New customer acquisition brings you an opportunity to make new sales – that’s the cornerstone of a thriving and scalable business. Retention, on the other hand, is what fuels recurring business and creates loyalty that then grows into brand advocacy.
Email marketing is where these two cross. Being able to acquire 40 times more clients compared to social media and giving you the opportunity to establish regular communication with customers for loyalty purposes, this channel gives you unparalleled opportunities both in customer acquisition and retention.
However, when it comes to facilitating growth (whether for your own business or for your agency’s client), the ongoing dilemma is whether we need to focus on attracting new clients or finding ways to satisfy and keep the ones we already have. What’s the most important backbone of business growth? That’s what we’re going to figure out today.
Customer Acquisition in Email Marketing
Customer acquisition is basically the process of driving new clients for your business. While growing the customer base and securing new sales are its core goals. Acquisition is also about how people discover your brand, what reputation it has, and what makes them buy from it. Simply put, by streamlining this process, you can also enhance your brand image and customer journey, leading to greater long-term outcomes for your company.
With 4.594 million people using email in 2025, email marketing remains an important customer acquisition funnel that can let you tap into large audiences and transform interested leads into actual customers. Besides, it has been shown to offer a fairly low customer acquisition cost, compared to other channels, for example, paid ads.
There are a few tactics that can help capture leads via this channel:
- Cold emails—When approached thoughtfully, cold emails can let you connect with prospects and establish meaningful business relationships, especially in the B2B sector. This approach requires deep research and perfect alignment of your recipients to your ideal buyer profile, as well as a strong message that communicates your value point.
- Opt-in strategies—These tactics imply encouraging interested leads to opt into your mailing list to get more of the content that you deliver. It requires a solid and diversified content strategy with high-value content and clear CTAs that encourage users to subscribe.
- Lead magnets—This is a more proactive approach that implies gaining new list subscribers in exchange for a unique piece of content that they get for free, such as a white paper, cheat sheet, ebook, software, or anything else. Succeeding in this tactic requires offering your leads something they can’t find elsewhere and getting them genuinely interested through your content.
Customer Retention in Email Marketing
Unlike customer acquisition, retention doesn’t involve driving new clients but rather keeping the existing ones. It implies fostering lasting relationships for the sake of securing recurring business. It’s about loyalty and brand advocacy that can enhance the overall brand image and provide you with stable streams of recurring profit. Besides, customer retention cost tends to be significantly lower for a number of reasons. Most importantly, when you engage in it, you’re dealing with people who already know your brand, products, and service well.
That is, you don’t have to request heavily into marketing and sales to convert them. All you need to do is keep them happy through regular engagement, personalized communication, and loyalty programs.
In terms of retention, email is also an excellent channel. Unlike other channels, such as social media, where you speak to your entire audience, email allows you to facilitate a direct and personalized line of communication with every client. Via this channel, businesses can spread news and valuable content, make personalized loyalty offers, and otherwise interact with their existing buyers. In the long run, personalized campaigns can greatly boost your retention rates and reduce churn.
Email Design: Practical Tips for Both Acquisition and Retention
If you want to capture new leads while keeping your existing buyers engaged, one thing to begin with is email design. Some of the best practices to use include:
Accessibility
Striving for accessibility is pivotal for user experience as it enables you to speak to all users, regardless of their impairments. Implementing accessibility in design involves adding descriptive alt texts to images and using descriptive language in links. You should also use contrasting colors for a clear hierarchy and keep important information out of images to make sure it’s seen.
Mobile-First Approach
According to different research, around 85% of people use their mobile phones to check emails. These could be both your prospects and existing clients, meaning that keeping mobile in mind is pivotal for user experiences, no matter if you strive to retain or acquire them.
To tap into the needs of your mobile recipients, you need to take a mobile-first approach to design, which includes:
- Optimizing subject lines and preview texts to show in full on small screens.
- Using properly sized images that look good and have a full view on all devices.
- Leveraging a mobile-friendly one-column layout.
Engaging Visuals and Text-Image Balance
Media elements like images, GIFs, and videos can help you make your emails more appealing and capture recipients’ attention. They can also help improve open and click-through rates and enhance overall recipient engagement. Thus, it’s important to include high-quality visuals. However, it’s also important to keep the fine line between media elements and text so that you don’t overload your emails or shift recipients’ attention away from important information.
Visual Hierarchy
To make your messages more impactful, use design elements, such as different colors or fonts to create focus points and drive recipients’ attention to things that matter most.
Clear and Strategic CTAs
Calls to action are pivotal both for acquisition and retention as they help increase the likelihood that people perform the target actions. To make the most out of this opportunity, include clear CTAs and highlight them in your design so that they pop out of your message. Place your CTAs strategically so that recipients don’t have to scroll too much to perform an action.
Also, consider using low-commitment phrases like “Learn more” instead of high-commitment ones like “Buy now.” This way recipients will feel less pressured and will be more likely to perform your target action.
Responsive Design
Emails that use responsive coding tend to deliver better user experiences as they are generally easier to interact with. Responsive coding implements an intuitive layout, easily clickable links, large buttons that can be easily tapped, and other elements that create positive experiences.
Branding Consistency
Using branding elements (such as logos, corporate colors, etc.) in your emails helps create a consistent brand image that leads to greater recognition, credibility, and trust.
Personalization
Using personalization strategies in email marketing can help enhance ROI and make the most out of your retention and acquisition strategies. You can leverage users’ recent activity, individual recommendations, and other personalization approaches to make your messages more impactful.
Dynamic Content
In a nutshell, dynamic content is content that changes depending on who receives your email. It’s an important part of personalization that can help you deliver the best experiences possible to all users, whether they are new leads or existing buyers.
The Roles of Segmentation and Personalization in Success
After you deal with email design, another thing you should focus on is segmentation and personalization. Whether you’re wondering how to improve customer retention or how to attract new leads, segmenting your audience and personalizing the message accordingly can change everything.
Segmentation implies separating your mailing list into several groups based on certain characteristics or behaviors that are shared by people in these groups. Basically, doing so can help you refine personalization by adjusting your message to different groups.
There are a few ways to use segmentation to set up your retention and acquisition tactics for success:
- Demographics—You can segment your list using demographic data so that you can deliver more relevant messages and recommendations based on recipients’ place of residence, age, gender, etc.
- Behavioral data—You can also segment recipients based on their behaviors. For example, you can adjust your content to people who have already opened your past email and completed an action and to those who didn’t open it. You can also check website traffic and analyze user behavior on it to adopt content accordingly. For example, cart abandonment messages sent to users who didn’t proceed to payment can help stimulate their purchases.
- Life cycle—Most importantly, you should segment your list based on users’ life cycle. That is, you should tailor your message to new leads who are yet to be converted, to loyal clients, and to inactive users. This will help you gain the most out of your efforts both in retention and acquisition.
After segmenting your audience, use personalization to adjust your message to each particular group of recipients, considering their unique needs and expectations.
Automation for Maximum Email Marketing Impact
While this should probably go without saying, email marketing automation can offer you a wealth of benefits regardless of your purpose. It allows you to put your daily workflows on autopilot and, thus, engage more leads with fewer efforts on your side.
Here’s how you can make use of it:
- Automate welcome messages to instantly engage with newcomers.
- Automate follow-up and re-engagement messages to keep existing clients engaged.
- Use automatic sequences to nurture relationships with leads and convert them.
You can leverage tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and similar to create and implement automatic campaigns.
Tracking the Outcomes of Your Retention and Acquisition Efforts
While implementing effective customer acquisition and retention strategies is crucial to jump-start the process, result monitoring is important for assessing the outcomes and adjusting your tactic to obtain maximum benefits. The core metrics you want to focus on are:
- Acquisition: Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion. These three metrics will help you see how effectively you nurture leads to grow your client base.
- Retention: Customer lifetime value (CLV) and retention rate. These metrics can suggest whether you engage with your existing buyers well enough to secure recurring business.
Use analytical software to track these metrics and define the success of your efforts. Also, leverage A/B testing to test the impact of your retention and acquisition-focused emails and refine both strategies based on data.
The Bottom Line: Finding the Balance for Growth
So what should you focus on? As you now know, acquisition tactics help grow your client base, which is necessary to spread awareness and enhance your brand’s outreach. Retention tactics, on the other hand, aim to keep your existing clients coming back, which is crucial for loyalty, brand reputation, and customer lifetime value.
Most often, brands want to focus on driving new leads for market expansion, growth, and competitive reasons. Retention, on the other hand, might become a primary focus for the following purposes:
Increased customer lifetime value
- Reduced cost
- Enhanced ROI
- Brand advocacy
- Repeat sales
- Predictable revenue
- Economic stagnation
While reasons to focus on one particular goal might be quite justified, this can lead to a range of negative impacts, such as high churn or resource strain when the focus is on driving leads and slowed customer growth and market expansion when the focus is solely on loyalty.
At the end of the day, although they both matter, focusing just on one approach might be a mistake because only a balance between new clients’ flow and old clients’ retention can help you create a virtuous cycle that drives sustainable business growth. Simply put, for optimal growth, you may want to find ways to balance both customer acquisition and retention.
