B2C Marketing Automation for the Busy Entrepreneur

 a female robot serving drinking cups to a customer - a symbolic representation for the concept of "B2C marketing automation"

Being a busy entrepreneur can get overwhelming at times, and result in neglecting your marketing. However this is a surefire way to kill your business growth. Fortunately, B2C marketing automation is here to save the day, and remove much of that burden.

And the good news is that if you’re in B2C, marketing automation is significantly easier and simpler to implement than what you might think. 

Most marketing automation discussions out there can sound overwhelming, but remember, they are mostly based on what big enterprises are doing. It can, and should be a bit simpler if you’re small or medium sized. But more on that in a bit.

What is B2C Marketing Automation

Think “effortless lead nurture and conversion on autopilot”. B2C marketing automation is all about setting up automated systems that nurture leads, personalize customer journeys and send relevant, timely content on autopilot. 

And if you’re with Emercury, automation can go even further, helping you automate other sales and marketing tasks in a fully integrated way.

How is it different from B2B Marketing Automation

I’m often stunned by how much small and medium-sized companies fail to leverage automation to make their lives easier. From what I can gather, it seems it has to do with a misperception about how automation gets applied in the real world.

Most of the marketing tutorials, gurus and discussions out there are about the most convoluted and complex ways to personalize and automate. And most of these are only applicable within big enterprises, and not even necessary for your business. 

It gets even worse if you look at the marketing done by enterprise B2Bs. Remember, these are big enterprises trying to sell multi-million dollar contracts to other big enterprises. It is a totally different game, and the budgets are entirely different.

The good news is that most of your competitors are procrastinating for the same reason, so even if you only apply some of the basics in this guide, you’re likely to dominate your market. With that said, here are some of the differences between B2B and B2C marketing.

Shorter customer journeys

In B2B you have to expect longer decision cycles. There are typically multiple decision makers, and purchases are rarely made on a whim or impulse. This is exactly the opposite in B2C where the time from signup to first purchase is typically a lot shorter.

This is good news for you, because it makes your job significantly easier. You need to produce much less content to fill in that timeframe from signup to purchase. A couple of sequences to get started and you’re already there.

Easier segmentation and personalization

Since B2B involves more than just the person reading the emails, it tends to require gathering more data about the company in question. While you can get away with asking more questions upfront in a B2B context, you still have to gather most relevant data after they signup.

That means you have to craft more of your automations around gathering the different relevant company information. For example you might send an email that offers a webinar or whitepaper, and links to a page that asks additional questions.

In B2C things are a lot simpler because you generally don’t need to go that deep into profiling the subscriber. You generally need to only gather information relating to their stage in the customer journey

In addition, you can gather more information through their behavior, including which types of products and topics they are interested, so that you can better personalize your automations, but more on that later.

A focus on creating engagement

Whereas B2B requires some serious, deep content (think whitepapers, case studies), B2C is more about creating engagement. That means fun content that delivers value in a fun way, while building positivity and trust towards your brand.

However, engagement is more than just that the content itself is engaging. It’s also about leveraging marketing automation to deliver the right content, at the right time. And this is what we refer to as “relevant content”. This is necessary in order to create deep engagement.

More behavioral marketing

The concept of behavioral-driven email marketing is a game changer. However, it is a lot more useful within a B2C context, and that is for several reasons. 

As already mentioned, in B2B the decision process is complex and takes multiple stakeholders. The purchase is typically a serious business investment. In B2C however you’re dealing with the individual, the investment isn’t as serious or as large, and hence emotions, timing and impulse can lead to many of your sales.

Take for example the abandoned cart campaign. It is essentially a behaviorally triggered automation, where a customer who failed to finish an order gets an email with a sweet additional discount or incentive with a time limit. 

The other difference is that in B2B there is just much less volume, so you have less behavioral data to draw from.

That isn’t to say that you can’t utilize behavioral data in B2B, it’s just that the goal is typically different. Whereas in B2C you utilize it to push for quicker sales, in B2B you track behavioral data to build a better understanding of the customer’s needs.

B2C Marketing Automation Software

One of the most important decisions that you will have to make is choosing the right marketing automation software. You really do not want your marketing automation platform to work against you and make life difficult for you. 

Ideally, you need to choose a platform that wants you to get real, tangible results. This involves supporting enough of the right features, but also focusing on the right priorities. With that said, some of the features you’re looking for include:

Good, quality segmentation that’s fun and easy to use

When it comes to automation, your goal is to achieve sufficient personalization and engagement. This is what is going to provide you with the most growth and sales. And nothing enables these two like good quality email segmentation.

Whether you’re looking to leverage tags, or build quality refined segments, Emercury has you covered. Whether we’re talking about our super fun advanced segment builder, the convenient tag manager, or our automated smart segments, Emercury is constantly striving to give you the tools to make powerful segmentation a breeze.

Enables behavioral tracking in email, and outside of it

As we discussed, behavioral email marketing is a must in a B2C context, otherwise you’re leaving easy sales on the table. However, in order to be able to implement behavioral targeting, you need a platform that makes it easy.

When it comes to Emercury, we automatically track all behavior related to, and inside of your emails. This includes what emails they open, the links they click on, if they forward the email as well as other behaviors relevant to deliverability.

In addition however you get access to a quite robust site & event tracking system. This means that you can track any and all behavior across your different assets.

For example, a person visits your pricing page 3 times? Send them a special discount code. A person plays a video, sends them a nurturing email.

But it goes even further than that. We even give you access to incoming webhooks which is almost unheard of. This means you can have your other assets automatically sending updates to your Emercury account. This is yet another way to track subscriber behavior outside of your emails, and then automating the marketing response to said behavior.

Native ecommerce integrations and recommended platform for Influencer Marketing

Before we dive into native ecommerce integrations, if you’re thinking of using influencers to promote and connect your product with your target audience, then you’re gonna need the right tool and platform. Take a look at this list of recommended platforms for influencer marketing for 2024.

Whether you run a web-shop, or merely leverage an ecommerce solution to charge and deliver products, you’ll want your platform to offer a tight integration. Emercury offers a tight integration with both WooCommerce and Shopify, but also makes it really easy to integrate with any other solution through either Make.com, Zapier or Webhooks.

Easy-to-use automation builder that grows with you

The biggest secret to implementing B2C marketing automation? It has to be fun, easy, simple and enjoyable. So you want a platform that makes it streamlined and simple to get started. And yet, at the same time it should allow you to get fancier and more complex over time.

This describes how we built our automation builder to the letter. Unlike platforms that cause procrastination due to overwhelm, we’ve constructed our builder to be super beginner friendly. This means that you can just go in, and build those simpler automation to start with.

And yet, at the same time, it does allow you to enable more advanced features as you get a handle on things. This includes things like advanced day-time targeting windows, a special “go to” feature not seen on other platforms, or even webhooks.

5 Easy ways to get started with B2C marketing automation

Welcome campaigns

If you’re looking to get started with B2C marketing automation, then welcome sequences are an absolute must. And not only are they mandatory, I would recommend you set this up before you do anything else. 

When done right, they give you all the behavioral data you need for your next automations and sequences, but also drastically improve your deliverability.

Bribe emails and abandoned cart campaigns

We’ve already discussed the abandoned cart email as the classic example of marketing automation. However, a lot of people don’t realize that you can utilize the same concept outside of ecommerce as well. It doesn’t have to be a literal cart that people are abandoning either.

For example, a lot of people utilize something like Woocommerce to sell digital products or services. And with our Woocommerce integration, you can easily send an email that does much the same thing. It reminds people that they didn’t finish their order, and bribes them in some way to finish it.

Generate reviews and referrals

If you’re collecting behavioral and segmentation data, you should be able to “know” when a subscriber has reached a level of trust and loyalty. Once criteria are met, you can trigger an automation that sends them an email asking them for a favor. It could be asking them for a favorable review, or asking them to recommend the newsletter to a friend.

Personalized offers

If you do a good job of gathering segmentation data with your sequences, you should be able to automatically send different offers to different subscribers.

To give you a simple, illustrative example, suppose that you run an ecommerce store that sells different categories of products. You can set it up such that when they hit the “tennis apparel” category on your site, Emercury automatically sends them a special offer on bestsellers in said category, with a nice discount coupon – “use tennis10 for 10% off”. 

The above is easy to implement using our site and event tracking technology. An alternative approach would be to have your automations tag people based on which emails they open or click.

Let’s say that they open and click on your email promoting weight loss courses. Just set up the automation so that we can tag them as “Interested In Weight Loss”. 

Then, you can have a separate automation that triggers whenever someone gets this tag, waits 3 days, and sends them a discount code (if they haven’t purchased in the meantime).

Automatically reward loyalty

It’s always a good idea to make subscribers feel appreciated. And it’s especially convenient when you can do this on autopilot. There are several things you can do automatically, depending on what data you have gathered.

If you have their birth date, you can configure a happy birthday automation. Alternatively, if you don’t gather this data, you can set up automations for different milestones. For example celebrating that they’ve been on your list for 3 months, with a free PDF as a gift. 

Or perhaps celebrating 100 days since they’ve been on your free-tier service, with a special discount to nudge them into upgrading to a paid service.

Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side

There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.

If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.

I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.

Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.

Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.