B2c email

These numbers prove that marketing teams should focus on mobile-friendly and responsive email designs, rather than designs for the desktop. These are easier to achieve than you may think—if you have a quality email marketing tool at your disposal.

Understanding the 5 basic B2C business models

1. Direct sellers

The most common B2C business model is known as the direct seller’s model. In this model, retailers use their online stores to offer goods to consumers, making it easy to order products from the comfort of their home.

2. Online intermediaries

These are online shops or service providers that don’t own any product, but instead work as a “go-between” and put buyers and sellers together. The travel industry is ripe with these business models—think: Trivago and Expedia. They don’t actually own the hotels listed, they help shoppers find the best deals for their individual needs.

3. Community-based

These are shops found on popular social media websites, including Facebook. Through this model, you could reach your customer base through social media marketing, not necessarily selling anything (like in Facebook Marketplace). This leads people to either your email newsletter sign-up or your brand’s website to make the conversion from viewer to consumer.

4. Fee-based

Fee-based models are sites that require a payment to access gated content. Businesses such as Sling, Direct TV, and Netflix all offer premium content to viewers looking for an alternative to traditional cable. They may offer a free trial, but after that promotional period ends consumers eventually pay a monthly fee to continue with their access.

5. Advertising-based B2C

The fifth B2C business model is advertising-based. This model uses free content to draw the interest of your target audience to either your website or email sign-up form. This is where the meat of many B2C email marketing strategies begin. Why? Because people want to know your value before they purchase. Free content is often the best way to showcase your expertise—to show people you have the answers they seek. Now, how do you get this free content to your target audience? Email marketing.

Difference between B2B and B2C marketing strategies

Though inbox folders are a private space, there is a constant battle for attention going on inside them. Just imagine how many emails an average person receives per day. These are private messages, invites, discounts and offers, notifications and reminders, business deals, and proposals. Each of them convey some value and if you want to break through the noise, you need to work to make your emails a cut above the rest.

First, you must understand all the specifics of the market and audience you sell to. While B2B or business to business marketing entails promoting products or services to companies, B2C or business to consumer marketing is about dealing with consumers directly.

The main difference between the two models lies in the decision-making process: in B2B, you work with a group of people or stakeholders who make purchase decisions, in B2C, you communicate directly with the consumer who makes the purchasing decision.

Businesses prefer figures and logic, so B2B email marketing focuses on bringing value and explains how to save time, money, and resources. Consumers typically look for utility and use emotions to inform their decisions, so B2C email marketing is all about crafting compelling messages and storytelling.

Difference between B2B and B2C marketing strategies

A majority of the messages we receive from brands are built around a product and showcasing its features. To stand out from the crowd, nail down what your subscribers want and give it to them. We are living the age of information overload, so it’s time to provide value and create something genuine.

Just remember the emails that you always open. They don’t sound “salesy” at all. As Jay Bayer, the author of “Youtility” says, communications that fascinate us can be amazing or they can be useful. You can invest a fortune in being amazing, but smarter and more efficient marketing is about help, not hype.

Stop trying to be amazing and start being useful. I don’t mean this in a Trojan-horse, “infomercial that pretends to be useful but is actually a sales pitch” way. I mean a genuine, “how can we actually help you?” way.

B2C email marketing tips you can’t afford to miss

Tip #1: Put your customer first

You have a variety of data to consider, including demographic information like occupation, gender, interests, purchasing behavior, subscription preferences, and browsing history. Ask your subscribers about their preferences, collect the data, and segment your mailing lists accordingly. Sending highly-relevant content is the core of the efficient B2C communication.

A valuable insight from Twilio engagement report: apart from being attentive to personal details, give your readers a sense of control. Make it easy for subscribers to manage their subscription and provide some choices on what kind of content they want to receive and when they want to receive it.

What is most important to you when a business communicates with you?

Once you dial in your B2C communications, you are a winner! 75% of consumers have rewarded businesses that communicate in the way they prefer by making a purchase; seven out of ten consumers have penalized a business for using the wrong frequency and channel.

The situation is even more critical when it comes to Gen Z and millennials. These groups expect messages to be personalized and prefer to choose the frequency and time of the day. Moreover, they are also more likely to penalize businesses that don’t meet their expectations by unsubscribing or posting negative reviews.

Tip #2: Automate your B2C email marketing

It’s hard to personalize and send each message manually. SendPulse allows you to easily craft and test automated email campaigns, to help you to send the right messages at the right time. This way you can minimize the risk of annoying your consumers and make your B2C email marketing smarter.

Tip #3: Measure, test, and iterate

Because everybody loves cats, let’s assume you decided to test the last one. Send an email with the emoji to group A and the one without the emoji to group B. Compare the open rates. If your theory worked, keep it up!

Tip #4: Optimize for mobile

Tip #5: Be emotional and concise

Tip #6: Experiment with different types of emails

Triggered messages, including transactional emails, are driven by a certain event or action. They convey information about this action, facilitating the transaction and helping the customer complete a certain scenario. They are automated and have a higher open rate than business as usual emails because people consider them as a helpful tool on their way to success. You should definitely include them into your B2C marketing strategy.

Create automated email flows that will be triggered by certain user actions: page visits and purchases, search queries, individual milestones, and so on. Use Automation 360 to reinforce your email flows with web push notifications and SMS.

Business as usual emails are curated manually and are sent to inform recipients about products, sell, or promote your brand. If triggered emails support a customer through the journey, promotional emails inspire them to start it.

Sources:

https://myemma.com/blog/how-to-craft-a-b2c-email-marketing-strategy-that-hits-your-goals/
https://sendpulse.com/blog/b2c-email-marketing-tips
https://www.sendx.io/blog/b2c-email-marketing
B2c email

Maximize your average customer lifetime value using B2C email automation to make sure they order again and again! Many products have a limited shelf life or finite usage. If your makeup product lasts the typical user around 30 days, you might consider reminding them to re-order after 21 days. Encourage them to “never run out!” You can automate these kinds of emails so your sales team works day and night.

A simple invite user flow for AAD B2C (without custom policies)

It’s pretty easy to get up and running with simple sign in/sign up, but as soon as you want to start doing something slightly more advanced, things start to get tricky quite quickly. Microsoft themselves recommend that you should use the built-in "user flows" for most scenarios and only consider customisation for addressing complex cases (i.e when you don’t have a choice).

One example of this is the "invite user" flow – a fairly common feature that’s generally required for any business-oriented SaaS application – i.e. you sign up on behalf of your organisation, and then want to invite your colleagues/teammates into the newly created workspace/account/organisation. This isn’t supported in the built-in user flows, so you’re in the "complex scenario" territory and forced to look at custom policies if you want to implement this feature inside AAD B2C.

We desperately wanted to avoid going down the custom policy route (more on the reasoning behind this later) when adding B2C authentication to our SaaS platform, so we set about designing a simpler approach to the Invite User flow that doesn’t require custom policies. This post explains the approach that we took, the reasoning behind it, and the benefits that it gives us.

Abandoned cart emails

A commonly used B2C email automation for eCommerce, abandoned cart messages are delivered when subscribers add items to their carts but don’t complete a purchase. Cart abandonment is common. Super common. Numbers vary but hover around 70%. An automated recovery program will certainly reduce this number.

You might send an email a few hours after abandonment that shows the item the shopper was interested in and asks if they still want to go through with a purchase. The hope is that this simple reminder will bring back a distracted consumer.

This is fine, but you can take things much further. You might use the opportunity to overcome common objections or offset the advances of a competitor. Remind your potential customer of your key value proposition, or build trust by including a prominent endorsement or recent review.

But remember, this is a customer journey. You aren’t limited to a single abandoned cart email. You can’t expect to convince every reader with just one email. But a series that builds your case and ends with a discount only after you’ve exhausted your other options, might be most effective.

Try to understand common objections that explain why consumers leave items in their cart. Is it the product’s price or the cost of shipping? Maybe it’s a complicated checkout process, security concerns, or forcing account creation. Working with those who own the customer or user experience (CX and UX) helps inform your abandoned cart email strategy.

This abandoned cart email from Nomad is a great example of a first point of contact. There’s no discount offer; it’s just a fun way to ask if the customer wants to continue. Near the end, however, they help overcome consumer hesitations by reminding the subscriber of their generous return policy.

If you sell something that consumers often finance, you can provide a way for them to learn more by browsing financing options. The further subscribers advance into their journey, the more likely they are to become customers.

New customer welcome series

A new customer welcome email series helps keep their excitement level high, which is particularly important if you offer a free trial or limited cancellation window, or if your product requires a time commitment to see results, like a fitness app.

It’s also a great opportunity to build brand affinity as well as inform them of other products you offer. Share examples of other customers having success or enjoying your products. Tell the story of how proceeds from their purchase are being used to promote positive change in communities around the world. Provide insight into your company’s culture and give subscribers more ways to get involved.

This friendly email from Warby Parker does everything right. It offers new subscribers several options for engaging with the brand, and provides information about the company’s “buy a pair, give a pair” initiative.

You don’t want to wait to connect with new customers until the next scheduled marketing campaign rolls around. You want to reach out to them immediately, especially if your email opt-in is incentivized. With a new customer welcome series, you can reach out to the people who are most eager to hear from you!

Abandoned cart emails

Abandoned carts can feel like a marketer’s worst nightmare. Someone liked you enough to almost buy from your brand… but not quite. Customers have myriad reasons for choosing to abandon a transaction, and sometimes they’re gone for good. But, often, a little nudge in the form of an abandoned cart email – with a reminder of what they’re missing out on – can be enough to bring them back for a purchase. Brands that send these emails can only gain from converting an ambivalent customer… if you send it, they can come (back).

Compared to other B2C emails, abandoned cart emails had the lowest rates of response in our report. Just 21.1% said they’d read and click on an abandoned cart email, and 29.1% said they’d save it and read it later. It doesn’t seem like that much, but that’s 21.1% more than you had before you sent that email.

Creating great content for your abandoned cart emails

What’s a great way to change a customer’s mind? Offer them a good deal. A consumer may abandon their cart for one or several reasons, like price, shipping time, or a loss of interest in their items. But, a discount can lure consumers back to complete the purchase. If an item is cheaper, it can help overcome a longer wait for delivery or a sense that the product isn’t needed. And of course, lowering the price assuages concerns over expense and affordability.

Alex Mill’s abandoned cart email does this well by reminding users of clothing picks the website has saved for them – with a discount. You can use discounts as a way to entice subscribers to complete transactions immediately, or as a re-engagement effort if your first abandoned cart email goes unnoticed.

Finding the right design for your abandoned cart emails

For design, simplicity is the key to abandoned cart emails. Consumers already respond to them at lower rates than other B2C emails, and you don’t want to turn off your audience with a lot of unnecessary images and text. You can, however, include images and graphics reminding the customer of what they’re missing (and creating a sense of urgency – the items won’t last long!), along with a CTA to come back and complete the purchase.

As with all other emails, your CTA should be placed near the top of the email. Don’t make users scroll for it. Use a color or font that fits with your brand, but will still stand out and get attention. If you have an image alongside it, use colors that draw the eye to the CTA… after all, that’s why you’re sending the email in the first place.

LEGO does this in a fun way by including a large image of a LEGO figurine with binoculars. It’s a good reminder without feeling pushy or heavy. The colors are on-brand (that LEGO yellow features heavily), but the CTA is designed in a contrasting blue that stands out from the rest of the graphic. The CTA is also repeated with an image and price quote for the item the user viewed. The whole email is engaging without being too cluttered – the CTA is still front and center.

Testing your B2C email marketing campaigns

If you’re not A/B testing your messages, you’re missing out. A/B testing lets you optimize your email marketing campaigns by testing variations of the same message to different audiences. You can test pretty much anything – subject lines, content, design, price inclusion, CTA style, color. For example, you can send two versions of the same email to a portion of your list to find what works best: one to 10% of your audience that has a red CTA, and one to another 10% that’s exactly the same… except it has a blue CTA.

You can also use A/B testing to experiment with different sending times (i.e., one version sent at 9 AM, and the other at 10 AM). That’s one thing about B2C email campaigns: It’s all about when you send them. Your audience members may have different times when they’re most likely to open them. Make sure you A/B test these messages with different send times to ensure they have the highest possible chance of conversion.

For example, you can send abandoned cart emails to one set of users 30 minutes after they abandon their cart, and to another group after 60 or 90 minutes. You can even try sending an email one or two days later. The same can be done with birthday emails – does a birthday freebie drive more conversion on the actual date or a couple days before?

From there, you can use metrics to track open rates, click rates, and conversions for each segment. Finding the segment with the highest engagement– for example, the segment that received the email 60 minutes after abandoning their carts – will let you know when you should try sending your emails to your general audience.

Sources:

https://endjin.com/blog/2020/09/simple-invite-user-flow-for-aad-b2c-without-custom-policies
https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-marketing/b2c-email-automation-campaign-ideas/
https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/b2c-email-marketing-campaigns/
B2c email

For this reason, it makes sense for marketers to spread their marketing budget across many options. Some of these outbound channels are email, content marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and paid ads like PPC (pay per click).

7 Lessons the B2B World Can Learn From B2C Email Marketers

Well, B2B marketers, I have good news: we’re all inhabiting the same planet, Earth, which is populated by (shocker!) human beings. And human beings—whether they’re receiving email in a business or a consumer context—tend to think and act in remarkably predictable ways. Which is why every time I hear that faulty “…but we’re B2B” premise, I take the opportunity to crush it.

After all, every marketing message sent is received by a person. Whether your company sells to other companies or directly to consumers, people are receiving your messages and making response or purchase decisions.

That said, I am not without compassion. I crush premises acutely aware of the differences between B2B and B2C. As a B2B marketer myself, I know the challenges we face that B2C marketers usually don’t, like smaller email list sizes, longer and more complex sales cycles, business models that don’t (or can’t) support e-commerce, and difficulty in reaching—let alone merely influencing—decision-makers.

Still, those are not excuses for shying away from email as a marketing channel. So stop dissing your B2C cousins, and instead, pull up a coffee and swipe a lesson (or seven) from them, then deploy and share in the secrets of their success.

Think Dialogue, not Blast

The days of batch-and-blast are long gone. B2C email marketers learned this during the fledgling days of marketing automation with early “sense-and-respond” emails that were deployed to recognize high-value actions or prevent conversion attrition, like welcome, onboarding, repurchase and shopping cart abandonment campaigns.

Programs such as these are intentionally designed and sequenced to recognize the customer lifecycle and natural inflection points on the customer journey. They mirror a conversation vs. simple one-way communication. It’s time for B2B email to do so as well.

MapMyFitness does an excellent job facilitating a dialogue in its onboarding email campaign below. New users are first given resources to get started with the app, then they’re encouraged to set a fitness goal and find their friends. Once a relationship has been established, then the brand sells the benefits of its premium features.

What are the Differences Between B2B and B2C Email Marketing?

On the other hand, B2B customers are much more logical and rational with their purchases. They will only go ahead with a transaction after assessing its benefits and returns. So, in order for them to take an active interest in your offerings, you have to educate them about your product’s features and how it can address their pain points. You first need to establish a solid relationship with your customer before pitching your services to them.

• The buying cycle in B2B is much longer than B2C. This is because, unlike B2C here, the decision-making party is not a single individual. B2B think tanks either comprise a dedicated department or the heads of the relevant departments assembled together. B2B customers evaluate vendors and different offerings more rigorously than B2C customers, further prolonging the buying cycle. For this reason, while B2B marketers aim at nurturing clients over persistent drip campaigns, B2C folks focus more on generating conversions through campaigns that invite engagement and generate brand awareness. is another significant difference between B2B and B2C companies. If you’re a B2B organization, you’d ideally want to establish a certain routine for your communications. Because lead nurturing takes priority in this case, ensure you share something valuable to your customers throughout the week- tutorials, industry insights, discounts, etc. This doesn’t mean you have to send them an email on all seven days of the week; just fix the days on which you intend to. B2C email marketers don’t have to worry about establishing routines, but that doesn’t make their work any easier. Here, the frequency depends on the timing of different events.

For instance, you’d want to spend a greater number of emails during the holiday season or in the days leading up to a new product release in comparison to the rest of the year. Additionally, in B2C, email frequency can go a long way towards determining engagement. A lot of subscribers opt out of brand newsletters and communications simply because they get put off by the sheer number of emails that come their way. This is why it is vital to include an “update preferences” link that lets your customers specify their email frequency themselves.

Timing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are all the buzz, and that’s not going away anytime soon. Because of the pattern recognition capabilities of deep learning, AI is here to stay and gives marketers a competitive advantage.

It’s not magic, though. AI still cannot quite brainstorm like a human being. Although it might be very good at detecting the best time of day to send your emails, it’s not going to be good at understanding a persona in your target audience.

As a human, you still have to come up with the keywords to target, understand your products and services very well, and read about your competitors. You need to listen in the niche communities, and hear your customers out.

Because you’re a human, you can understand the pain they have with the market niche’s products and services, and you can emotionally connect with them and address their problems. AI can help to establish a consistent tone for your emails.

B2C tone and personalization can be much more casual, in some cases remarkably conversational. Of course, B2B tone is almost always more professional. AI can help your content remain as consistent as possible, whatever your level of formality.

Don’t forget to adjust the tone of voice in your email content, segment appropriately, and use send-time automation. Brainstorm and use your imagination to get into the mind of your audience, step into the shoes of different personas, and use that to devise customized UX journeys.

With analytics data, collect as much as you can, but use that data judiciously. Don’t rely too much on one indicator. Lastly, know your product inside and out, even the bad parts that cause your customers pain.

Sources:

https://iterable.com/blog/7-lessons-b2b-world-can-learn-b2c/
https://email.uplers.com/blog/b2c-email-marketing-tips/?amp=1
https://automizy.com/blog/b2b-email-marketing-guide/