As social media continues to dominate the internet, many B2C companies forget about one of the most highly successful forms of digital marketing – email marketing campaigns.
There are currently 4 billion email users worldwide, which will grow to 4.6 billion in 2025 (Statista). That’s the majority of the entire world. People are checking their email constantly, and many businesses have that to thank for their revenue growth. In addition, email campaigns have one of the most cost-compelling ROIs, with $36 for every $1 spent (Litmus).
And while social media boasts similar numbers, those are spread across many platforms, which means different formats, algorithms, and ratios.
Social media is an excellent asset to B2C brands. However, B2C email marketing campaigns can also help drive traffic to social media platforms and landing pages, raise awareness and engagement for your brand, and target niche audiences with personalized content.
Yeah, it’s pretty great.
With the number of emails circulating daily, starting your own B2C email marketing campaign can feel overwhelming! I’ve put together five tips for all email marketers to use to help navigate an effective B2C email marketing campaign.
How to Cater Marketing Emails to B2C
Before I jump in, let’s discuss what makes B2C email communication unique. Unlike B2B emails, B2C emails are simple, short, fun, and engaging.
Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey for a B2C email is much more abbreviated than B2B email marketing. Someone receiving a B2B email likely won’t make an impulse buy after reading a catchy subject line, but a curious consumer might.
An effective email campaign ensures you’re in lockstep with your target audience throughout the buyer’s journey. From a simple welcome email to a “Thank you” email after they’ve made their purchase, an email marketing campaign can allow you to engage with your customer’s needs and derive valuable analytics from their actions. You can also target specific points in the buying cycle.
Understanding your customer’s journey will also help when I get into list segmentation, reporting, and other tools for email marketers.
Tone
The tone of all B2C communications is more casual than in B2B. B2C marketing appeals to the emotional and impulsive nature of consumers. A light style that connects with your customers on a personal level gives you relatability and emotional leverage.
Layout
B2C emails will be much more streamlined, designed, and visually compelling than your typical B2B email communication. The visual element of these emails can become persuasive selling points for your brand. I’ll go into some of these design models later on.
B2C Email Marketing Tips
Now that I’ve gone over how an effective email marketing campaign can impact your business, let’s look at some tips for successful B2C email marketing.
1. Know Your B2C Email Marketing Strategy
Before you can get a campaign off the ground, what are your goals? For example, are you looking to grow your list, retain existing clients, or engage new customers? Knowing your plan will help set in motion the other components of your campaign.
Once you’ve clearly defined your goals, take some time to outline your objectives. What KPIs indicate success? Your results may come in many forms depending on the original purpose of the campaign.
2. Define Your Campaigns
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is a series of customized and automated emails sent on a set schedule. These emails develop a relationship with your customers and establish patterns of behaviors for future segmentations.
Nurture Campaign
Nurture campaigns are emails triggered by an action based on the user’s behavior. These rely heavily on personalization and appeal to emotion, focused on provoking the consumer’s impulse based on remarketing tools such as link clicks, webpage visits, or even items left in carts (these are called abandoned cart emails).
Types of Emails
A B2C email marketing campaign can consist of a variety of emails. Let’s look at a few and see how they fit into those campaigns.
Welcome Emails
Starting your customer off with a welcome email is a great way to thank the user for joining your list and showing off your brand. This email will be new customers’ first introduction to your brand and an excellent way to grow excitement while the customer is increasing their awareness of your offerings and services. Welcome emails are part of a drip campaign because they go out after this initial sign-up and no other reporting.
Sales Emails
These emails are trying to encourage the sale of a product – pretty straightforward.
Post Purchase Email
Emails that thank your customers for buying something from you. These are also used to get your customers to complete surveys and gather feedback. They help foster a sense of appreciation from B2C and reinforce your brand.
Product Announcement Email
These emails highlight a new product’s features, price, and scarcity. These should include a clear CTA to where they can buy.
See this example from Tarte Cosmetics and how they use campaign-specific photography in conjunction with a bold and clear CTA button:
Newsletters
Newsletters are occasional informational emails that give updates on anything related to your product. It can consist of tips, updates, or news that links to your company. This help establishes you as a knowledgeable resource for information that relates to your brand.
Here’s a great example from Tracksmith that uses product photography to guide the customer through some quickly scannable tips for running in the heat:
Promotional Email
A promotional email is what it sounds like – an email to inform the consumer about a discount or unique offering. These can be highly effective when catered to a specific target audience segment.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned cart emails urge a customer to return to the company’s webpage to complete their transaction.
This abandoned cart email from J Crew reminds the customer to come back and buy the item they left in their cart and uses the same email to promote other offers (source: Convercart)
3. Build Your List
An email marketing campaign is effective when sent to the right people at the right time. But how do you find those people? There are numerous ways to gain subscribers, including purchasing a list. However, this can be risky. You might not reach your target audience and, even worse, may lose credibility by targeting the wrong audience.
Instead, look for creative ways to build your email list and gain new subscribers. Here are a few examples:
- Create a lead magnet on your landing page by offering a discount or free shipping in exchange for their email.
- Use digital ads to create enticing CTAs that require email for participation.
- Create paid social media posts with CTAs that draw subscribers to your site.
- Make a blog that readers can subscribe to.
- Send emails that customers will be inclined to forward.
The more emails you can gather for your target audience, your campaigns will be successful. Email campaigns with more extensive lists tend to perform better, but only if most subscribers are the correct demographic.
Once you have your list, you can segment it into more effective groupings, for example, based on location, gender or age demographic, and behavioral trends like active or inactive users. These segmentations will dictate email remarketing and which people you include in a particular campaign.
4. Use Visual Elements to Guide the Customer
Best practices when designing an engaging B2C marketing email vary from a B2B email. In addition to visually compelling emails, they must work across mobile devices. In B2C email marketing, less is more.
Subject Line and Preheader
The goal is to quickly entice the buyer in the opening and scan your email, which begins with the subject line and preheader. Using personalization to call the customer by name in the preheader can grab their attention. A simple change of subject line can get a previously disinterested customer to open the last email they ignored. These should be concise, clear, and relevant to the body of your email.
Visually Engaging
It’s essential to keep vital visual elements of your brand, like your logo, at the top while keeping the email design simple and clean. Giving plenty of white space can allow you to direct the buyer’s attention to important talking points and CTAs.
Keep it Scannable
B2C emails are not as text-forward as B2B emails, which can complicate conveying more detailed information. Using brevity and a causal tone can allow you to focus the email on the CTAs. It’s best to keep the email content simple and engaging and let your site do the heavy lifting.
5. Use Proven B2C Email Marketing Tools
Personalization
The more targeted and specific you can be with your emails, the better. Personalizing emails with list segmentation or other data points engages the customer on a highly targeted level. Addressing the customer by their first name, remembering an anniversary, or catering recommendations based on previous purchases are great examples of personalization.
Automation
Email automation software tools allow you to schedule or trigger emails based on user behavior quickly. Automations work best when you have a mapped-out campaign journey. The emails should be pulsed out over time and have engaging content that is meaningful to the customer.
A/B Testing
By creating an A/B test, also known as a split test, you can send out two or more versions of your email to different segments and see which performs the highest engagement. These tests can help define the direction of future campaigns and weed out ineffective tactics.
Track Engagement
The data collected from email engagement can help you save time and money by tracking when emails are opened and scanned as well as which links are clicked. In addition, you can further segment your audience and reach out based on behaviors to better address your customer and direct future campaigns.
B2C Email Marketing Takeaways
- By utilizing effective B2C email marketing techniques, you can drive sales in a cost-effective and proven method.
- Build an effective campaign and cater it to your target audience using the data you collect across all of your digital platforms
- You are presenting useful information in a way that engages your audience personally and can immediately drive revenue through impulse sales.
