Another approach to finding new customers

If you’re a marketer, the terms B2C and B2B surely hold no mystery for you, but seeing “C2B” (consumer to business) may give you pause. The first time I encountered this term, I attempted to understand it by following the pattern of the other two acronyms. That left me wondering, What is this? Are we promoting consumers to companies? Is this a new consulting model? A colleague explained the simple concept: it’s just a catchy name for the cross-selling approach by which a company looks for business prospects within their current consumer portfolio.

There are many applications for C2B, but financial institutions are particularly successful with this approach. For those that have both consumer and commercial accounts, which are the majority of institutions, business leads can often be found in the typically more robust consumer portfolios.

Regardless of the vertical, if you sell products and solutions that serve both consumers and businesses, a C2B approach enables you to sift through your current consumer clients to find among them the subset who also own or run small businesses. Then you can market your business offerings to these warm leads — who are already familiar with your great products! This strategy can also provide a much-needed jump-start for organizations expanding from a consumer-only model to one targeting commercial clients as well.

In our experience running C2B programs with our clients, we usually see a better return on marketing spend compared to cold campaigns no matter how campaign success is measured:

• The tailored messaging and existing relationship lead to improved open and response rates and tend to produce warmer leads.
• The additional filters we apply using both first-party payment behavior data and Dun & Bradstreet proprietary elements can improve credit approval rates, improving net conversion and, down the line, booked client profitability.

In any business climate, these are benefits that are hard to dismiss, and are especially valuable in a slower COVID-19 business environment.