What is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a coordinated, strategic effort to promote a product or service through a variety of channels such as social media, email, and SMS. With the thoughtful use of copy, design, and audience segmentation, marketing campaigns fulfill their goals when they meet or exceed their revenue and engagement targets.

Marketing campaigns that meet today’s consumer expectations are omnichannel, meaning they guide people through their customer journey with a brand from end to end. Now, brands need to be everywhere their audiences are—and marketing campaigns that consistently address needs and desires across channels can help brands fulfill that expectation.

The benefits of running marketing campaigns

When you craft and implement a high-quality marketing campaign, here are some of the outcomes you can expect.

Accelerated revenue growth

Well-executed marketing campaigns can boost sales by showcasing your most valuable products and services at optimal moments. They generate excitement around new product launches and create urgency through limited-time offers.

When paired with automated flows—such as abandoned cart emails or post-purchase messages—campaigns become powerful revenue accelerators that can help you meet or exceed your sales targets. Campaigns can also speed up time to purchase by nudging people who were thinking about buying toward a sale.

More revenue from seasonal momentum

According to McKinsey, 40% of leading ecommerce brands generate more than 10% of their annual ecommerce revenues from shopping events like Black Friday Cyber Monday.

Since campaigns are time-bound, they’re perfect for riding the momentum of consumer excitement around specific seasons, holidays, or events. Building time-sensitive campaigns can deliver exactly what customers need right when they’re most receptive to purchasing.

Campaigns can also be a way to discount strategically rather than throughout the year, which can help generate a steady and predictable flow of revenue.

Increased customer retention

Data-driven campaigns can also have a direct impact on customer retention and lifetime value (LTV). By analyzing purchase histories and preferences, brands can create targeted campaigns—which include content and product recommendations tailored to customers—to drive repeat purchases and higher average order value (AOV).

Similarly, strategic win-back campaigns with personalized incentives can re-engage inactive customers and recoup revenue that would have otherwise been lost. By understanding exactly what your customers need when they need it, you can keep them coming back while increasing their AOV and purchase frequency.

6 common channels for B2C marketing campaigns

1. Email

As an owned channel, email marketing is one of your best direct lines to your audience—and all the data it generates is yours. While social media certainly has its place in a smart omnichannel strategy, it’ll always generate third-party data, which can lead to lower engagement and revenue per recipient (RPR) rates than you might like.

Email marketing, on the other hand, generates $36 for every $1 spend on it, according to Litmus. And according to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, the top 10% of industry-leading email campaigns drive 9x more RPR than average brands—meaning it’s a channel worth investing in.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a fitness retailer preparing to launch a summer campaign. You might segment customers who made a purchase in the last year and send them emails featuring new seasonal arrivals that are personalized to their past purchases.

Now, let’s take it a step further. Let’s say the customer opened that email, but they didn’t take any further action. If the customer opted in to receive texts, you could follow up with an SMS-only offer of 15% off to sweeten the deal. You could also retarget those same customers with social media ads that feature a similar offer.

Email is a critical anchor channel for any omnichannel campaign. It provides a powerful entry point for personalized communication, while also working in tandem with other channels.

2. SMS

SMS marketing involves sending promotional text messages to people who have opted in to receive them. While people tend to be more selective about who they share their phone number with, getting their digits pays off. According to Klaviyo’s latest SMS marketing benchmarks, on average, SMS marketing returns even higher RPR than email (though the top 10% benchmarks show that high-performing SMS campaigns yield slightly less RPR than email).

SMS also feels more personal to many customers, which increases the chances of them engaging in meaningful ways. According to Klaviyo’s 2024 SMS consumer trends report, 65% of people who made an SMS purchase in the last year said it was something they were planning to buy in the near future or in a few months—and they ended up buying the item earlier than they planned to because of a promotional text message.

SMS works best as a channel when there are solid email campaigns to complement it. Check out our step-by-step guide to integrating email with SMS for tips on exactly how to do that.

3. Mobile push

According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, around 1 in 5 consumers primarily uses brand mobile apps to shop with B2C brands. This makes sense: when you meet customers where they are, there’s far less friction between them and a purchase decision.

That’s why push notifications are so important for meeting rising consumer expectations. They’re a great way to create genuine urgency around time-sensitive offers and exclusive product launches. And when you coordinate your mobile app marketing strategy with your email and SMS efforts, they create powerful multi-channel moments that drive engagement.

Specifically, you can use mobile push notifications to:

Re-engage dormant customers by giving them a compelling reason to open your app again (such as a limited time offer).
Give early access to a new product or sale to your most loyal app users.
Respond in real time to customer behavior (for example, by sending someone a notification shortly after they abandon their cart).

While push notifications are similar to SMS in that they’re both short messages that carry some urgency, don’t use them identically. Whereas SMS campaigns excel at promoting time-bound purchase decisions, push notifications are most effective when they’re promoting offers that are directly related to user actions within your app.

4. In-app messaging

In-app messaging refers to messages displayed to mobile app users while they’re actively using an app (as opposed to mobile push notifications, which are delivered when someone isn’t using an app).

In-app messages are a valuable channel for your marketing campaigns because they can add to or reinforce the messages your customers have encountered via email or SMS. The main benefit of this channel is that it can nudge people toward a purchase when they’re in the final stages of consideration.

For instance, let’s say you run a spa and a returning customer is looking through your brand app for a product or service. You might automatically send them a message that says, “Refer a friend to this spa and get 10% off your next treatment.” This is a great way to nudge customers to interact with the app through contextually relevant announcements and drive them to book their appointment.

5. In-store

The physical retail environment creates powerful sensory connections that add another dimension to your marketing campaigns. In-store campaigns often involve window displays, signage, and employees verbally promoting discounts. These experiences often work best when they’re tightly integrated with campaign elements on other channels.

For example, an email or SMS with an exclusive discount code may prompt a customer to come to a brick-and-mortar location where they can see and feel products with their own two hands.

6. Social media

Social media is great for reaching a broad set of people who may not be aware of your brand through interest-based targeting and lookalike audiences. It’s also a great channel for showcasing user-generated content from customers using (and loving) your products. This can help build trust through social proof, all while increasing brand awareness.

Your social media strategy may include publishing organic posts, paid ads, or a combination of both to promote a specific product, collection, or offer. Social media ads are measured by return on ad spend (ROAS), which is a clear metric that can direct audience targeting, ad creative, and offers.

Multi-channel vs. omnichannel marketing: why connected channels matter

When the customer experience across channels is inconsistent, it causes friction. In fact, inconsistent pricing and promotions across channels is the No. 1 frustration customers have when shopping with a brand in multiple places, according to our future of consumer marketing report.

But not all campaigns using more than one channel are created equal. A multi-channel approach to marketing campaigns, for example, means you’re using multiple channels: email with SMS, perhaps, or SMS with mobile push.

An omnichannel approach, by contrast, uses all the channels at your disposal. Think of omnichannel as real-time orchestration across digital and in-store marketing, customer service, and commerce channels. This is a win-win: customers can purchase through every channel, they enjoy an integrated customer experience, and your brand knows exactly which behaviors and preferences drive the most purchases.

Types of marketing campaigns

A new product launch. An annual sitewide sale. National Spaghetti Day. There are infinite reasons you can launch marketing campaigns.

Campaigns are most commonly built around specific products, brand announcements, or exclusive offers. You can also plan campaigns around themed days that are relevant to your brand.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a list of types of campaigns you can build for your brand.

Product promotions

New product launch
Bestselling product feature
Competitor product comparison
Reasons to buy
Curated collection
Seasonal feature

Business updates

Behind the scenes
Educational content
Social proof (reviews and customer stories)
Important business update
Exciting announcement or big news

Exclusive offers

VIP discount
Deal of the month
Targeted discount
Replenishment promotion
Flash sale
Sitewide sale
New item added to clearance

5 steps for setting up a successful marketing campaign

There’s no one right way to set up a successful marketing campaign, but here are a few steps to get you started on the right track.

1. Define a clear, measurable goal

The first step in building a marketing campaign is to specify the outcome you’d like to achieve.

Common overarching marketing goals include generating revenue, building brand awareness, and engaging your audience—although you’ll want to get even more specific than this so that you can measure success.

A good rule of thumb is to make sure your goal is a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

For example, your goal might be to generate $20,000 in sales within 24 hours of an SMS send, or achieve a 5% click rate on your email campaign within 3 days.

2. Create your audience segments

Campaigns are most effective when they target a specific segment of your customer base. To start to define your ideal segments, it’s a good idea to perform customer data analysis to find opportunities to deliver a compelling offer to a group that shares interests, buying behaviors, or past website interactions.

For example, you might send a win-back campaign to people who haven’t made a purchase in a year. Or you may reach out to customers who bought a specific product for a cross-sell campaign about a complementary product.

After you’ve decided on the segment you’d like to reach, think about what message will resonate most with this group.

3. Decide on your timeline, budget, and channels

Next, it’s time to decide on your launch date and create a workback schedule to make sure all deliverables will be ready in time.

Be sure to define a clear scope of work and note all the resources—including time, money, and effort—you pour into the campaign. This will become important when you’re calculating your return on investment (ROI) later.

When determining the optimal channel mix, there are a few factors to take into consideration:

Campaign goals
Channel alignment with those goals
Budget per channel
Historical channel engagement
Campaign urgency and timeline

If you need a starting point, consider prioritizing channels that already have strong engagement, then strategically test additional channels to determine where you may want to expand your reach.

4. Build your campaign and creative—then launch

Now it’s time to bring your messages to life with the right graphics and words to make your offer undeniably enticing to your audience. Think back to the segment you defined previously, and make sure that all copy and design are tailored to this audience.

For example, let’s say you’re a luxury skincare brand crafting a campaign for a segment of high-value customers approaching their reorder window. You might use sophisticated imagery, personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases, and elevated language to communicate the exclusivity of the offer.

If you don’t have a large team of designers and copywriters, leveraging templates can be an excellent way to get something attractive out the door quickly before it’s time to launch.

5. Measure your campaign

Once your campaign has been live for a designated period of time, look at your analytics dashboards to see how the campaign has performed against the specific goals you set in the first step.

Consider the big picture, like the total ROI for the whole marketing campaign. But then drill down further to understand:

Attribution by channel
Performance metrics by individual message
Benchmarks compared to your industry peers

Regardless of your outcomes, document your learnings so you can get smarter over time.

Do you have the right CRM to run a successful marketing campaign?

It’s hard to build successful campaigns without the right tools and analytics in place. As the only CRM built for B2C, Klaviyo is an ideal platform for creating marketing campaigns that engage your customers.

With marketing, service, and analytics all in one suite of tools, Klaviyo B2C CRM can help you pull off omnichannel marketing campaigns—all from one place.

If you’re looking to make better use of your customer data to build better omnichannel marketing campaigns, sign up today.