As companies face tighter budgets and rising expectations, customer marketing is emerging as a critical lever for growth, retention, and long-term loyalty.
At UKG, we’ve learned that customer engagement is a strategic necessity. When done right, it drives efficiency, builds advocacy, and empowers customers to succeed on their own terms.
By blending high-impact experiences with scalable, self-service programs and meaningful measurement, we’ve made customer marketing indispensable to our business, and we’re continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
The investment conundrum
One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is what I call the “investment conundrum.” Within most marketing teams, the lion’s share of budget typically goes toward lead generation, social media, analyst relations, and advertising. All of these efforts are focused on acquiring new customers and supporting the sales organization.
But in a subscription-based business like ours, most of our revenue actually comes after the sale, from keeping customers, not getting them. Despite that, customer marketing tends to receive a fraction of the overall marketing budget.
My team is the only one within marketing focused on existing customers, yet we’re tasked with supporting a huge ecosystem: professional services, relationship managers, support, renewal teams – you name it. Meanwhile, the resources allocated to us are far smaller than those given to teams focused on acquisition.
We’ve made a concerted effort to rebalance this over time. Through a robust customer engagement strategy, we’re gradually shifting the mindset and the investment. But if you’re facing a similar imbalance, know that you’re not alone.
What’s the secret to justifying customer engagement marketing?
If you’re looking to elevate the role of customer engagement marketing in your organization, the secret sauce comes down to three key things:
- Driving internal scale and efficiency
- Creating self-sufficiency for customers
- Never sacrificing the experience
And above all, you have to measure it. Just like we measure the sales funnel from top to bottom, we need to apply the same rigor to the post-sale experience. That’s how you justify the investment – and your team’s impact.
Finding the balance between high touch and digital touch
The first and most important step is figuring out how to drive scale internally. That means knowing when to apply a human touch and when not to. For me, it’s about understanding the right balance between high-touch and digital-touch interactions.
A simple two-by-two matrix can help you map this out. I know most of your customer interactions are likely more complex than that, but the principle still applies. You need to identify which interactions can and should be digital.
These are usually the lower-value moments – either for your organization or the customer – or things that can be delivered just as effectively through a digital channel.
Some interactions should start digitally and escalate to a high-touch moment only if necessary – say, if the customer hasn’t taken an action. Your customer success or account managers don’t need to reach out to everyone, only to those who truly need that extra support.
Conversely, you might start with a high-touch approach but shift to digital once the personal interaction is no longer adding value. Of course, there will always be escalations and sensitive scenarios where high-touch is essential – but that should be the exception, not the rule.
Mapping the customer journey and modernizing your touchpoints
One of the most effective ways to gain efficiency is to map out your customer journey and determine which touchpoints are currently high-touch versus digital. Then ask: What could be digital? What should be?
As we move into more self-service, consumerized experiences across all industries, our customers expect faster, more seamless interactions.
So take a close look at how you're engaging with them across different product lines and lifecycle stages – and identify opportunities to modernize.
Yes, it will take effort. Yes, you’ll need to reset customer expectations. But the result is a more scalable and more consistent experience.
How we do this at UKG
At UKG, we’ve implemented several strategies to help our customers help themselves, without sacrificing the experience:
- In-product messaging: We provide helpful, real-time resources right inside the product interface, exactly when and where the customer might need them.
- Educational content: Thousands of customers subscribe to our blog, which we use to share knowledge and best practices in a friendly, digestible way.
- Judicious email use: We avoid over-emailing. When we do reach out, it's always to drive traffic to our community or a helpful resource. We're teaching customers where to go to get what they need – creating long-term self-sufficiency.
- Newsletters: These allow us to batch content instead of sending constant one-off messages.
- Community: This is a big one for us. Our community platform plays a central role in customer education, engagement, and support.
