Curious about what kinds of customer engagement strategies are most effective for cultivating meaningful relationships with health and wellness consumers? Wondering what steps brands like yours are taking right now to increase customer engagement?

We gathered answers to these questions and more as part of our 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER), an annual report on the state of customer engagement for health and wellness companies and brands in other verticals operating all over the world. These findings are the result of three key efforts, including:

• A market research study of 1,500 marketing executives at the VP level or higher from across 14 global markets, representing B2C companies with $10 million or more in annual revenue

• An analysis of data from over 5.4 billion global users from the Braze customer engagement platform, which powers experiences between consumers and 1,000+ brands across 50+ countries

• 1:1 interviews with top brands to get in-depth insights about their customer engagement efforts

Read on for the most important learnings about the state of customer engagement within the health and wellness industry, based on this year's installment of the Braze Global Customer Engagement Review.

How Health and Wellness Brands Rank on the Braze Customer Engagement Index

The Braze Customer Engagement Index is made up of 12 fundamental factors across industry verticals and regions that brands can use to evaluate their customer engagement efforts and compare their level of customer engagement maturity to the performance of businesses all over the world.

As part of our 2022 global customer engagement analysis, we used this universal framework to determine just how well health and wellness organizations are doing. Here's what we discovered.

About the Levels

The majority of companies within this vertical are fairly evenly split between the Activate (beginner) and Accelerate (intermediate) levels, at 40% and 43% respectively. On the other hand, fewer than 20% have achieved the highest performance level, Ace.

These maturity levels trail behind the ones seen for financial services brands, QSR and delivery brands, and retail and ecommerce brands, which see 71%, 72%, and 74% at the Accelerate (intermediate) and Ace (advanced) levels, respectively, compared to only 60% of health and wellness organizations.

What Sets Health and Wellness Customer Engagement Leaders Apart

To see what sets Ace health and wellness brands apart from the rest when it comes to customer engagement, we took a look at their top differentiators. Here's what we found they have in common and how that's helping them yield customer engagement gains.

#1: Teamwork

Compared with health and wellness brands with less mature customer engagement programs, Ace brands within this vertical are more likely to:

• Measure customer engagement performance

• Leverage campaign testing best practices

• Set their customer engagement teams up for success by providing training

By focusing on targeted customer engagement training and creating a culture of experimentation and optimization, health and wellness brands can set themselves up for future success when it comes to marketing campaign performance.

#2: Technology

Health and wellness brands that succeed at rising to the Ace level do so by:

• Embracing cross-channel customer engagement, using at least three customer marketing channels

• Using marketing automation technologies to optimize campaign performance

• Creating 1:1 personalized messaging

Our research has found that leveraging cross-channel messaging can have a significant positive impact for brands when it comes to engagement, monetization, and retention, suggesting that this focus on prioritizing cross-channel engagement and personalization has the potential to benefit these brands’ business results.

#3: Results

By making the most of their talented people and advanced tools, Ace leaders in the health and wellness space are able to boost sessions per user by nearly 20% and average user lifetimes by 2.5X. These are significant increases in both engagement and retention, giving companies in this spaces more opportunities to build strong, sustainable relationships with their customers over time.

Top Customer Engagement Opportunities for Health and Wellness Brands

As part of the Braze 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review, we uncovered key two areas of improvement where health and wellness brands can advance to meet changing customer expectations and catch up to the standards being set by leaders in other industries.

#1: Getting better at cross-team communication and collaboration

While it’s still common for teams like product and marketing to operate in silos when it comes to how they touch the customer experience, that state of affairs doesn’t tend to serve the consumer or a given company’s marketing strategy. To drive stronger outcomes and better customer relationships, brands should prioritize ongoing, continuous communication and collaboration and implement product and marketing collaboration best practices.

#2: Using customer data management best practices to enable more relevant personalized messaging

When health and wellness brands are able to harness the full power of their customer data, using effective data-collection strategies and streamlining data ingestion, they can then organize and apply that data to create seamless, personalized cross-channel experiences. That approach makes it possible to take effective advantage of personalization tools—from in-the-moment segmentation to dynamic content customization—in ways that both serve consumers (by serving up relevant, value-add messages) and help drive stronger business results.

How Braze Helps Health and Wellness Brands Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Engagement

Get your hands on the complete 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review and learn how Braze has partnered with international wellness leader PureGym and other top brands to adopt winning cross-channel customer engagement efforts that generate growth across key measures, including retention, return on ad spend, and revenue.