B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies consist of many micro-processes. You need to generate personalized messages, send them through the right channel, track win rates, and complete dozens of other actions. Only with combined efforts you will be able to engage customers and make them stay with you forever.

Although this may be less evident, address validation is a part of most digital marketing and sales enablement programs. It’s essential to verify customers’ identity, increase communications accuracy, and optimize sales cycles.

Address validation helps you automate B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies and boosts their effectiveness. How exactly?

We’ll explain this now. Read on to learn about when to use address validation in B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies.

• What is eCommerce marketing? Difference between B2C and B2B
• The role of address validation for B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies
• Sales enablement with Inkit’s address validation

What Is eCommerce Marketing? Difference Between B2C and B2B

eCommerce marketing is a combination of promotional techniques used to drive traffic to a specific online store, engage leads, convert them into paying customers, and retain. Even though the focus is on online marketing channels, including a website, digital ads, and social media, some eCommerce brands also effectively advertise offline. Thus, eCommerce marketing is a holistic approach that combines different marketing strategies that significantly vary based on a specific eCommerce business’s needs.

B2C vs. B2B

B2C and B2B eCommerce companies share lots of shared features. Both target their customers online, offer products or services, and promote themselves through the same channels. Still, the customer persona in B2C and B2B sales organizations differ. As a result, the marketing approach also requires customization.

What is eCommerce marketing in B2C

B2C or business-to-customer marketing is the classic of eCommerce businesses. These are promotional campaigns of regular online stores, like Amazon, Asos, or Alibaba, that sell products directly to customers. These companies publish products on their website pages and allow buyers to purchase as many items as they want. If you have ever bought something like a new smartphone or a T-shirt online, you’ve used the services of a B2C brand.

What is eCommerce marketing in B2B

B2B or business-to-business campaigns are launched to connect two companies. The typical case is when a wholesaler tries to engage retailers that could sell its product. This model is used by large manufacturers that don’t want to focus on retail sales management.

The Role of Address Validation in B2C and B2B eCommerce Marketing Strategies

To be effective with their strategies, marketing and sales reps need reliable data. Thus, they collect personal, and contact information, preferences, demographic data, and other details to study the customer persona and contact leads.

Address information is one of the crucial data sources. Companies have to request it from prospects and customers, standardize, and validate to:

• Verify the identity of a customer before providing them access to the services. This will increase security and allow you to learn more about your leads.
• Simplify customer onboarding. Address validation is necessary for quick and smooth customer onboarding. Inkit provides fully automated address verification and address autocomplete that enables leads to share their data and go to the next step in several seconds. This boosts customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
• Rely on address information for customer data enrichment. Address data is helpful to receive additional demographic information about the target audience and subsequently use it to customize marketing campaigns.
• Send accurate marketing messages. B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies are based on constant communication. Some of these messages you will need to send offline to physical addresses. Address validation allows you to make sure invoices, marketing direct mail, and other notices always reach the destination.

Note that without address validation, the quality of address data will suffer. You won’t be able to properly verify customers’ identity, study your target audience, and deliver them marketing communications. This harms the overall customer experience and makes the implemented sales enablement best practices less effective.

Find practical examples on how to use address validation in B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies below.

B2C eCommerce marketing techniques that require address validation

#1. Personalized digital ads in search engines and social media

Before displaying ads to customers, you should know what they are likely to click. The tastes vary among target audiences depending on age, social status, residence, and other factors. Reliable address data can help you dig a little deeper and find the details you wouldn’t learn otherwise.

When address verification happens, you can be sure that customers are who they are. You can check their location to understand demographics, what services and goods are available nearby, and what product is more likely to attract attention. Since B2C eCommerce companies usually offer a bunch of products, sales and marketing must be personalized. This will speed up sales cycles and help your sales enablement team achieve better results.

#2. One-click purchase

The speed of services is a valid reason to choose one store over another. In B2C, where customers make sporadic decisions to buy, they can change their mind in a second. When you have validated address data stored in the system, you don’t need to request contact details. The purchase process can happen in several clicks and takes minimum time.

This considerably improves customer experience and helps you promote your brand. Large retail marketplaces can use the idea of one-click purchase to advertise their services and engage more customers.

#3. Direct mail to manage abandoned carts

Cart abandonment is a big problem in the B2C business. In March 2020, customers abandoned 88% of online shopping orders. In some industries, cart abandonment rate was as high as 96%.

Address validation and direct mail can increase the number of successful sales by remarketing customers. In most cases, online stores use sales enablement tools to remarket leads through online channels. Marketers and sales reps focus on digital ads with abandoned products or automatically send reminder emails that rarely work. Direct mail is an alternative channel of communication with much higher response rates than digital channels. It enables you to reach customers that ignore online communications and make them reevaluate the decision to refuse from purchase.

Check out Inkit’s case study on a B2C customer engagement campaign here.

B2B eCommerce marketing strategies based on address validation

#1. Cross-channel customer engagement campaigns

B2B buyers take more time to think about their purchase decisions than B2C leads. Therefore, to promote your eCommerce business, you will need to remind them about your brand through multiple online and offline channels. Reliable mentions contribute to your brand reputation and increase customer engagement success.

Address validation is indispensable to implement cross-channel B2B eCommerce marketing strategies. You will need address data to target your customers offline by sending them personal invitations to offline events, catalogs, official letters, and other communications that help to close deals.

#2. Customer analysis and account-based sales enablement

Address-based market analysis in B2B is similar to customer research in B2C campaigns. After collecting contact information from prospects and validating it, you will use location data for customer analysis. This information will help you decide which accounts are more likely to convert and start targeting them. Since customer conversion in B2B requires more effort, you should narrow down the customer list to several leads.

#3. Address validation for advanced automation

Automation is impossible without standardized and validated data, including addresses. Clean database records allow B2B companies to implement any sales enablement and marketing tools. You can easily synchronize tools for social media marketing, website analysis, content management, and other promotions to launch powerful B2B eCommerce marketing strategies.

The use of advanced automation in B2B marketing speeds up sales cycles and tailors customer experience. For example, when a prospect lands on your website and shares contact information, automation tools can assist with autocomplete and automatically run validation. After this, the lead will receive personalized sales content based on their location data and other characteristics.

Automation software will also allow you to align the promotional strategies of marketing and sales teams. They will have access to the same customer data to use it for customized communications and joint sales training. Marketing and sales effort will turn into a single automated promotional strategy.

Sales Enablement with Inkit’s Address Validation

Inkit is a reach enablement platform that unites several tools for data validation and marketing. It’s a universal solution to power B2C and B2B eCommerce marketing strategies.

Just integrate it with your system to get automated address autocomplete and address validation. Inkit Verify helps customers share properly formatted data and instantly verify it to detect any invalid input. Address validation is based on official USPS databases and happens in a matter of seconds.

Later on, you can continue to use Inkit to deliver custom messages online and offline. The tool generates communications and sends them based on triggers in real-time. As soon as a customer registers on your website, they will receive a greeting email, personalized catalog, postcard, etc.

Most importantly, Inkit smoothly integrates with hundreds of third-party tools. You will instantly connect to any software you need for specific B2C or B2B eCommerce marketing strategies.

Want to optimize your eCommerce marketing with Inkit? Contact us to get the demo.