As you surely know in B2C marketing, personalization is the key to a successful customer relationship! Brands have no choice but to adapt and offer a unique, smooth but above all relevant experience to consumers who are constantly being approached.
The best tool for personalizing your communications is nothing other than a marketing automation software. With it, you can automate your marketing processes at scale while optimizing your marketing teams’ time.
Many people think these scenarios are reserved for e-commerce sites. But their implementation is not limited to selling your products. You can apply them to drive-to-store or omnichannel retention strategies, right up to tailoring your campaigns based on your company’s objectives.
Here are 5 examples of marketing workflows to set up to capture, engage, and retain your leads, whatever your industry. ?
Why use marketing automation in B2C?
The event-driven scenario to capitalize on key moments
A scenario dedicated to the abandoned cart
Use the data you already have to create a retargeting scenario
Re-engage your inactive contacts with this workflow
Turn your customers into ambassadors with the retention scenario
Why use marketing automation in B2C?
With marketing automation, you can turn repetitive, time-consuming tasks into automated scenarios triggered based on your contacts’ behavior or data. The goal: save valuable time, but also deliver more relevant and personalized communication.
In a B2C context, marketing automation is a real lever for targeting the right people, at the right time, with the right message. By intelligently leveraging your customer data (age, location, purchase history, behavior, etc.), you can maintain a high-quality customer relationship—more human and more engaging.
The benefits of marketing automation in B2C are real. You optimize the profitability of your marketing campaigns, but also.
You improve your customer experience by providing personalized answers tailored to each stage of the journey (your conversion rate will thank you for this offering). And finally, you increase your chances of retaining customers in the long term by creating an ongoing relationship.
The event-driven scenario to capitalize on key moments
Create engagement and purchases?
Events are excellent levers for building a connection with your contacts. This is not only about promotional campaigns around seasonal occasions, but about key moments, personalized to the customer or your brand.
You can have, for example, these events:
- The customer’s birthday
- The brand’s anniversary
- A seasonal or calendar event (back to school, Black Friday…)
- The subscription anniversary
?Webmecanik tip: request useful information right at the beginning of the customer journey (date of birth, gender, preferences), but in a natural way! You can do this via a progressive form, a pop-in, or when signing up for a newsletter. These data will enrich your CRM and allow you to trigger personalized emails.
Example: a 50-year-old person who has provided their date of birth can receive, a few days before their birthday, an offer on an anti-age range, with a personalized touch. This scenario creates a wow effect and boosts your open and click-through rates, especially if you offer an offer related to their favorite products.
A scenario dedicated to the abandoned cart
Who has never created a cart without ever checking out? Many companies face this issue, and it represents a major challenge for e-commerce. According to FEVAD, we estimate that nearly 70% of carts are never finalized. And yet, these users had clearly shown an intention to purchase. So how can you limit cart abandonment? Let’s start by identifying what the possible reasons are:
- Prices that are too high
- Shipping fees are a barrier
- The customer wants to compare with other websites
- The site requires creating an account
- The contact doesn’t (yet) trust you
Once you’ve identified what the barrier is in your case, it’s time to solve the problem. A customer may have told themselves they’ll purchase later—this is the best time to activate your cart recovery scenario. The goal here is to automatically re-engage someone who abandoned their cart, while highlighting the resolved pains. It’s also entirely possible to propose other services with additional benefits.
Be careful not to lose your contacts; this campaign must be well thought out. You need to remove your contacts’ barriers and help them take action—not drive them away. ?
Workflow example:
- Email 1 – Day +1: product reminder with visual + benefits + social proof
- Email 2 – Day +3: purchase incentive with an exclusive benefit (discount, free delivery)
What’s the benefit of this scenario? You improve your conversion rate without being intrusive. The extra advantage is that it easily fits into an email marketing strategy.
Use the data you already have to create a retargeting scenario
Target contacts based on their behavioral data
One of the strengths of marketing automation is the detection of weak signals. A user might view a product page multiple times, download a guide, or watch a video… without going as far as purchasing. Pretty frustrating, right ?!
This scenario is precisely designed to turn this simple interest into a purchase intention by triggering a targeted campaign at the right moment. Thanks to the scoring feature (available in your marketing automation software) and a good CRM, you can refine your scenarios and increase the ROI of your retargeting campaigns. ?
Scenario example
A contact identified (via tracking or email) shows interest in a specific category, such as treadmills. As soon as a certain level of engagement is reached, a scenario automatically activates with targeted content. This might include model comparisons, customer reviews, or even a promotional offer along with a purchase guide.
The objective here is to turn that interest into a purchase action through personalized follow-up.
Re-engage your inactive contacts with this workflow
Over time, part of your contacts becomes inactive: they no longer read your emails, no longer purchase, or simply stop interacting with you. That’s normal—sometimes we may no longer be interested in a product or a brand.
To fix this, you need to set up a re-engagement workflow. This automated scenario allows you to either reactivate an inactive lead or identify the contacts to remove to clean up your database. ? And to go further, you can re-qualify the interested leads with a new approach to increase your chances of conversion.
Steps to set up this scenario:
- First, segment your inactive contacts in your database based on inactivity criteria (no email opens, no purchases in 6 months, etc.). Then, offer a specific piece of content or an offer to re-engage them
- You can ask them, in order to get feedback from them by asking why they are no longer responding—you can do this via a questionnaire or a phone call.
- Finally, if you have no signals, unsubscribe them to improve the health of your database and boost the performance of your campaigns.
Keep in mind that a dissatisfied customer rarely makes themselves known. It’s often inactivity that signals it. You can think of this scenario as a tool to assess the quality of your contacts. ?
Turn your customers into ambassadors with the retention scenario
A loyal customer is up to 5 times less expensive to convert than a new customer. This concept is often underestimated, even though it’s a real profitability lever. In addition to purchasing repeatedly, a loyal customer tends to increase their average cart size but above all recommends your brand to their community.
So you need to maintain a connection with your customers so they become ambassadors. But how does a marketing automation scenario come into play here? And well—thanks to the workflow, you can set up a retention journey that adapts to customers’ behaviors and preferences. You can carry out post-purchase follow-ups, send dedicated offers only to your loyal customers, set up a loyalty or ambassador program.
With the retention scenario, you save time, but you also strengthen the engagement of your loyal customers.
Actions to turn your customers into ambassadors:
The first step is to send them an email confirming their purchase—use this to reassure them about the product and your brand. You can thank them, give them advice related to their product or service, or offer complementary products (up-selling or cross-selling campaigns). In a second step, set up private or exclusive sales reserved only for your loyal customers. Many options are available to you—you just need to tailor them to your line of business and your target audiences, of course. ?
Conclusion
As you’ve understood, marketing automation in B2C is not limited to a few automatically sent emails. It’s a complete strategy centered on sending personalized messages based on each customer or prospect’s behavior, data, and expectations.
Setting up automation scenarios is good! Making them relevant is even better! The goal is to provide your contacts with a smooth, effective, and consistent experience at every stage of their journey. From discovery to purchase, follow-up, and retention—no matter the lead’s status—down to loyal customers.
The workflow examples shared here show how much a well-structured campaign can turn a simple email into an action, a click, a conversion, a reactivation… or even a recommendation. The goal is to maximize the performance of your campaigns while optimizing your customer relationship.
By using the right marketing automation or CRM tools, your company can easily automate email sending, enrich its customer data, segment your leads, personalize your content, and above all increase its chances of boosting conversion rates. Each message contributes to the overall success of your B2C strategy.
