79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. 63% of companies, growing faster than their competitors, are marketing automation users. Companies using marketing automation generate twice as many leads as companies who use just email software.

These statistics speak for themselves. Trend is clear – more and more companies discover marketing automation potential for their business and wisely adopt it. If you don’t want to fall off the track, you should give it a try. However, before you decide on investing in marketing automation software you come to the point where you need to make some decisions on what type of marketing automation tools would fit your business best!  Which functionalities will work for you? What channels your target group use the most? But on the top of this remains the question: What type of communication strategy is the most effective for your business growth? It depends on the type of transactions you perform at your B2B or B2C commerce.

B2C in need of exclusively designed marketing automation tools

B2B businesses don’t need to focus to the same extent as B2C on building strong relations through their websites. Why? B2B connections are very often built “offline” and are meant to last for a long time. It’s simply ineffective to change the business partners often. The opposite: reliable, long lasting partnerships is what companies are looking for.

B2C business is totally a different story. Customers are chasing best (latest, cheapest) products and don’t care about spending much time on this; they simply like it. Why? Buying plays a similar role for today’s society, as hunting played for our predecessors from the stone age period – it’s a vital part of our existence. Individual customers love surfing and shooting the best pray.

What defines individual purchases? Most of the time they are immediate, impulse and illogical. Customers like these are not looking to build strong relationships with the seller. As one can imagine, this is much different from the characteristic of B2B purchases: well planned, products chosen after deep analysis and consultation from several sides. That is why when choosing marketing tools for B2C we need to think outside of the B2B box.

Customer Value Marketing –  powerful strategy for B2C business

Surprisingly, the key players within the branch of marketing automation keep offering the same products for B2C consumers as for the B2B ones.

However B2C businesses need an exclusively designed marketing approach, a strategy which would concentrate on building long lasting relationship between seller and customer, as the latter is not interested in this process itself.

A powerful strategy focused on retaining customers is Customer Value Marketing. It focuses on lead retention instead of lead generation, while aiming at building the highest value of a customer over time and in practice, on maximizing return on investment per customer profit maximization from each and every customer. The main method which enables achievement of this goal is the RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary). It takes into account not only the traditional monetary aspect of purchases, but adds to this also their recency and  frequency. This way RFM analysis provides data which makes it possible to adjust the offer to the customer’s behavior. The main outcomes of implementing the CVM approach are:

● real growth of revenue and sales by marketing operations focused on building customer value (customer expenses and profitability over time)

● revenue maximization from every captured customer

● marketing campaigns adjusted to ever-changing customer value

● distinct marketing strategies to different customer groups, based on their purchasing activity

 

To wrap-up this article let’s come back to its main question: Why you should stop using B2B marketing automation tools for your B2C business? That’s because B2C customers differ a lot from the B2B ones. Their purchases are spontaneous and in most cases, they don’t look for a long time relationship with marketer. That’s why one should put much stronger focus on lead retention when it comes to B2C customers. The answer to this need is a recently developed Customer Value Marketing strategy, aiming at creating the highest value of a customer over time through running continuous marketing automation processes. Its powerful tools such as RFM analysis makes the tough goal of lead retention attainable.

 

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