B2C Marketing

Business to customer marketing, commonly known as B2C marketing, is a set of strategies, practices, and tactics that a company uses to push its products or services to customers. B2C campaigns don’t just focus on the benefit or value that a product offers, but also on invoking an emotional response from the customer.

B2C marketing works on the basis that customers look for goods or services to meet an immediate need. Therefore, they tend to purchase without doing much research on the product or service. With B2C purchases, users typically complete their purchase within the first hours or days of becoming aware of a product or service. For a successful B2C campaign, a business owner should understand their customers’ buying habits, trends in the market, and what strategies the competitors use.

B2C promotions should be bright, easy for consumers to understand, and focused on solving the precise problem faced by their customers. With this information and the right tools, it is easy to create a campaign that triggers the right reactions from customers and as a result, drives sales.

B2C marketing is vital for all businesses that sell consumer-based products or services. These include restaurants, drug stores, car companies, fashion businesses, software companies, grocery stores, and so forth. Today, however, the internet has become the most preferred channel for B2C brands to promote their goods or services and for conducting market research. Almost every B2C company wants to get a share of the $2.3 trillion e-commerce industry and shift its marketing outreach online.

B2C e-commerce sales stood at $1.5 billion in 2013, with forecasts showing steady growth to 2.35 billion in 2018. These figures show that B2C marketing is worth the investment for higher ROI and business growth. B2C marketing is beneficial in the following ways, it:

• Boosts website visits: B2C campaigns are created to woo prospective customers into visiting your brand’s website to earn more about your brand. 
• Helps brands grow their subscriber list: when the number of leads that visit a business’s website increases, the number of new subscribers also goes up.
• Offers more refined interactions with customers: with knowledge about your target audience, B2C companies can send more specific messages at strategic times. Here segmentation proves to be useful.
• Gives businesses better rankings on search engines: by using targeted keywords, a website can increase its position in search results. As a result, there are more chances for users to find YOUR company.
• Increases conversion and brand awareness: B2C marketing strategies enable businesses to reach and connect with large audiences through bulk emailing, social media outreach, and other channels. As a result, a brand becomes popular, and conversion rates increase.

Features of B2C Marketing

B2C marketing can be characterized by a list of features that makes it stand out. Look below.

• A short sales cycle. Unlike B2B marketing, in which the sales cycle is much longer, B2C clients don’t spend hours on research, hesitating, and comparing every single feature. B2C customers usually buy products that were advised by their friends so the entire process is less intimidating for clients and sellers.
• Domination of an emotional element over the rational one. B2C customers look for instant solutions to their problems based on their desires. They rarely think strategically over the purchase. They are just looking for a fast solution that will satisfy their needs here and now. So if a brand manages to provide them with this solution, they will definitely return to for the same emotional experience.
• Working with the end-user. B2C companies usually deal directly with the consumers of their products. This makes it easier to convince a person, find the right words, and use special techniques. While in B2B, a salesperson needs to negotiate with multiple influencers who make decisions on behalf of the entire company.
• The high importance of social media. Working with the end consumers is impossible today without investing in social media marketing. While choosing a product, people desperately look for customer feedback. They investigate each channel they know to make the right decision. They not only look for reviews but prefer Facebook and Instagram to talk to the brand via chatbots. You will hardly find a person who will give a call or visit the company’s office. So, brands create chatbots to provide clients with 24/7 support, collect reviews, share updates, and run retargeting campaigns to bring in new customers and maintain relationships with them.

B2C Marketing vs. B2B Marketing

B2C and B2B marketing differ significantly; therefore, understanding these differences can make a brand’s marketing campaigns more relevant and successful. The following is a comprehensive comparison of the two:

B2C marketing has been in existence for a long time and relies on various communication channels to reach the final customer. Just like other types of marketing, growth in technology has also increased the number of marketing channels in B2C.

The most important channels for B2C marketers include the following:

Email marketing

Email marketing is a popular and effective way for consumer brands looking to increase their sales to reach the target audience. It primarily involves sending out email blasts or personalized promotional emails to new leads or loyal customers. Email marketing, however, is only useful if it is relevant to the recipients.

Mobile marketing

It is estimated that over half of all internet shoppers buy things from their mobile devices. Therefore, successful B2C companies should work on reaching mobile users through interactive and mobile-optimized promotions. Mobile marketing aims to reach mobile users through websites, apps, SMS, MMS, and social media.

Web push marketing

Push notifications are a way to deliver messages about sales, discounts, or offers to customers in real-time when they visit a website. Push notifications usually pop up on users’ computers or mobile screens and help elicit an immediate response from the viewer.

Social media marketing (SMM)

SMM is the use of social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote goods or services directly to customers. It entails creating and sharing marketing content on social media platforms. Usually, B2C businesses use social media as a channel to market their brands' potential target customers, loyal clients, and the general public.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a natural or organic marketing process for increasing the visibility of a site or webpage on a search engine’s non-paid results. Good SEO practices and tools help businesses drive more traffic to their websites and consequently increase sales.

Paid Search Advertising

This form of marketing is a type of pay-per-click advertising where brands pay for their digital advertisements to appear on the results page of a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The placement and frequency of these ads depend on one’s quality score and bid.

B2C marketers, sales executives, and business owners can benefit from marketing tools offered by services such as SendPulse. Here are the most prominent services:

Email marketing

Email marketing tools with SendPulse can be used to build and segment mailing lists, create and send personalized email campaigns, automate email sending, analyze subscriber activity, and monitor results. This channel assists marketers with user onboarding and moves users down the sales funnel.

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SMS marketing

SMS marketing tools enable brands to reach prospects and loyal customers on their mobile devices. With SendPulse, brands can send bulk promotional or non-commercial SMS messages to 800 mobile networks in more than 190 countries worldwide. You can schedule SMS sending to a specific date and time or choose gradual sending at defined times. You can perform B2C marketing with SendPulse at speeds of up to 500 SMS messages per second.

Web push marketing

SendPulse helps brands send browser push notifications about sales, exciting updates, new content, and products that get the attention of visitors and drive traffic back to websites. They are easy to set up and work on most browsers, including Chrome, Opera, and Firefox.

Messenger marketing

You can promote your products via messengers as well as answer users' frequently asked questions, help them order, and register for events using a chatbot. With SendPulse you can create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and Telegram and send up to 10,000 messages every month at no cost.

Combination of an online chat + behavior-based scripts + chatbots

It is important for brands to use an omnichannel approach to be successful in B2C sales — after all, potential customers are looking for products and services in a convenient channel and at a convenient time. It is necessary to involve uncommunicative visitors in your dialogue, promptly answer questions, help with order placement, advise on prices, and motivate them to buy and come back to your website in the future. SendPulse allows users to create a live chat for a website for free without any coding skills. This way, you'll convert more site visitors into clients, assist users and start building long-lasting relationships with your audience. 

Test launching a scripted online chat based on the behavior or actions of your website visitors. In order not to lose calls from visitors outside of working hours, invite them to chat and subscribe to your Facebook chatbot. You can customize the look of your chatbot to make it match your corporate identity, or change its position and format on the website — minimized or expanded.

B2C Marketing Strategies

1. Content marketing. You've definitely heard the quote published on Microsoft's site "Content is King." Every famous brand invests in content marketing. This strategy helps businesses generate leads, increase their target audience, boost engagement, nurture leads, build brand awareness, blow up sales, and raise customer loyalty. Different content formats help effectively reach these goals. You can start a blog both to drive traffic to your site and educate your audience about your products.
2. Search Engine Optimization. Now, that you're in content marketing, it's high time you take SEO seriously. This strategy means optimizing your site pages to rank high in the search engine results page. In short, this is a set of techniques that enables the search engine robots to make your content visible and help people find it. This is a long-term strategy that implies working with users' search queries, the load speed of your pages, and building links to your website.
3. Paid advertising. This strategy is similar to SEO, the only difference is that you have to pay for it. It includes PPC, ads on Facebook, and Instagram, retargeting campaigns. All these ads help drive users who are already interested in your product to your site. Depending on the ad format, you can either pay for views or for clicks.
4. Email marketing. With a well-thought email marketing strategy, you can increase your outreach, build long-lasting relationships with your audience, increase brand recognition, and boost sales. Combine promotional emails with transactional campaigns to perform better. With SendPulse's Automation 360, you can send emails triggered by users' actions automatically.
5. Social media. People spend hours per day on social media channels and they DO use them to buy products online. They look for reviews and customer feedback on Facebook and seek more behind-the-scenes information about brands on Instagram. Besides, they tend to share content they liked with their friends, so you can both increase sales and user engagement. In addition, you can use Facebook and Instagram to talk to your audience, find out which improvements will make you brand the best choice.
6. Influencer marketing. Find the most popular bloggers in your niche. They will help you promote your brand to their vast audience in favorable terms. If they enjoy using your product, you’ll get the benefits of long-term cooperation and increase sales significantly. You only need to carry out research to find the right influencers.
7. Membership and rewarding programs. Your loyal clients let your brand prosper. They not only increase your ROI but bring in new clients, spread a good word about your brand, and can help you improve. Create programs to reward their loyalty. Offer them to collect points that they can change for a product or a discount.

Consumer-based companies can achieve B2C marketing success with SendPulse for free. Follow these steps to create and send B2C campaigns.

1. Register in SendPulse. Sign up on the website and start using marketing tools to reach and connect with prospects for free.
2. Choose the optimal channel or mix them. Choose a suitable channel for your new campaign. You can choose email, SMS, web push, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram app. SendPulse also lets you combine multiple channels in one campaign for better outreach.
3. Upload a mailing list or grow your current list. You can add a mailing list if you have one already or create a new list of contacts. With the help of a subscription form or a script for push notifications — which you can make and segment with SendPulse — brands can grow their mailing list without much effort. Besides, you can create multichannel forms to communicate with your audience via messengers. If you upload your existing mailing list, we recommend your verify the addresses with our free tool. This check will help you stay out of the spam folder and keep your sender reputation high.
4. Send your marketing campaign. Create the content for your campaign, add the list of recipients, and send it. Alternatively, schedule a date and specific time for automatic sending.
5. Monitor results and improve strategy. With SendPulse reports, track how the campaign performs. Analyze delivered emails, opens, clicks, delivery errors, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and improve your marketing strategy.

B2C Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is essential, especially for B2C companies, as it simplifies and optimizes most marketing tasks. With SendPulse Automation 360, you can automate marketing campaigns across multiple channels. This automation tool lets you send triggered messages after customers perform actions such as making a purchase, registering on the website, abandoning products in their carts, or any other event you specify.

To get started with Automation 360:

1. Sign up. Add an event to be tracked, such as a «Add subscriber,» when a visitor joins your mailing list.
2. Create an email, SMS, or web push message to send when the event is triggered.
3. Start the automation flow.
4. Track conversions.

B2C Marketing Examples

See how Habitat tempts its customers to buy the products at reduced prices.

Check out another example of the B2C tactic to increase sales. Skiphop offers a free shipping day for all the orders.

Look how True Citrus takes advantage of Valentine’s Day. They offer generous, time-limited sales to push clients to make a purchase.

B2C Marketing Tips and Best Practices

• Ethically collect recipient addresses to avoid being blacklisted. A permission-based marketing approach is the choice of a good marketer.
• Categorize your leads and keep detailed buyer profiles.
• Create catchy headlines on landing pages to pull in the potential buyer.
• Create personalized, interactive, and engaging content to attract and enhance the customer experience with the help of segmentation.
• Optimize marketing messages and web pages for mobile.

Start B2C marketing, grow brand awareness, and increase sales with the help of SendPulse today.

References

1. The article "BUSINESS-TO-CONSUMER (B2C) MARKETING" on Brafton explains the difference between B2C and B2B marketing approaches.
2. The article "What Is B2C Marketing?" on Emarsys defines B2C marketing, explains its importance, considers top priorities for B2C content creators, sheds light on its biggest challenges, and offers essential B2C tips.
3. The article "5 Examples of B2C Marketing Strategies with Big Results" on Emarsys provides proven B2C strategies to implement.
4. The article "Understanding the Differences Between B2B and B2C Marketing" on The Balance Small Business explains the critical differences between these two marketing approaches.
5. The article "We Break Down B2B vs. B2C Marketing" on HubSpot blog defines B2B and B2C marketing and compares the approaches.

Last Updated: 03.07.2023