At R360Growth , we consistently rank in the top 10% of key performance indicators (KPIs) for retention and lifecycle marketing. But what does that mean for you, and why is it still so rare?
Despite all the evidence that retention drives profitability, most companies are still locked in acquisition-first cycles. And as CAC continues to rise and attention gets harder to buy, balancing your investment mix isn’t just smart, it’s essential.
The Numbers That Matter
- Retained customers spend 67% more than new ones and drive 65% of company revenue.
- You’re up to 14x more likely to convert a returning customer than a new one.
- A 5% increase in retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
- Acquiring a new customer costs up to 5x more than keeping an existing one
The economics are clear. So with numbers like these, why are so few brands migrating to retention-first growth?
The Divide Between Average and Elite
The difference isn’t effort. It’s infrastructure. Klaviyo benchmarks show that the top 10% of brands are achieving:
- 5–10x more revenue per recipient (RPR)
- Far higher conversion rates
- Deeper engagement and stronger loyalty over time
The common thread? They’ve adopted live email marketing as the foundation of their retention-first ecosystem. These brands don’t send generic blasts, they build intelligent systems that respond in real time powered by behavioural triggers, dynamic content, and hyper-personalisation.
At R360Growth, this is the standard we build for every client, because top performance starts with strategic alignment at the top.
What sets leading brands apart? They’re not just tweaking tactics, they’re making decisions at the C-suite level - Finance, Marketing, and Ops are aligning around a single goal: Sustainable, profitable growth.
These brands are reallocating intelligently, consistently dedicating 40–60% of their marketing spend to retention-first strategy, not acquisition overspend.
Because when your business is designed to keep customers,
you stop paying the price of losing them.
The Post-Acquisition Era
The marketing model most businesses still use? Built for a different era when media was cheap and attention was abundant.
We’re no longer just marketers, we’re architects of holistic, intelligent, retention-first growth strategies. Today, brands that win are doing things differently:
- Blending the power of AI with the intuition of human insight
- Designing journeys that are intelligent, contextual, and customer-led
- Building retention-first ecosystems that compound over time
It’s about designing journeys that are as intelligent as they are intimate, ensuring every interaction is meaningful, memorable, and measurable.
And yet… most budgets are still locked in acquisition-first cycles.
Why Most Brands Are Still Behind
It’s not because brands don’t want to evolve. It’s because most aren’t structurally equipped to. On the surface, it might look like progress, there’s a retention strategy deck, a few flows in Klaviyo, maybe even a loyalty program.
But underneath, the foundations are shaky:
- In-house teams are often built for speed and execution, great at getting campaigns out the door. But without the structure or support to design intelligent, behaviour-led journeys, their efforts remain focused on output over long-term impact. And because budgets are still heavily weighted toward top-of-funnel activity, there’s very little investment in the strategy, tooling, or time needed to build true retention infrastructure.
- Tech stacks are not optimised for a retention-first ecosystem. Without the infrastructure to act on live signals, churn doesn’t just persist, it compounds.
- Today's reality is that most agencies are built to own acquisition and email, not retention ecosystems. They can deliver ads and campaigns, but few have the capability to stitch together brand, behaviour, data, and loyalty into a unified customer experience. Their model isn’t built for retention-first, so they keep clients stuck in a loop: drive traffic, send cookie-cutter emails, repeat.
This isn’t a strategy. It’s a cycle of short-term gains and long-term loss.
Until brands and agencies invest in the architecture for hyper-personalisation, they’ll continue to overspend at the top and underperform at the bottom.
It’s not a creativity problem. It’s an operational one. And it’s costing more than most brands realise.
The 3% Opportunity
Only 3% of brands have adopted true live email marketing using real-time, dynamic, behaviour-triggered campaigns that engage customers in the moment.
The rest? Still running static emails, batch sends, and relying heavily on top-of-funnel spend. That’s why the gap is widening. But it also presents a massive opportunity for brands ready to evolve.
→ Live content can boost click-through rates by up to 70%
→ Real-time campaigns can drive up to 47% more revenue
And those who act now? They won’t just catch up, they’ll pull ahead. This isn’t about chasing trends or shiny new objects, it’s about setting the standard for modern customer engagement, loyalty, and growth.
If you want to sit in the top 10% of Klaviyo benchmarks, retention can’t be an afterthought. It must be a core pillar of your growth strategy backed by the right infrastructure, budget, and talent to move beyond cookie-cutter campaigns and into compounding customer value.
We’re Not Just Another Marketing Partner
We’re Pioneers of Retention-First Growth.
At R360Growth, we help brands move beyond short-term spikes and start building sustainable, profitable ecosystems. While others chase traffic, we optimise the full customer journey, from first click to long-term loyalty.
In 2025, brands that thrive will be the ones with strong retention, healthy margins, and customer relationships that compound. That’s what we build.
We don’t just offer retention as a service, we’ve built an entire growth model around it. While only 3% of brands are using live, behaviour-led email marketing, we help our clients get there - and outperform it.
Here's what it looks like in practice:
- Top 10% Klaviyo retention benchmarks
- +1384% increase in flow entries in just 15 days
- 9x more revenue per recipient through hyper-personalised journeys
We’re not just another email agency. We’re your infrastructure partner for scaling profitably, sustainably, and intelligently in 2025 and beyond.
