Exceptional B2C marketing in 2025: how to resonate with your customers
B2C stands for “business to consumer.” Unlike B2B marketing, which is about promoting products to businesses, B2C marketing is about finding the best ways to promote your products to individuals.
While there’s some overlap between B2C and B2B marketing strategies, B2C marketing is geared more toward emotion, instant gratification, and personalized experiences. Sales cycles tend to be shorter, sales volume needs to be higher, and top-of-mind brand awareness metrics are more important.
The thing is, B2C businesses face a lot of competition and high expectations. Amazon has conditioned customers to expect effortless shopping experiences marked by fast delivery, seamless check-out, and personalized suggestions tailored to where they browsed, clicked, and bought. Anything less feels subpar.
Your mission as a B2C marketer is to produce always-on, personalized experiences that can differentiate your products and keep your brand top of mind.
What is B2C marketing?
B2C marketing refers to the tactics and strategies you use to promote your products to individual consumers, rather than companies. From crafting compelling content to delivering personalized messages, it involves communicating with your prospects and customers in a way that builds relationships, drives sales, and increases loyalty.
B2C vs. B2B marketing: what’s the difference?
Besides the obvious difference in audiences—individual consumers shopping for themselves or others, vs. decision makers shopping for their businesses—here are 6 differences between B2C and B2B marketing that can help you allocate resources:
A sales cycle is the amount of time between awareness and purchase. While some B2C purchases have longer sales cycles—think expensive items like cars and high-end jewelry—the vast majority of them have shorter sales cycles than B2B purchases.
Whereas B2B marketing tends to focus on establishing credibility through research reports, case studies, and webinars, B2C marketing assets educate and entertain with short-form video, newsletters, text messages, eye-catching ads, and quick hits of social proof.
B2B marketing reaches people on channels associated with work. B2C marketing, by contrast, is necessarily a more omnichannel experience that spans organic and paid search, email, SMS, and social media.
Whereas B2B companies rely mostly on recurring monthly or annual subscriptions to generate repeat purchases, B2C businesses generate customer loyalty through gamification, points, tiers, and a thoughtful post-purchase experience.
There’s a lot of overlap between B2B and B2C marketing metrics—conversions, customer lifetime value (CLTV), and customer acquisition cost (CAC) are universally important, for example. But engagement and website metrics matter much more to B2C marketers because clicks, shares, and other website behavior are meaningful precursors to buying—and they’re necessary for the behavioral segmentation that creates personalized experiences.
B2B marketing is (mostly) about appealing to logic, whereas B2C marketing must address both the logical and emotional motivations for making a purchase, whether through nostalgia, joy, or even a sense of urgency.
Understanding the modern B2C consumer lifecycle
A quick recap: Amazon raised consumer expectations to new heights with one-click check-out and advanced product recommendation algorithms. B2C marketers are now expected to create cohesive, personalized experiences across multiple channels. And the average B2C consumer makes purchases based on emotion, personal values, and urgency.
To understand how to operate effectively in this challenging environment, let’s break down the modern B2C consumer lifecycle as your starting point.
1. Awareness
The awareness stage begins when someone realizes they have a logical and/or emotional need—and they’re eager to find potential products that can meet these needs.
At this stage, a person may not have interacted with your brand in a way you can see and measure. But it’s important that your brand is top of mind nonetheless.
This is why discovery channels, such as organic search and social media, are so fundamental for the awareness stage. In fact, according to Adobe, more than 2 in 5 Americans use TikTok as a search engine, and nearly 1 in 10 Gen Z consumers are more likely to rely on TikTok than Google.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, a consumer has a few brands in mind that can solve their initial problem. This is when they compare prices, features, and other lifestyle factors that products in your category address. They might:
- Browse your website and product pages.
- Read product reviews.
- Sign up for your newsletter.
- Follow you on social media.
At this stage, the most important thing someone can do is give your brand permission to contact them. When someone signs up for email or SMS updates from your brand, they’re opening the door to the next stage: conversion.
3. Conversion
In the conversion stage, potential customers turn into actual customers. It’s the point at which someone has enough information to feel confident in their decision to buy.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll buy immediately. If their need isn’t urgent, savvy shoppers may hold out for a limited-time offer that creates the urgency they need to purchase. Others might almost buy, but abandon their carts because something made them think twice—high shipping fees, long shipping timelines, an inconvenient returns policy, etc.
In other words, the conversion stage isn’t a done deal. It’s a fickle stage that can be disrupted by perceived complexity and inconvenience during the purchase process, and it’s important for brands to understand, with real-time data, when people are dropping off.
4. Fulfillment
Between placing an order and receiving it, a consumer enters the fulfillment stage of the lifecycle. During this stage, people expect to see order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails to track their order and make sure it hasn’t disappeared into an online shopping ether.
While the fulfillment stage is ultimately about sending post-purchase emails that don’t sell, people still appreciate good customer service. This means they’ll likely welcome educational content that teaches them how to make the most of their purchase.
Once the customer receives their order, your goal is to eventually move them to the next stage of the lifecycle for repeat revenue.
5. Loyalty
This is an important moment for your brand and your customers. It’s the moment your customer will decide to buy again or not.
If they’re happy and you sell products that make sense to purchase again, they’re more likely to return for more. At this stage, a satisfied customer might:
- Share glowing reviews about their experiences.
- Recommend your products to friends and family.
- Join your loyalty program.
- Upgrade to premium versions of what they love.
- Explore and try out other products.
At this point, it’s time to focus on retention strategies that help keep your customers satisfied.
5 key strategies for B2C marketing success
Now that you have an understanding of the B2C customer lifecycle, let’s match stages to some of the core B2C marketing strategies you’ll need to see success.
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Stages: awareness, consideration
SEO is the process of creating content for your website in a way that helps you rank in search results. The channel informs awareness when results pop up from general keyword searches—like “high quality denim for men”—and consideration when people are searching for specific brands they already know could serve their needs.
For ecommerce B2C brands, it’s important to add product structured data to your product pages. Structured data includes information like:
- High-quality images
- Detailed product descriptions
- Price
- Shipping details
- Sales, discounts, and offers
This information can help you rank in enriched search items like product snippets, popular products widgets, the shopping knowledge panel, and Google images.
Take a look at how toothpaste brand Hismile shows up in a popular products widget. While the toothpaste brand’s product listing shows up alongside other listings from different sellers, Hismile’s owned listing competes with more customer reviews and a 30-day return policy.
2. Social media engagement
Stages: awareness, consideration
B2C marketing relies on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat to attract a broad audience during awareness and consideration stages. User-generated content, influencer collaborations, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and interactive features like polls and stories are all great ways to use social media to connect more deeply with your audience.
Social media for B2C ecommerce brands is about learning the conventions of your niche with an understanding of how your audience might want you to play with those conventions. For example, this TikTok video from Jones Road Beauty expands on the standard makeup tutorial with a split screen of two generations of women applying the same makeup.
3. Email and SMS marketing
Stages: consideration, conversion, fulfillment, loyalty
When they’re personalized and/or automated, email and SMS are tried-and-true, cost-effective ways to hit almost every stage of the customer lifecycle. Klaviyo’s latest benchmarks data shows that automated flows (like abandoned cart or post purchase messages) generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient than campaigns because they’re so timely and targeted.
While email and SMS campaigns are staples of any B2C marketing strategy—you’re not wrong to keep sending them!—automations are where you can expect to see revenue with much less effort. This is because automations are messages triggered by behavior, like product browsing, cart abandonment, or other actions that signal someone is about to buy again.
In other words, when they’re informed by rich audience data, email and SMS are how smaller B2C brands can deliver that personalized, Amazon-like shopping experience that’s now so important to consumers.
When someone abandons a cart on the Kizik website, the brand sends this email—a reminder about the product they almost bought with quick information about the benefits they can expect if they follow through. It’s a good alternative to offering a discount, which can still be effective—especially for high-value carts you’ll really want to nab.
4. Loyalty programs and gamification
Stages: fulfillment, loyalty
Customer loyalty programs are important because repeat customers are worth more than one-time customers. By offering memberships, points-based rewards, or VIP experiences, you can turn one-time buyers into lifelong advocates.
There are 5 main types of loyalty programs you can try:
Customers accumulate points from purchases and redeem those points for discounts, freebies, and cash-backs.
Customers access different levels of benefits based on behavior like purchase volume or order history.
Customers pay to receive premium benefits for their brand loyalty.
Companies within complementary industries that are not competitors work together to create a loyalty program.
Brands incentivize actions by turning them into small games or competitions, then awarding benefits upon successful completion. To be successful, gamified loyalty programs need to be, well, fun—just like any other game.
Athleisure and lingerie brand LIVELY offers a tiered loyalty program that rewards customers with points based on purchases. The system is straightforward and transparent about how many points you need to earn to get a certain amount off your next purchase.
5. Omnichannel personalization
Stages: consideration, conversion, fulfillment, and loyalty
People interact with brands across multiple channels—your website, social media, email, and physical stores. Omnichannel marketing is the practice of delivering a consistent, personalized experience across all these touchpoints to build trust and loyalty.
Personalized omnichannel marketing requires a centralized customer profile that calibrates a better customer experience across whatever marketing and sales channels the customer chooses.
This customer profile is what makes it possible for someone to click on an Instagram ad, place an item in their cart, abandon that cart, and then complete a purchase after getting an email with a discount code for the product they abandoned.
How to start building strong customer relationships with B2C marketing
Your B2C marketing promotion channels are only effective if you’re using them to build strong, empathetic relationships with your audience.
If you’re wondering how to begin connecting more deeply with your customers, here are 3 great places to start:
1. Learn from success stories
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The benefit to facing a lot of competition is that you’re also in a great position to learn from brands in your niche—then spot how you can do better.
Take inspiration from streetwear brand Jordan Craig, for example, which recently grew email revenue 54% YoY. The brand was able to achieve this growth in part by sending messages to customers based on their AI-generated predicted date of next order—data brands couldn’t conceive of having just a short time ago.
2. Personalize your messages with data
Digital lives are noisy ones—and people only click on what’s relevant to them at that moment. This is why personalization is no longer a nice-to-have, and it’s no longer just a first name in an email.
But before you can move toward Amazon-level personalization, you need the audience data to inform it—and you need it all in one place. Invest in a B2C-oriented marketing automation platform that can:
- Generate behavioral data from your online channels.
- Segment your audience based on that behavior.
- Send personalized messages that reflect how someone has actually interacted with your brand.
When travel brand July started sending a targeted email promoting a new product color to customers within a 20-kilometre radius of their retail locations in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, it contributed to 52% YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue.
3. Lead with empathetic communication
Customers remember brands that treat them like people, not transactions. The great news is that when you have data that can help you get to know members of your audience, you’re in a great position to send messages that lead with empathy.
There are many ways to infuse empathy into your messages, but every one of them starts with a basic principle: that the needs of your audience come before the interests of your brand. Some would even say they’re one and the same.
Take a look at this holiday message from Culture Kings as an example—it’s all about their audience. The brand thanks their community for a great year, then consolidates their Boxing Day sale links in one convenient place.
Next steps: sourcing a B2C-specific tech stack
The reality is, many of the tools B2C marketers rely on today—like CRMs designed for B2B marketing—can’t deliver the personalized shopping experience consumers expect. Platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce, while powerful, often lack the consumer-first features needed to address the fast-paced, emotionally driven nature of B2C interactions.
This is where Klaviyo shines. Built exclusively for B2C businesses, Klaviyo combines robust data integration, real-time segmentation, and personalized communication tools to create seamless, emotionally resonant experiences.
Whether you’re launching an SMS campaign or analyzing customer behavior, Klaviyo empowers marketers to deliver what today’s consumers crave: relevance and authenticity.
Ready to transform your B2C marketing strategy? Discover how Klaviyo can help you deliver meaningful experiences that turn audiences into advocates.
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