Email marketing guide for B2C startups and founders in 2025

Remember, email marketing has a 36:1 ROI. It’s not only high-yield, it’s also low-cost.

The majority of the budget you have to allocate to email marketing is a monthly subscription to an email marketing platform. There typically aren’t additional costs to deal with, and every email you send is an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with current and potential customers.

With email, you’re not at the whim of an algorithm that prioritizes memes and trendy dances like on social media. You have a direct line to your customers, which is actually how most consumers prefer to engage with their favorite brands. 

According to our future of consumer marketing report research, 35% of Gen Z, 42% of millennials, and 42% of Gen X prefer engaging with retail or ecommerce brands by subscribing to their email newsletter.

Email’s most powerful benefit is its ability to personalize at scale, and have a big impact without a ton of manual work thanks to marketing automation. According to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, the average revenue per recipient (RPR) for automated email flows is $1.68. For the top 10% of brands, it’s a whopping $16.15.

PERL Cosmetics, a shop that sells clay face masks customized to your skin type, boosted their monthly revenue from email 3x with Klaviyo, using email as a way to connect with shoppers and retain customer loyalty. “I’m excited to expand out Klaviyo campaigns and introduce more flows so we can automate as much of the process as possible, without losing the personal touch,” says Isobel Perl, founder of PERL Cosmetics.

Your days working at a startup are busy enough. The last thing you want to do is hop from one platform to the next, only to have to stitch together the data from each one to paint a vague picture of what’s going on with your business and customers. 

With Klaviyo, your business will have a single source of truth. With email, SMS, forms, analytics, and customer service all under one roof, you’ll have a crystal clear view of the inner workings of your startup. You’ll also have over 350 integrations at your disposal to keep even more of your data housed in one place.  

Whether you choose Klaviyo or a different email marketing platform, the most important thing you need to consider as a startup is whether it can scale with you. Most email marketing platforms offer a free starter tier, but if your subscriber list grows beyond the cap, you send more emails than the maximum, and you want more sophisticated segmentation and automation features, then it’s time to upgrade to the next tier.

The most effective way to build an email list is by adding sign-up forms to your website that dangle offers. Exclusive discounts are the biggest reason consumers sign up for ongoing communications from B2C brands, according to our future of consumer marketing report.

But you can also drive sign-ups with educational resources, digital tools, and early access to events or new products. The key is to craft offers that provide solutions to the challenges that your product helps solve.

Here are a few popular email sign-up incentives for consumer brands:

• Discounts

• Free shipping

• Early access to new products

• Educational materials

• Free consultations

Timing and placement are key for your sign-up forms. Consider timing your forms for when users meaningfully engage with your website, scroll through to a certain depth, or show exit intent, instead of right when they land on your homepage.

You can also time sign-up forms that offer updates on personalized deals and discounts on your purchase confirmation pages. Place your embedded forms, meanwhile, in your headers and footers to ensure they’re non-intrustive and easy to fill out.

Brands growing the fastest on Klaviyo see at least a 2.75% conversion rate on their sign-up forms, so consider setting your sights on that number and A/B testing and targeting your forms to get to it.

Along with sign-up forms, contests, giveaways, and a simple “check here to receive marketing communications” box at check-out are simple ways to bring more folks into your email database.

Another way to build your list is to share your startup’s journey on social media. The consensus after surveying 8,000+ consumers for our future of consumer marketing report is that organic social media is the top discovery channel for new retail and ecommerce brands (anyone else starting to use TikTok more than Google?), so consider posting images, memes, and videos about the progress of your startup. 

If your budget permits, run a paid social ad that incentivizes an email list sign-up with a discount code. This is a great option if you’re launching a new product and want to include paid social as part of your go-to-market strategy. You’ll still generate some revenue from the paid ad campaign, but you’ll also see the long-term benefits of expanding your owned channels.

Welcome sequences introduce your brand and mission to new subscribers in the hopes that they convert to new customers. 

After Fishwife appeared on Shark Tank, they knew they had to capitalize on the influx of new email subscribers who had just signed up for their list. They decided to revamp their welcome email flow with a message from their founder, some baseline information about their product, and a welcome discount. All of the above contributed to 35% YoY growth in revenue from flows. 

Promotional emails can spotlight a holiday sale, a new product, or a limited-time offer. Try to send at least one promotional campaign per week. 

Depending on your experience with email segmentation, you can divvy up your list based on basic segmentation criteria like purchase behavior, engagement levels, and geographic location, or more advanced segmentation criteria like interests or customer lifecycle stage. 

As a startup, your most influential marketer is your founder. They have the most clout in your industry, the largest network, and, most importantly, the deepest personal connection to your brand’s mission. 

A behind-the-scenes newsletter where your founder maps out the journey of their new company is something almost every one of your subscribers can get behind. Your founder is the best person to tell this story, and your subscribers can get invested in their journey because they’re already interested in the product.

Other premises for your behind-the-scenes newsletter include investor updates or an inside look into the company, like Fishwife does below. With a highly visual and colorful email that takes their subscribers through each step of their product development process and even lets them participate in their research and development process, the brand shows subscribers how the sausage (or tuna) gets made—and makes them feel like company insiders.

Transactional emails are order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and account notifications like order refunds, subscription confirmations, and customer service replies. Your customers expect to receive them, so automatically triggering them after they take a relevant action is a great way to build trust in your brand. 

To build even more trust in your brand with transactional emails, consider offering any clarifying information about using your product if it’s someone’s first time buying it. You can also add cross-sell and up-sell product recommendations based on a customer’s recent and repeat purchases.

Freshly, a small business that sells 99% natural cosmetics, created a transactional flow that provides tips based on the specific products someone purchased. The flow was part of a larger post-purchase flow strategy that improved placed order rates by 153% and revenue by 136%

Abandoned cart and abandoned browse emails can put up some great numbers when it comes to RPR. According to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, the average RPR for abandoned cart flows is $3.07 and the average RPR for abandoned browse flows is $0.95.

With browse abandonment flows, you want to nudge anyone who views a product but doesn’t add it to their cart or start the check-out process within a set time frame, such as 2–3 hours after their visit. You also want to avoid sending these emails to anyone who just ordered one of your products or received an abandoned cart email.  

When jewelry brand Maison Miru started including an offer for a free gift in their browse abandonment flow, the simple step generated a 2% revenue boost. The founders expect the combination of their abandoned cart and abandoned check-out flows to increase annual revenue by 4%.

Another creative way to approach an abandoned cart flow is to ask customers why they didn’t want to buy the item they left in their cart. Then, you can gift anyone who responds a personalized coupon. Manly Bands, a wedding band shop, followed this exact strategy and produced a 4.8x higher placed order rate than the median for the rest of their peer group.

Educational content newsletters can pull in subscribers and website traffic, but they have to be segmented properly. When Nuun, a zero-sugar hydration tablet and drink mix company, started segmenting their content newsletters by interest (customers who buy endurance products only receive endurance-related content, for example), it helped improve their website traffic from email 950% YoY.

Nuun’s product emails, like this one, incorporate education by guiding their customers on springtime activities that are well suited to their hydration supplements.

Going from manual marketing to fully automated flows is the gold standard in email marketing, but it requires a very iterative process.

Make sure to build a framework that allows you to test and optimize the different types of automations you build. Consider defining SMART goals, implementing A/B testing, and monitoring performance metrics to optimize your email automation strategy.

Your email automations should be triggered by actions your subscribers take and should aim to accomplish a business goal. In addition to the baseline automated email flows we discussed above, consider whether launching the following automations makes sense for your startup:

• Win-back

• Replenishment reminders

• Product review request

• Post-purchase up- and cross-sell emails

• Instructional emails

• Back-in-stock notifications

• VIP customer exclusive emails

• Birthday or anniversary emails

PERL Cosmetics automatically sends emails that cross-sell complementary products, like cleaning pads, and reminds subscribers when products have been restocked, like in the email below.

Customer data is your best friend when it comes to segmentation and personalization. Analyzing website activity, purchase behavior, and interactions with customer service can tell you who each of your customers really is and allow you to segment them more precisely. 

As you’re building out your segmentation strategy, make sure to avoid the most common email marketing segmentation mistakes:

• Oversegmenting

• Undersegmenting

• Ignoring key exclusion groups

• Not using zero-party data

• Sending to recent purchasers

With email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, you can use AI to:

• Generate email designs, subject lines, and copy, as well as SMS campaigns and responses.

• Build automated flows, and use Segments AI for more targeted messages based on a description.

• Perform ongoing A/B tests and automatically send out the best-performing version of your campaigns at the best possible time.

• Personalize product recommendations based on a subscriber’s website activity and past buying behavior to drive repeat purchases and boost customer lifetime value.

• Use predictive analytics to forecast product interest, next order date, best cross-sell date, customer lifetime value, and churn risk.

• Automatically warm up your IP by gradually ramping up your send volume and pausing any sends to unengaged subscribers.

Having a single source of truth gives you a unified view of all your customers, so consider syncing your email marketing with your paid advertising, social media marketing, and customer service marketing strategies. 

By consolidating their email marketing, reviews, customer service, and data storage tools into Klaviyo, Daily Harvest, a healthy meal and snack company, slashed their tech stack costs by 18%. 

It’s critical that your email marketing platform has templates that you can build off of. Otherwise, you have to make them from scratch. In the Klaviyo template library, there are over 160 options for welcome series, abandoned cart, product launch, and newsletter emails—and more.

You could craft an email that could go into the email marketing hall of fame, but if it doesn’t land in your customers’ inboxes, then all that email greatness will go to waste. 

Make sure you follow deliverability best practices:

• Only collect email addresses with explicit consent from subscribers. Never purchase an email list.

• Clean your list frequently.

• Warm up your IP address by gradually ramping up your send volume over time. 

• Follow the legal requirements that are stipulated in the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR, and review any region-specific considerations. 

We recommend sending an email campaign at least once per week. If you need a month-to-month guide to reach your customers more effectively and make the biggest impact with your promotions, check out our marketing campaign calendar.

Finding the right cadence and timing for your audience all comes down to testing, testing, and more testing. Check out these A/B testing best practices to optimize your send frequency and send times.

Mobile-first designs are a must in today’s email marketing world. Most people check their emails on their phones more than any other device and are more comfortable shopping on them than ever. Be sure that your email marketing platform can create responsive emails that are compatible with every mobile device available.

There are countless copywriting tips on the internet to craft compelling subject lines and email copy, but arguably the most important tip is to hone your brand’s voice and stick to it with everything you write—email copy, social media copy, and website copy. A bold, unique voice will not only stand out to your audience, it will also keep them reading.

To really gauge the performance of your startup’s email marketing program, consider tracking RPR, conversion rates, and list growth rate. If you need to assign a concrete number to your email marketing program’s ROI, check out our ROI calculator.

You don’t want to shoot for the stars when landing on the moon is already above industry standard. Set realistic goals against benchmark data, like Klaviyo’s email marketing benchmarks.

Just like you need a unified view of your customers, you need a unified view of your analytics. Integrating your email marketing data into your analytics stack will allow you to grasp the entire customer journey—from first click to last purchase.