B2C Email Marketing Best Practices

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Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach your customers and potential customers. The Data & Marketing Association reported that the channel delivers B2C companies an ROI of 42:1, or $57.54 for every $1.37 spent. Of course, it’s not as simple as digging a dollar and change out of your pocket and sending an email. That’s why we put together this B2C email marketing guide to help you maximize your investment.

1. Develop a B2C Email Marketing Strategy
The first step to effective email marketing is to develop a plan. Marketers without a strategic plan are likely to exhaust resources on email marketing software, mailing lists, and the time it takes their team to run the campaigns without getting a return on their investment.

You can avoid that problem by spending some time on strategic planning before you get started.

At a minimum, your B2C email marketing strategy should include:

Goals. Overall, what do you hope to accomplish through email marketing?
Objectives. How will email marketing help you achieve that goal? What targets do your email marketing campaigns need to hit to meet your goal?
Tactics. What email campaigns (audience, messaging, offers, etc.) will you send to hit those targets?
2. Build an Audience
If you don’t already have an audience, you’ll need to build one. Even if you do, you might want to re-assess your B2C lead generation efforts to see if there are opportunities to increase its size.

Email acquisition can be as simple as buying a list, but we don’t recommend that. B2C email lists can be filled with outdated emails and spam traps. If you’re not careful, you can do serious damage to your sender reputation with a single campaign.

Besides that, the people on a purchased or rented list aren’t likely to recognize your brand. That means they’ll probably flag your email as spam or just ignore the email. Those actions are also bad for your sender reputation.

But there are other ways to get data for email marketing. For example:

Offer an incentive to people who sign up for your mailing list.
Use digital advertising to get more leads.
Require shoppers to register before adding items to their carts.
Use website visitor identification to get the email address of anonymous visitors who don’t convert.
3. Choose Your Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing software provides many benefits, including:

Personalization. Sending highly relevant campaigns to segments of your audience is proven to increase performance. (To learn more about that, see this article on eCommerce personalization.)
Automation. Email marketing automation will send emails and segment your audience based on the behavior of the recipient (e.g., whether they opened an email) can increase efficiency and protect your sender reputation.
Audience management. This feature allows you to use audience segmentation belarus telemarketing data so that you can divide your audience based on relevant factors and send them personalized emails, recommendations, and offers.
Detailed reporting. Email marketing platforms that provide in-depth analytics enable you to assess your campaigns to see what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.
Email validation. You can identify spam traps and other subscribers who will hurt your sender reputation by running those emails through an email validation tool.
Additionally, while these aren’t exactly email marketing tools, you might want to consider using some landing page optimization tools to increase conversions. If you’re directing your subscribers to a landing page (or multiple landing pages), these tools will help you see what’s working and what’s not.

4. Focus on Effective Email Marketing Tactics
The subject lines and body copy of your emails are important, but there are other tactics to ensure that your emails are opened, read, and acted on. Here are a few to consider as you get started.

Audience Segmentation
There are many ways you can split your audience into groups with shared attributes. Then you can make sure you’re only sending emails to subscribers who will find them valuable.

The four primary types of audience segmentation are:

Demographic. Demographic segmentation divides your audience into groups based on characteristics like age and gender.
Geographic. Geographic segmentation groups subscribers by location.
Behavioral. Behavioral segmentation groups your subscribers based on their actions (e.g., website activity).
Psychographic. Psychographic segmentation splits your audience into groups based on psychological factors.
Email Remarketing
Email remarketing works like a remarketing ad. It targets your subscribers based on website activity (e.g., product page views or cart abandonment) and sends them an email.

Email Retargeting
Email retargeting is similar to email remarketing, but it allows you to retarget visitors even if you don’t have their email. It requires an email retargeting platform to match your visitors to records in a third-party database to get their email addresses.

Even though these visitors haven’t specifically opted into your list, this is method is legal and compliant with privacy regulations because of the way the email retargeting platform’s data partners collect the data.

Personalization
Personalizing your emails will lead to better open rates and conversion rates. You can personalize your emails by:

Including the subscriber’s name in the salutation
Sending them at the best time according to the recipient’s time zone or the time they are most likely to open it
Sharing offers that are relevant to the subscriber (e.g., notifying parents about a sale on children’s clothing)
Re-Send Unopened Emails
If someone doesn’t open an email, you can use email marketing automation to send that email again. You can send it as is, or change the subject line to try to get their attention.

5. Choose Your Campaigns Types
There’s a wide variety of tried-and-true campaign types that you can use depending on your strategy.

Welcome emails. Welcome emails thank people for subscribing to your list and let them know what to expect from future emails. They’re likely to be read because the recipient just subscribed so they know who you are and why you’re emailing them. To keep them opening your emails in the future, make it clear what value you’ll deliver to your new subscriber’s inbox.
Post-purchase emails. These emails (known as post-stay emails in hotel email marketing) thank your subscriber for making a purchase. It’s a good time to ask for feedback.
Drip campaign. A drip campaign is a series of emails designed to provide value to the subscriber, usually in the form of information.
Opt-in emails. If you have a lot of drip campaigns or you use website visitor identification for email acquisition, an occasional opt-in email to give subscribers a way out is a good idea to protect your sender reputation.
Newsletters. Newsletters are informative, entertaining, or both. They give subscribers a reason to stick around. Digg, The Hustle, and theSkimm are great examples to follow.
Blog updates. If you develop value-packed content for your blog, sharing those updates through email can be a good way to get it in front of as many people as possible. Don’t overdo it. If you generate a lot of content, the newsletter format would probably be a better choice.
Exclusive content. Exclusive content and offers are another way to give the people on your list a reason not to unsubscribe.
Promotional offers. Discounts and other promotional offers can increase sales, but they’re most effective when you use audience segmentation to ensure that they’re relevant to the recipients.
Abandoned cart recovery. Email can be a powerful addition to an eCommerce email marketing strategy. Since you won’t have the shopper’s email in your CRM in most cases, this campaign type requires an email retargeting platform.