growth experimentation fosters agility, enables real-time optimization and ultimately drives more sustainable returns than static campaigns. Recent innovations in AI have made continuous goal optimization even more accessible to brands, delivering the actionable, contextual insights needed to accelerate time to value and drive specific business outcomes.

Show Up When and Where it Matters Most to Customers

Delivering a good experience means being consistently present and relevant across all channels where customers interact with your brand — whether it’s via website, app, email, SMS or even in a physical store. The best way to do this is by simply asking customers where, when and how often they want to be engaged. With these insights, you can integrate your brand more seamlessly into customers’ lifestyles and reach them when they will be most receptive to it. Empowering customers to choose what they receive and when will pave the way for deeper trust and a more equitable value exchange.

Prioritize a Two-Way Dialogue

Experiences require listening, understanding and responding to customers in a relevant and timely manner. This means integrating feedback loops, enabling two-way conversations across channels and adapting your outreach based on real-time customer behavior. Integrating ongoing opportunities to share preferences and feedback can make or break your ability to go beyond broadcasting and prioritize interacting. Brands with a framework for capturing and activating first- and zero-party data early and often have an advantage in the experience economy. 

Go Beyond First Name Mentions 

Emotional connections are forged when customers feel seen and understood. This goes beyond first name personalization to tailor content, offer, and support based on past interactions, preferences and predicted needs.  ​​Like customer behaviors and preferences, your personalization strategy should be dynamic. Keep a close pulse on what resonates with customers not just now but as your relationship grows over time, and be sure to carry that understanding across channels and destinations.

Turn Clicks into Lasting Loyalty

As acquisition costs surge and organic referral traffic plummets, a message-first approach no longer cuts it with mobile-first audiences. It’s time to reframe your mindset around building experiences that guide customers to value and lay the foundation for repeatable conversions and long-term loyalty. Not sure where to start? Let’s talk.