The State of Retention Email & Lead Capture in Beauty 2025
Introduction: Retention as a growth imperative
In the beauty and wellness sector, personalisation has shifted from trend to necessity. It defines the customer journey, shaping engagement, conversion, and lifetime value. Yet despite its strategic importance, most brands remain anchored in cookie-cutter email marketing, forfeiting the chance to build the compounding relationships that underpin profitability.
Our analysis of 200 luxury beauty and wellness brands highlights the gap. While email remains one of the highest-ROI channels in ecommerce, its potential is systematically under-realised. The opportunity is clear: by strengthening lead capture, embedding personalisation from the outset, and deploying data-led retention strategies, beauty brands can materially improve both profitability and growth resilience.
Benchmark findings: The state of play
- Email capture is underbuilt. Only 34.5% of brands actively collect emails, leaving a majority of high-intent visitors uncaptured.
- Minimal data undermines relevance. Just 10.5% collect a first name at sign-up, preventing even basic personalisation.
- Pop-ups under-leveraged. Only 42% deploy welcome pop-ups; 58% miss this simple but powerful lead-capture mechanism.
- Automation gaps persist. 27% of brands with a pop-up fail to trigger a welcome email.
- Execution quality lags. Of the 62% that send a welcome email, 40% use static, generic templates. 19% never arrive at all due to deliverability issues.
The outcome: weak top-of-funnel conversion, broken mid-funnel engagement, and declining lifetime value, a cycle that erodes profitability rather than compounding it.
Strategic fault lines: Where brands fall behind
Our benchmarking focussed on three foundational areas:
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Welcome Pop-ups - Are brands effectively capturing first-party data from the outset?
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First-Name Collection - Are they embedding personalisation into their retention system from day one?
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Welcome Email Strategy - Is the first communication behaviour-driven and retention-focused, or static and transactional?
Across each dimension, execution gaps were significant, revealing systemic underinvestment in retention infrastructure.
The case for foundational personalisation: Quantifying impact
Retention-First Growth partnered with a leading global fragrance house to test the incremental value of personalisation across a three-month A/B program. Results were unequivocal:
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+10% Open Rate – greater visibility and engagement.
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Up to 113% higher CTR – deeper interaction and intent.
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2300% increase in order placement – a 23-fold uplift in conversions.
In an industry where consumers expect precision and relevance, these results illustrate the commercial risk of generic messaging. Personalisation is no longer optional; it is the determinant of conversion, loyalty, and profitability.
From erosion to momentum
The economics are clear:
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At the top of the funnel, brands waste CAC as high-intent visitors exit without capture.
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At the bottom, weak onboarding and generic messaging depress conversion and CLV.
Most beauty brands leave significant value untapped in email. Gaps in capture, data, and execution are eroding profitability and limiting growth. Yet the path forward is clear, Retention-First Growth® enables brands to transform email from a transactional channel into a compounding growth engine.
How does your brand compare?
For a custom assessment, contact us at hi@retentionfirstgrowth.com or [schedule a call here].
In beauty, where consumer expectations rise and acquisition costs escalate, growth will not be secured at the top of the funnel. It will be sustained through retention, by turning email into the axis of a flywheel that compounds loyalty, profitability, and long-term advantage.
