B2C email marketing: Best practices, examples, and tools for 2025

Email is still the most used marketing channel by B2C (business to consumer) brands across the world. This presents both challenges and opportunities for B2C marketers:

• On the one hand, customers expect to share their email at some point when interacting with brands online. They’re also used to receiving all sorts of promotional and transactional emails.
• On the other hand, their inboxes are constantly bombarded with wanted and unwanted emails. As a result, most messages are completely ignored, open and conversion rates are low, and unsubscribing after a while is the norm.

So, how do you stand out and ensure your B2C emails actually get read?

It’s all about being relevant, timely, and respectful of customers’ time and attention. 

That’s easier said than done, as it requires understanding recipients’ needs and interests, while also having the necessary tools to send them the right emails with the right content at the right times.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about B2C email marketing, including best practices, tools, and ways to maximize your efforts and spend. We’ll use Insider — our enterprise email marketing and omnichannel platform — to show real-life examples of B2C email capabilities and strategies in action.

Email is still the most used marketing channel by B2C (business to consumer) brands across the world. This presents both challenges and opportunities for B2C marketers:

• On the one hand, customers expect to share their email at some point when interacting with brands online. They’re also used to receiving all sorts of promotional and transactional emails.
• On the other hand, their inboxes are constantly bombarded with wanted and unwanted emails. As a result, most messages are completely ignored, open and conversion rates are low, and unsubscribing after a while is the norm.

So, how do you stand out and ensure your B2C emails actually get read?

It’s all about being relevant, timely, and respectful of customers’ time and attention. 

That’s easier said than done, as it requires understanding recipients’ needs and interests, while also having the necessary tools to send them the right emails with the right content at the right times.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about B2C email marketing, including best practices, tools, and ways to maximize your efforts and spend. We’ll use Insider — our enterprise email marketing and omnichannel platform — to show real-life examples of B2C email capabilities and strategies in action.

These 360 customer profiles ensure your email marketing efforts are based on reliable data about the entire customer journey. This lets you create much more targeted campaigns based on customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.

#2 Segment and personalize

Segmentation is the process of organizing your email lists into groups based on shared traits and characteristics. When done right, segmentation enables you to send highly targeted emails to ensure maximum relevance and engagement.

Modern email marketing solutions can help you segment audiences based on a combination of different characteristics. For example, with Insider, you can organize your audiences based on:

• Previous purchases, as well as last visited and abandoned products.
• Demographics, locations, or weather conditions (e.g., for seasonal and location-based campaigns).
• Previous interactions with your website, mobile app, or other marketing channels. 
• Predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a specific channel (like email and SMS), or discount affinity.

These versatile segmentation options open the doors to email personalization — i.e., the ability to tailor email content to the recipient rather than sending generic, mass-marketing messages.

Say you have a segment of customers who’ve shown interest in a specific product while also having a high discount affinity. You can send them a promotional email with a dynamic subject line, relevant items, and a limited-time coupon code.

This approach can drastically increase open rates, conversion rates, and email revenue as each element is tailored to the recipient’s needs and interests.

#3 Set up contextual automations

Automation ensures you can make the most out of your email marketing efforts and budget by triggering messages at key times during the customer lifecycle. In fact, most of your emails should be set up and automated ahead of time.

Here are some of the most important automated emails and campaigns that you should leverage:

• Welcome and nurture flows. When new leads or customers subscribe to receive emails, they should receive a confirmation and thank you message. For new subscribers, there should also be a flow guiding them to their first purchase. Remix built a three step email flow for new leads and increased first purchases by 104%.
• Cart abandonment reminders. These emails will help you reach leads who’ve already demonstrated purchase intent. Many eCommerce brands also throw in a limited-time discount or another incentive to get users to complete their purchase. 
• Transactional emails. These include order confirmations, delivery updates, account notifications, one-time passwords (OTPs), and other similar messages. They’re essential for building trust and keeping customers informed throughout their journeys.
• Re-engagement emails. Even regular customers can go cold on your brand. Re-engagement emails help you bring them back with new product recommendations, personalized discounts and coupon codes, or another special offer.
• Birthday celebrations. This is a classic example of acknowledging customer milestones. It can be as simple as congratulating customers on their special occasion or even throwing a small gift, like free shipping on their next purchase.
• Price drop and back-in-stock alerts. Customers often show interest in products on your site without adding them to their carts. These emails help you keep those products top-of-mind at crucial times — either when they get discounted or when they get restocked after being bought out.

Setting up these and other automations is simple with today’s email platforms. You can usually do it with a canvas-based editor by selecting automation triggers, wait times, conditions, and more.

If you’re interested, we explore this topic in our guide to using customer journey builders to drive revenue.

#4 Experiment with different opt-in templates

Growing your subscriber list can be as simple as placing a form or pop-up on your website. You can also entice leads to sign up for your email newsletter by offering a first-purchase discount.

Another option is to use gamification for a more engaging lead generation approach. Insider offers various gamified templates that incentivize users to leave their email or phone number like “Pick a Gift” or “Wheel of Fortune”.

Puma is a great example of a B2C company that used gamification to drastically speed up its lead generation efforts. Our team recommended they implement a “Spin-the-Wheel” overlay for an interactive experience where users would win a discount coupon by submitting their emails.

Thanks to this strategy, Puma observed a 231% uplift in lead submission rate and a 163% uplift in coupon code usage. You can check out their complete case study on our website.

#5 Run A/B tests for subject lines, send times, and other key elements 

It’s often impossible to know which version of an email will perform the best. That’s why A/B testing is crucial, as it lets you make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns based on what recipients prefer.

Many email marketing solutions today come with A/B testing capabilities. For example, Insider lets you experiment with all sorts of email elements — from subject lines to send times, body text, visuals, videos, product recommendations, calls-to-action (CTAs) and more.

As an aside, remember to be careful with subject lines. Being enticing is important but you don’t want to get into clickbait territory and hurt your reputation and relationships with customers.

Lastly, if you’ve already gathered data about recipients’ email engagement patterns, Insider can automatically trigger each email at the right time via Send-Time Optimization (STO). This can save you weeks of manual testing and optimization.

#6 Analyze results and optimize campaigns accordingly

As with any marketing activity, you want to track the results of your email campaigns to find opportunities for improvements. This includes monitoring metrics like:

• Open rates.
• Deliverability. 
• Bounce rates.
• Conversion rate.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR).
• Revenue.

Any good email marketing platform should give you a dashboard with these metrics, alongside the ability to customize it to your needs. Additionally, an omnichannel solution like Insider can also give you insights into the performance of other channels. This is a great way to track the entire customer journey and compare email’s effectiveness against different touchpoints.

#7 Integrate email with your other marketing channels

Email is likely just one channel your business relies on to reach customers. That’s why it’s essential to integrate with other customer touchpoints — like your website, mobile app, SMS, and WhatsApp — to ensure your efforts are coordinated and aimed at creating a seamless customer journey.

To do that, you can set up conditions that automatically govern how your campaigns unfold based on users’ behaviors. 

For example, if a customer doesn’t engage with your emails but continues to browse your website, you can trigger a message with relevant content or product recommendations on another channel. Or, if you’re not sure which channel to try, you can A/B test email against other touchpoints to see which ones users prefer.

The implementation process here differs depending on the solutions you’re using.

If you’re using a point solution (e.g., an email and SMS platform), you’ll have to rely on integrations with other channel-specific software. On the other hand, a unified marketing platform can let you control all channels from one place, which results in a more effective campaign orchestration and management process.

For example, Insider brings together 12+ channels under one umbrella — including email, push notifications, on-site, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. It also offers AI-powered capabilities for building and optimizing campaigns across these touchpoints.

Another useful feature here is Next-Best Channel, which analyzes recipients’ behaviors to determine which channel they’re most likely to engage on. You can set up a campaign, add multiple channel options, and let our platform trigger messages on the right ones automatically.

This is a great way to integrate email with your other touchpoints as you can put channel selection autopilot and ensure messages are reaching customers on their preferred touchpoints.

#8 Use AMP to create interactive email experiences

The AMP framework was created by Google to help brands create user-first websites, stories, emails, and ads. 

AMP emails specifically allow businesses to include modern app functionality inside their emails with rich components. This helps create different and engaging email experiences that result in higher conversions, submission rates, and email ROI.

AMP emails allow email recipients to:

• Browse products: Users can explore items and mix and match different looks by clicking on arrows inside each email. This is a great way to showcase new arrivals, streamline product discovery, and generate extra revenue from your emails.

• Complete bookings: For businesses that rely on appointments or reservations, AMP allows recipients to complete bookings without being redirected. This results in more conversions and revenue, as people don’t need to be redirected to another booking site or app.

• Provide feedback: AMP emails are also ideal for collecting first-party data as customers can leave feedback with a single click. This can drastically speed up data collection and improve completion rates.

3 Best B2C email marketing platforms

In this final section, we’ll look at three of the top B2C email marketing platforms that you can use to put the strategies we just discussed into action. 

Each email provider below is best-suited for specific business sizes and use cases — from complete enterprise email marketing to small-scale B2C efforts that don’t require advanced email capabilities. At the same time, they all offer various email templates, opt-in methods, simple drag-and-drop editors, and support for both promotional and transactional emails. 

For a more comprehensive list of solutions, check out our guide on the top 12 email marketing platforms for different use cases.

Insider: Ideal for large contact lists and integrating email with other marketing channels

Insider is our AI-native platform for creating omnichannel customer experiences. Over 1200 leading B2C brands, including Adidas, Samsung, Philips, and Toyota use Insider to build tailored experiences that drive sales, retention, and customer loyalty.

Insider offers everything you need to create, personalize, automate, and analyze email marketing campaigns, including:

• Proven opt-in and email templates: You can easily add all sorts of opt-in options to your website or mobile app, including standard pop-ups and gamified experiences. Plus, you have a plethora of proven email templates for all sorts of use cases — from nurturing leads to celebrating customer milestones, recovering abandoned carts, and upselling with relevant product recommendations.

• Easy drag-and-drop editor: You can build beautiful, engaging, and personalized emails by dragging and dropping elements like customers’ names, cart items, buttons, images, and much more. You also have the freedom to preview your emails on all devices and add custom code for maximum flexibility.

• Advanced segmentation: Insider lets you use standard, predefined, and predictive characteristics for accurate segmentation and customer targeting. For example, you can use customers’ locations, demographics, previous purchases, website interactions, likelihood to engage, lifecycle status, and much more.

• Real-time hyper-personalization: Insider can deliver dynamic content based on real-time behavioral triggers (like making a purchase or adding to a wishlist) and additional contextual information, including weather, location, and time. Plus, our leading product recommendation engine lets you add tailored recommendations to each email for a smooth product discovery and purchase experience.

• Email marketing automation and experimentation: You set up any automated contextual email flow or campaign, as well as A/B test different email elements against each other using a simple drag-and-drop editor. Our platform can also direct users to the winning variants, so you don’t have to review results and optimize your campaigns manually.

• AMP emails for interactive experiences. Thanks to AMP emails, you can create web-like experiences that let customers provide feedback, book appointments, browse products, and much more without leaving the email. This can help you turn email into a revenue-generating channel as opposed to a tool for guiding users to an external site or app.

• Fast subject line and content generation: Our patent-pending generative AI solution (Sirius AI™) can quickly create engaging subject lines and email body copy for you based on short text prompts with your end goal, like driving repeat purchases or re-engaging dormant customers.

• Customer journey analytics: You can track essential email marketing metrics like deliverability, open rates, CTR, and revenue. Insider enables you to analyze results across all other channels and lifecycle stages, so you can get a view of the entire customer experience, instead of focusing only on one channel.
• Send-Time Optimization (STO): STO automatically triggers each email at the time users are most likely to engage with it to ensure maximum engagement and open rates.
• AI-powered localization: Insider lets you localize and translate campaigns in one click, depending on each recipient’s language of choice. 
• Finally, Insider supports 10+ other channels besides email. This makes it a complete omnichannel engagement platform for unifying customer data and coordinating your efforts across all touchpoints.
• Specifically, you can use our Campaign CDP and journey builder to create cohesive experiences across channels like email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
• For example, you can put different channels against each other and compare their results for various customer segments. You can also have our platform automatically optimize your journeys (based on metrics you set beforehand) and select the right touchpoints for each message depending on each recipient’s behavioral patterns.

If you’re interested in Insider, learn more about our email capabilities or get a detailed demo with our team.

ActiveCampaign: Ideal for small to mid-sized brands looking for a CRM-based email solution

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that combines powerful email marketing tools with CRM features, making it ideal for businesses looking to nurture customer relationships. The platform offers an intuitive email builder, advanced automation workflows, and segmentation features, enabling personalized campaigns that respond to customer behavior. Its CRM helps businesses track leads, manage sales pipelines, and automate follow-ups to ensure no opportunities are missed.

Mailchimp: Ideal for small businesses looking for simplicity and ease of use

Mailchimp is a popular marketing platform, mostly known for its robust email marketing capabilities. It lets businesses design, send, and analyze email campaigns with a simple drag-and-drop editor, customizable templates, and advanced automation features that enable personalized messaging and segmentation. Marketers can also use it to set up automated workflows based on subscriber behavior, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and re-engagement campaigns. In terms of pricing, Mailchimp offers a free plan and paid ones starting at $13/month for 500 contacts.

Make the most out of your B2C email marketing strategy with Insider

Insider is the ideal B2C email marketing software for midsized and enterprise brands looking to maximize their email spend. 

It offers both standard and advanced tools for growing and segmenting your audience, delivering personalized email content and product recommendations, building automated workflows, using AI-native capabilities like A/B Test Winner-Autoselection and STO, and much more.

As a complete customer engagement platform, Insider also lets you:

• Unify your customer data from all online and offline sources — including CRMs, CMSs, customer service platforms, analytics solutions, marketing automation tools, and more — into a true enterprise CDP.
• Work with experienced in-house support teams that ensure fast deployment, easy management, and quick problem resolution.
• Maximize website conversion rates, revenue, and budget utilization by tailoring content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
• Build, automate, and analyze campaigns across all marketing channels, including email, on-site, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications by leveraging intuitive personalization, automation, and analytics tools.
• Leverage the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, deliver personalized content, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers (e.g., across WhatsApp or Chatbots), and work more efficiently.
• Access a library of easily customizable templates for any channel or use case — from generating leads fast via gamification to automating omnichannel cart abandonment journeys or cross-sell campaigns.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about B2C email marketing