The Ultimate Guide to B2C Email Marketing in 2025
Reading Time: 12 minutes
It’s 2025. Do you know where your customers are?
The reality is, marketers are facing challenges that keep growing in type and number. These include fragmented customer data, trying to balance personalization with privacy, and being able to speed up decision cycles and reaction times. On top of that, marketers must deal with increasing competition to stand out not only in the inbox but also against the many apps and social media platforms that also vie for a consumer’s attention.
But we have good news for you! When you switch your mindset from focusing on B2C email marketing to an omnichannel approach, these challenges are easier to overcome.
This B2C email marketing guide will help you increase your insight into your customers’ behaviors and preferences, plus understand the importance of a cross-channel approach, ultimately resulting in higher ROI.
Understanding B2C Email Marketing
Although businesses large and small have several options for marketing to consumers, from social media to advertising and more, it is B2C email marketing that reigns supreme over all the others. Why? Because it offers by far the best return on investment (ROI) of any marketing method. That ROI isn’t automatically granted, however. The savvy marketer who will maximize that potential return is the one with a thorough understanding of B2C email marketing.
What Is B2C Email Marketing?
B2C email marketing is the use of email to market goods and services to consumers rather than other businesses.
For those new to B2C email marketing, an overview of email marketing in general might be helpful. But if you’re already aware of the ins and outs of this marketing method, let’s explain the B2C aspect of it in more detail.
In essence, B2C email marketing is using email to market to consumers, rather than businesses. (That’s B2B email marketing and we will talk about that more later.) This doesn’t mean, however, that you simply get your hands on a list of email addresses and start emailing these consumers. That’s technically spamming. No, there’s more to it than that.
B2C email marketing delivers such a high ROI because it isn’t generalized, meaning sent to anyone. Rather it is targeted. And because it is targeted, it is an effective way to build direct and personalized communications with consumers. With an omnichannel approach, it can be even more targeted…and profitable.
B2B vs. B2C Email Marketing: Main Differences
If you’re wondering how B2C differs from B2B email marketing, it’s all about the audience. In B2B email marketing, the audience is quite literally other businesses. That means you’re probably selling something significant, like software, equipment, or consulting services. And it’s probably pricey. That means the email marketing campaigns will likely be more complex, with longer emails and longer sales cycles.
In addition, the many stakeholders complicate the buying process. With B2B email marketing, many people are involved in the decision-making, including influencers, champions, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business decision makers (BDMs). These stakeholders will likely compare competitors’ products and decide which products or services to buy.
B2C email marketing, on the other hand, targets individuals. As an individual buyer, you are more likely to make many smaller purchases rather than the occasional big purchase made by a business. And these purchase decisions are often impulsive rather than carefully considered.
That means B2C email marketing tends to use more and shorter emails intended to drive these purchases. Ideally, these emails are targeted and timely, because a marketer’s insight into a consumer’s behavior and preferences—enabled by a cross-channel marketing platform—results in messaging and cadence targeted to that consumer.
5 B2C Email Marketing Statistics That Prove Personalization Matters
How much does this personalization matter? Quite a lot, as these b2c email marketing statistics compiled by Forbes demonstrate:
- People are 3x more likely to make purchases from email marketing than social media.
- 59% of people say that email marketing impacts their purchasing decisions.
- 50% of people said they buy from a marketing email at least once a month.
- Personalization within emails generates 6x higher transaction rates.
- Automated flows such as abandoned cart or post-purchase emails generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient.
Core Challenges in B2C Email Marketing
Despite all the benefits of personalized B2C email marketing, it is not without its challenges. Just because a marketer has the desire to personalize email and build campaigns based on consumer behavior does not mean it happens without some effort.
Delivering personalization at scale, standing out in crowded inboxes, and mastering lifecycle-based targeting are the three core challenges facing B2C marketers today. Here’s how to overcome each.
Challenge #1: Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale
The first challenge is to deliver personalized experiences at scale. If I am sending an email to you, I can easily personalize it. Perhaps I can even take the time to personalize emails to 10 different people. But if I am a marketer with an email list of 20,000, I’ll be hard-pressed to personalize all those emails!
And “Dear Name” doesn’t cut it anymore as personalization. While our recent report found that attribute-based personalization is better than no personalization at all, today’s consumers expect the emails in their inboxes to be highly relevant to their current interests and past purchases.
How do you overcome this challenge? With the right automation tool that enables dynamic segmentation, marketers can easily personalize one-to-one communications to everyone on their list.
Think about it: When you personalize product or content recommendations based on your customers’ interests, browsing history, and behavior, you can stand out from the competition with ease. Why? Because you’ll be the one reaching consumers with the right message at the right time.
This is where your email marketing platform choice is crucial, because you’ll need advanced capabilities such as interactive email elements and AI-generated subject lines that make this level of personalization possible—without extra work for you.
Challenge #2: Standing Out in a Crowded Inbox
The second big challenge in B2C email marketing is standing out in a crowded inbox. Picture your own inbox, whether you tend to check email on your computer or your phone. It’s full, right? And every day it seems a little fuller.
For email marketers, that means your competition doesn’t necessarily come from your competitors; it comes from all the other messages competing for your customer’s attention.
This isn’t a fruitless battle, however. You can win your customer’s attention away from the other emails by optimizing subject lines, using visuals, and timing your emails for better open rates.
If you’re wondering how to identify the best send times and content formats to get the best open rates, choosing an email marketing platform with advanced analytics means the software can determine that for you. In addition, this platform can generate personalized subject lines for you using AI, and make sure the timing is spot on for a particular consumer.
In short, this is no longer a challenge with the right email marketing platform.
Challenge #3: Navigating Customer Lifecycle Complexities
We’ve talked about how to personalize at scale and stand out in a crowd. The third big challenge is taking that personalization to the next level by meeting consumers where they are in the buying journey—because they’re all in a different place.
The consumer who has shopped at your website but not made a purchase needs a different message than those who are ready to buy or have items in their shopping cart. But it even goes beyond that. Sometimes, consumers simply stop opening your emails, and they need to be won back. Some consumers might make one purchase, but you want to convert them into loyal fans. And obviously, you don’t want to lose sight of the customers who are already loyal; you want to keep them that way.
Can you see the complexity inherent in navigating all these different customer journeys, to ensure everyone gets the right message and at the right time?
Overcome this challenge with the right email campaign manager, one that helps you unify customer data, enable lifecycle-based targeting, and trigger emails based on that customer’s lifecycle.
Lifecycle marketing means developing a strategy to address customers at various stages, on an individual level. It reaches prospects and customers at every lifecycle stage starting at the beginning, and then ongoing to build loyalty. It is also used to re-engage them later if necessary. This is how you build a holistic B2C email marketing strategy.
Done right, lifecycle-based email marketing aligns with specific customer stages, leveraging insights and automation to trigger relevant campaigns for long-term success.
For example, online retailer Poshmark used MoEngage’s Smart Recommendations for personalized messaging, driven by AI and user behavior data. They implemented flow versioning and provided helpful hints and suggestions at relevant points in the customer lifecycle journey to nudge users toward conversions. The result? The company saw up to 60% email open rates and more than a 30% lift in converting listings to sales.
For more examples of brands winning at email, see The Ultimate Email Marketing Best Practices Cheatsheet.
Building a B2C Email Marketing Strategy That Works
Now that you understand the biggest challenges and how to overcome them, your next step is to build a B2C email marketing strategy that works.
If you’re new to this, we recommend starting with this comprehensive email strategy guide.
On the other hand, if you’re ready to dive in, let’s cover some of the basics: knowing your audience, personalization, optimization of timing and frequency, and testing.
The Foundation: Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is the first step in building your B2C email marketing strategy. To do this, you will need an email marketing platform that centralizes customer insights based on behavior, demographics and purchase history, so you can create actionable segments.
Personalization Beyond Names
Next, it’s time to move beyond “Dear Name” to target consumers with actual personalization such as dynamic product recommendations, localized content and curated offers. Why? Because that is the level of personalization that consumers today expect when they see your email in their inbox—or an SMS message on their phone. According to the MoEngage report on personalization, 56% of North American consumers want a curated shopping experience.
This might sound like an impossible task, but the right B2C email marketing tools can enable this level of personalization at scale. For example, Loblaw—a company with multiple brands and 2,500 stores—partnered with MoEngage to scale up its transactional messaging needs across a number of different business lines. They enabled on-site messaging, email, SMS, and push to engage users across multiple devices.
If you want to dig in further you can see a comparison of the performance of attribute-based, behavior-based and journey-based personalization in the report Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2025 & Beyond.
Optimize Timing and Frequency
Most unsubscribes are due to over-messaging, making timing and cadence important for retention. But optimized timing and frequency can also improve your B2C email marketing ROI, which is why it needs to be part of your overall strategy.
When you can access your data and use it to avoid over- or under-communicating with your audiences, you are—in effect—personalizing your emails even more because you are delivering the right message at the right time. And the right email marketing platform can make that possible.
For example, bridalwear retailer Cocomelody used the MoEngage platform to centralize data from physical boutiques and their website to understand where and why customers were dropping off. They used that insight to develop two different campaigns to address the problem. Doing so, they increased their repurchase rates by 27%.
Testing and Iterating for Success
You can’t succeed at B2C email marketing if you don’t know what’s working…or not. That’s why testing is key and must be part of your strategy. You need to do A/B testing for everything you can, from subject lines to images to design to calls to action. You can even test your From name, logo placement, you name it; the possibilities are almost endless.
And that can also make testing time-consuming, not only to set up but also to analyze the results and act on the information. So make sure your 2025 B2C email marketing plans include finding an email marketing platform that can automatically analyze and optimize based on test results. Because testing is not optional.
For more B2C email marketing strategy ideas, see 8 Email Strategies You Should Be Implementing.
4 Types of B2C Email Marketing Campaigns to Master
Now that you’ve given some thought to your email marketing strategies, it’s time to develop your B2C email marketing campaigns. The four that we will cover here include welcome emails, transactional emails, promotional emails, and win-back/retention emails.
1. Welcome Emails That Set the Tone
The saying “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” is true in B2C email marketing. That means your welcome emails need to be well-written and designed but also carefully considered. The welcome email is your first chance to start building trust with this new subscriber. So, emphasize its welcoming aspect.
Your reward for this effort? Higher than usual open and click-through rates.
Also, make it more than one email. Use a sequence of emails to start familiarizing your new subscribers with your business. Avoid the temptation to jump into selling. Approach your welcome emails like you would a meeting with a new person and getting to know them. You’d take it slow, right?
How many welcome emails in your B2C email marketing campaign is up to you. There isn’t a set number, and testing will teach you the number and cadence that deliver the best result.
2. Transactional Emails That Build Trust
Transactional emails are the next B2C email marketing campaign you’ll need. Think beyond the transactional email that says simply, “Your product has shipped.” Instead, use these emails to reinforce your brand and deepen your customer’s loyalty. Every one of your transactional emails, from purchase confirmations to shipping updates and receipts, can reinforce your brand and even bring a smile to your customer’s face.
Think beyond email, too, for transactional messaging that uses text messages, push notifications, and in-app and on-site messages.
3. Promotional Emails That Drive Action
Your welcome and transactional emails aren’t intended to do the heavy lifting of sales. That’s what your promotional emails are for. But not every email can have a “buy now” message, or you’ll cause list fatigue and lose customers. Instead, you need a mix of urgent emails that offer a flash sale, for example, and value-focused emails that offer useful information to your customers and help solidify your brand and their loyalty.
That’s not to say you can’t include calls to action and links in these value-focused emails because you certainly can. But it’s important to find the right mix of promotional emails that sell outright and those that do a soft sell by building the brand.
More importantly, your promotional emails must show up in the inbox in real time based on consumer behavior. This is crucial to boosting conversions and building your brand.
This is also the time to deploy your arsenal of B2C email marketing tools. Your promotional emails should include those triggered in real time by consumer behavior, such as cart abandonment emails and location-based offers.
Cart abandonment emails are a huge opportunity to not only encourage a customer to complete a purchase, but also to build brand as retailers allow these emails to be full of personality that resonates with their customers. For ideas on crafting your own, see these expert tips on crafting cart-abandonment emails.
Location-based triggers coupled with AI-powered push notifications are used everywhere, from hotels to retail and beyond. Think about how: When it shows up while a customer is physically close to your location, how much more relevant and timely can your message be?
4. Win-Back and Retention Emails
Your fourth B2C email marketing campaign is the one that keeps consumers coming back. When a consumer has disengaged, you want to win them back. Since retaining existing customers is less expensive than winning over new ones, this is key, and a growing priority for B2C marketers.
Retention emails might be about loyalty program updates or exclusive offers for existing customers. These are emails intended to keep consumers interested. It’s worth noting that retention is easier when your email marketing has timing and cadence personalized for each consumer. That way, you’re not under- or over-messaging anyone, which can mean they lose interest (in the first case) or unsubscribe (in the second case). And the right email marketing platform can help you automate that timing and frequency.
Win-back emails, on the other hand, target dormant customers with personalized offers or re-engagement campaigns. To do this, however, you need data and insights. You need to know which customers need winning back. And, you need a strategy to do so.
Publisher’s Clearing House succeeds at this by using prediction capabilities to reactivate over 30,000 dormant and inactive users, averaging a 3.93% overall conversion rate.
Measuring Success in B2C Email Marketing
Once your campaigns and strategies are in place, you need to measure your results so you’ll know what to change and how to improve. In the old days of B2C email marketing, the metrics you’d measure were basic: open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
You still need that data, and those are still key metrics to measure. But that’s not the kind of actionable information you need to level up your marketing.
These days, the best email marketing software has evolved to offer you much more, to give you actionable insights like predictive analytics or cohort-based analysis. That means you can optimize your campaigns with advanced analytics to increase those open rates, yes, but to do more: to reach your customers with the right message at the right time for improved ROI.
You need to move beyond the obvious to leverage insights so you can optimize campaigns. For example, the restaurant chain Outback wanted deeper insights into customer behavior so they could create and send more relevant personalized messages across channels like push notifications, emails, SMS and WhatsApp. However, they also wanted to cap the frequency of these messages to avoid over messaging subscribers. MoEngage helped them achieve these goals.
Emerging Trends in B2C Email Marketing
Deeper insight into analytics is definitely one trend, as more email marketing platforms offer it. However, other emerging B2C email trends are worth noting because they will help you succeed if you opt to use them. Two of these trends will be game changers: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cross-channel integration.
AI-Driven Personalization and Optimization
AI is all over these days, and that’s going to both save you time and increase your ROI. AI will learn from your past campaigns, simplify your A/B testing, generate targeted subject lines, automate processes, generate multiple variations of assets (such as content for push notifications, emails, SMS, advertisements, creative assets, social media), generate images, optimize your send times and much more.
B2C email marketing tools such as AI will both speed up and optimize your campaigns while enabling you to continuously react and optimize in real time, for unprecedented personalization.
Cross-Channel Integration for Unified Experiences
Although it’s already happening, B2C email marketing in 2025 will be even more integrated with multiple channels, including SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. For marketers, this will require a consistent user experience across devices and channels, as well as provide deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors.
Why is this key? Because consumers are seeing or engaging with your brand in many different places, from social media to their phones to your website, and you need to offer a seamless experience throughout.
With cross-channel integration, you’ll be able to reach your customers wherever they are, confident that it’s the right message at the right time.
Watch for these two B2C email trends to transform how you think about email marketing in the year ahead.
Succeeding with B2C Email Marketing in 2025: Concluding Thoughts
We’ve certainly given you plenty to think about with this guide to B2C email marketing in 2025.
From personalization that is so targeted as to be location-based to using AI to optimize subject lines and campaigns, there is a lot to take in and process. If you want a partner to guide you through deploying some or all of these best practices, consider a demo of MoEngage’s email marketing solutions.
MoEngage is the B2C email marketing platform built for engaging conversations cross-channel, with plenty of AI built-in to simplify and speed up optimized email campaigns. For a walk-through of our platform, request a demo today.
