There are multiple marketing channels that businesses can utilise in today’s online world. However, most of them don’t match the impact that emails can have on your marketing campaigns. Not only is email marketing budget-friendly, but it can also be a great way of building long-term, sturdy relationships with your current customers as well as reaching new ones.

When the question of improving your customer experience is brought up, what comes to mind? Reducing your site’s load times? Making it more mobile-friendly? Well, yes, all of those elements are important. But, so is having an effective B2C email marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll go through what B2C email marketing is and how it differs from its B2B email marketing counterpart. Then, we’ll discuss the best B2C email marketing practices that every business and digital marketer should employ.

What is B2C email marketing?

B2C (or business-to-consumer) email marketing refers to the many tactics and strategies that a company can use to promote its services and products to people online through email.

The emails you target to your audience will address the needs, interests, as well as requirements that users have. So, it perhaps comes as no surprise that according to a study done by SaleCycle, 59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

Now, B2C marketing emails come in numerous different types, including:

Welcome emails

As the name already suggests, welcome emails are sent to users after they sign up to an email list. They are a great way of introducing your brand and its personality to new subscribers.

You can also include promo codes and such in these emails in hopes of boosting the chances of the user making their first purchase. According to HubSpot, this type of email has the highest open rate of any marketing email, sitting at around 50%.

Promo emails

Once you have gotten familiar with your new customers, now is the time to let them know of the latest and greatest about your business. Yes, we’re talking about marketing emails.

Now, it isn’t recommended to bombard your customers with such emails. In fact, according to research done by Campaign Monitor, 60% of subscribers find the frequency of one promo email per week just right.

Purchase confirmation emails

Emails such as these can be used by marketers to capitalise on a fresh and recent purchase. They give information to the consumer about their purchase or order, as well as some engaging bits of information that can be used to push them to buy more.

Abandoned carts emails

Abandoned carts refer to people who don’t complete their buying process. These users can be sent an email where you would include a one-time discount or promo, which can incentivise them to complete their purchase.

Indeed, abandoned carts are a perfect way of turning the tides in your favour as a business owner.

Re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails are supposed to be sent out to people who aren’t as active or as engaged as the rest. While it might sound like the logical decision for some business owners to simply abandon these users, it’s actually better if you just try to re-engage them.

And what’s a better way of getting the attention of inactive users besides an email-exclusive promo offer or some valuable advice and information.

Difference between B2B and B2C email marketing

The goals of B2C and B2B email marketing are one and the same: communicating with current customers, promoting your products and services, and guiding your prospects through their consumer journey.

However, there are some noticeable differences between B2C and B2B email marketing which are:

• B2C email marketing usually has a much larger target audience than B2B email marketing
• It focuses on short buying cycles, while B2B email marketing is focused on longer ones
• B2C marketing emails are usually very personal and emotion-driven. B2B marketing emails, on the other hand, tend to be less personal and more professional
• The audience of B2C email marketing is obviously your regular everyday consumer who is looking for a good deal and product. B2B audiences, on the other hand, are usually seeking an efficient relationship/deal backed up with expertise
• Lastly, one of the main focuses of B2C email marketing is building your brand, while for B2B email marketing, it’s mostly about lead generation

B2C email marketing – Best practices

Segment your audience

Collecting data on the different behaviours that your audience members might exhibit is crucial to a successful email marketing campaign. Indeed, the majority of your strategies and decisions should be tailored to the ever-changing element that is your audience.

You must try your best to pick up every tiny bit of information about your audience that might help you. That includes anything from their likes, dislikes, purchasing behaviour, and more. With this data, you can create a highly targeted and extremely efficient B2C email marketing campaign.

Once you have all the data you need, you then start to segment your consumers based on their behaviours as well as at which stage of their buying cycle they’re in. Once that’s done, you can then start sending them personalised emails which will feel targeted and accurate.

According to a report by Instapage, 82% of marketers have noted that their open rates drastically improved after they implemented some sort of email personalisation.

Automate your emails

If we’re being completely honest here, it’s almost impossible for a business to manually run an email marketing campaign. In fact, high-quality B2C communication necessitates some form of automation for it to run smoothly.

There are a bunch of different email marketing tools out there. Just make sure to use one that has all the automation features that you might need. Those features include API triggered emails, autoresponders, delivery dashboard, A/B testing, etc.

As for the tools, we recommend Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Mailjet, and Drip. However, there are other tools out there that are as efficient as these, so don’t take our word for granted.

B2C email marketing: Optimise the content of your emails

When creating a B2C marketing email, you need to pay close attention to what words you use and how you organise them. The whole point of a marketing email is to incentivise users to do an action, right? So, your content should be on par with this objective.

The first thing that your audience members will notice when they receive your email are your subject lines. There were numerous studies done in this regard. Many of them concluded that whatever you include in your subject line is crucial to your open rates.

Once recipients of your email open it, they are welcomed with a copy of your email. Now, not only does the copy need to be engaging and attractive, but it should also be accompanied by a well-designed CTA (call-to-action) button and the right choice of images.

As we have just mentioned, the tone you use in your marketing email should be positive and engaging. As for the images, well, they should be relevant to whatever product or service you are presenting in the email.

Lastly, you should rely on things such as social proof as well as words and sentences that create a sense of urgency in the recipients of the email (limited time offers/discounts, etc.).

Optimise for mobile devices

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, then you already know the growing impact that mobile devices have on digital marketing and the Internet in general.

As for emails, well, most reports indicate that emails have an open rate of at least 50% on mobile devices. So, you can see the importance of creating mobile-friendly emails. Optimising your marketing emails for mobile devices can be super easy if you are already using an email marketing tool.

Here are some tips and tricks for crafting mobile-friendly and responsive emails:

• Rely on shorter subject lines
• Don’t use a long copy and make
• Choose a font size that is easy to read
• Use an appropriate text to image ratio

B2C email marketing: Your customers come first

You might want to communicate with your customers on a regular basis. However, many of them simply cannot do that for a wide variety of reasons. Others might want to receive certain messages from you but also be excluded from some others.

For this reason, we recommend that you set up a preference centre. There, your subscribers can adjust anything from the type of content they receive from you to how often you send them emails.

We know that this sounds counterintuitive at first but trust us when we say that giving such control to your audience is beneficial in the long run. It gives your customer base the idea that you are committed to delivering a great customer experience regardless of how often they allow you to email them.

A/B test your emails

A/B testing refers to the process of sending out variations of a marketing email to two subsets of your subscribers’ list. The goal is to determine which version works best.

Some A/B tests can simply be based upon using different subject lines to see which one works best. Others can be as advanced as using a completely different template for each email variation.

As is the case with other elements of your email marketing strategy, A/B testing can be done easily using a tool.

Let us take care of the heavy lifting

B2C email marketing can be challenging for beginners. Worry not, as you don’t have to do it alone. Book a discovery call with us today, and we’ll show you how we can make it work for your business.

---

B2C email marketing – FAQs