Email is still the most used marketing channel by B2C (business to consumer) brands across the world. This presents both challenges and opportunities for B2C marketers:
- On the one hand, customers expect to share their email at some point when interacting with brands online. They’re also used to receiving all sorts of promotional and transactional emails.
- On the other hand, their inboxes are constantly bombarded with wanted and unwanted emails. As a result, most messages are completely ignored, open and conversion rates are low, and unsubscribing after a while is the norm.
So, how do you stand out and ensure your B2C emails actually get read?
It’s all about being relevant, timely, and respectful of customers’ time and attention.
That’s easier said than done, as it requires understanding recipients’ needs and interests, while also having the necessary tools to send them the right emails with the right content at the right times.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about B2C email marketing, including best practices, tools, and ways to maximize your efforts and spend. We’ll use Insider — our enterprise email marketing and omnichannel platform — to show real-life examples of B2C email capabilities and strategies in action.
Email is still the most used marketing channel by B2C (business to consumer) brands across the world. This presents both challenges and opportunities for B2C marketers:
- On the one hand, customers expect to share their email at some point when interacting with brands online. They’re also used to receiving all sorts of promotional and transactional emails.
- On the other hand, their inboxes are constantly bombarded with wanted and unwanted emails. As a result, most messages are completely ignored, open and conversion rates are low, and unsubscribing after a while is the norm.
So, how do you stand out and ensure your B2C emails actually get read?
It’s all about being relevant, timely, and respectful of customers’ time and attention.
That’s easier said than done, as it requires understanding recipients’ needs and interests, while also having the necessary tools to send them the right emails with the right content at the right times.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about B2C email marketing, including best practices, tools, and ways to maximize your efforts and spend. We’ll use Insider — our enterprise email marketing and omnichannel platform — to show real-life examples of B2C email capabilities and strategies in action.
These 360 customer profiles ensure your email marketing efforts are based on reliable data about the entire customer journey. This lets you create much more targeted campaigns based on customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.
#2 Segment and personalize
Segmentation is the process of organizing your email lists into groups based on shared traits and characteristics. When done right, segmentation enables you to send highly targeted emails to ensure maximum relevance and engagement.
Modern email marketing solutions can help you segment audiences based on a combination of different characteristics. For example, with Insider, you can organize your audiences based on:
- Previous purchases, as well as last visited and abandoned products.
- Demographics, locations, or weather conditions (e.g., for seasonal and location-based campaigns).
- Previous interactions with your website, mobile app, or other marketing channels.
- Predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a specific channel (like email and SMS), or discount affinity.
These versatile segmentation options open the doors to email personalization — i.e., the ability to tailor email content to the recipient rather than sending generic, mass-marketing messages.
Say you have a segment of customers who’ve shown interest in a specific product while also having a high discount affinity. You can send them a promotional email with a dynamic subject line, relevant items, and a limited-time coupon code.
This approach can drastically increase open rates, conversion rates, and email revenue as each element is tailored to the recipient’s needs and interests.
#3 Set up contextual automations
Automation ensures you can make the most out of your email marketing efforts and budget by triggering messages at key times during the customer lifecycle. In fact, most of your emails should be set up and automated ahead of time.
Here are some of the most important automated emails and campaigns that you should leverage:
- Welcome and nurture flows. When new leads or customers subscribe to receive emails, they should receive a confirmation and thank you message. For new subscribers, there should also be a flow guiding them to their first purchase. Remix built a three step email flow for new leads and increased first purchases by 104%.
- Cart abandonment reminders. These emails will help you reach leads who’ve already demonstrated purchase intent. Many eCommerce brands also throw in a limited-time discount or another incentive to get users to complete their purchase.
- Transactional emails. These include order confirmations, delivery updates, account notifications, one-time passwords (OTPs), and other similar messages. They’re essential for building trust and keeping customers informed throughout their journeys.
- Re-engagement emails. Even regular customers can go cold on your brand. Re-engagement emails help you bring them back with new product recommendations, personalized discounts and coupon codes, or another special offer.
- Birthday celebrations. This is a classic example of acknowledging customer milestones. It can be as simple as congratulating customers on their special occasion or even throwing a small gift, like free shipping on their next purchase.
- Price drop and back-in-stock alerts. Customers often show interest in products on your site without adding them to their carts. These emails help you keep those products top-of-mind at crucial times — either when they get discounted or when they get restocked after being bought out.
Setting up these and other automations is simple with today’s email platforms. You can usually do it with a canvas-based editor by selecting automation triggers, wait times, conditions, and more.
If you’re interested, we explore this topic in our guide to using customer journey builders to drive revenue.
#4 Experiment with different opt-in templates
Growing your subscriber list can be as simple as placing a form or pop-up on your website. You can also entice leads to sign up for your email newsletter by offering a first-purchase discount.
Another option is to use gamification for a more engaging lead generation approach. Insider offers various gamified templates that incentivize users to leave their email or phone number like “Pick a Gift” or “Wheel of Fortune”.
Puma is a great example of a B2C company that used gamification to drastically speed up its lead generation efforts. Our team recommended they implement a “Spin-the-Wheel” overlay for an interactive experience where users would win a discount coupon by submitting their emails.
Thanks to this strategy, Puma observed a 231% uplift in lead submission rate and a 163% uplift in coupon code usage. You can check out their complete case study on our website.
#5 Run A/B tests for subject lines, send times, and other key elements
It’s often impossible to know which version of an email will perform the best. That’s why A/B testing is crucial, as it lets you make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns based on what recipients prefer.
Many email marketing solutions today come with A/B testing capabilities. For example, Insider lets you experiment with all sorts of email elements — from subject lines to send times, body text, visuals, videos, product recommendations, calls-to-action (CTAs) and more.
As an aside, remember to be careful with subject lines. Being enticing is important but you don’t want to get into clickbait territory and hurt your reputation and relationships with customers.
Lastly, if you’ve already gathered data about recipients’ email engagement patterns, Insider can automatically trigger each email at the right time via Send-Time Optimization (STO). This can save you weeks of manual testing and optimization.
#6 Analyze results and optimize campaigns accordingly
As with any marketing activity, you want to track the results of your email campaigns to find opportunities for improvements. This includes monitoring metrics like:
- Open rates.
- Deliverability.
- Bounce rates.
- Conversion rate.
- Clickthrough rate (CTR).
- Revenue.
Any good email marketing platform should give you a dashboard with these metrics, alongside the ability to customize it to your needs. Additionally, an omnichannel solution like Insider can also give you insights into the performance of other channels. This is a great way to track the entire customer journey and compare email’s effectiveness against different touchpoints.
#7 Integrate email with your other marketing channels
Email is likely just one channel your business relies on to reach customers. That’s why it’s essential to integrate with other customer touchpoints — like your website, mobile app, SMS, and WhatsApp — to ensure your efforts are coordinated and aimed at creating a seamless customer journey.
To do that, you can set up conditions that automatically govern how your campaigns unfold based on users’ behaviors.
For example, if a customer doesn’t engage with your emails but continues to browse your website, you can trigger a message with relevant content or product recommendations on another channel. Or, if you’re not sure which channel to try, you can A/B test email against other touchpoints to see which ones users prefer.
The implementation process here differs depending on the solutions you’re using.
If you’re using a point solution (e.g., an email and SMS platform), you’ll have to rely on integrations with other channel-specific software. On the other hand, a unified marketing platform can let you control all channels from one place, which results in a more effective campaign orchestration and management process.
For example, Insider brings together 12+ channels under one umbrella — including email, push notifications, on-site, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. It also offers AI-powered capabilities for building and optimizing campaigns across these touchpoints.
Another useful feature here is Next-Best Channel, which analyzes recipients’ behaviors to determine which channel they’re most likely to engage on. You can set up a campaign, add multiple channel options, and let our platform trigger messages on the right ones automatically.
