Email + Paid Ads: Why the Best Growth Strategies Combine Both

Two channels, one customer journey

Brands often treat paid advertising and email marketing as separate workstreams, run by separate people, with separate goals. In reality, the strongest-performing ecommerce brands treat them as one connected system.

Paid ads bring the traffic; email captures the value over time

Paid acquisition is expensive relative to email, which has a near-zero marginal cost per send. Using paid ads to build an engaged list, then nurturing that list through email, significantly improves long-term return on ad spend.

Retarget email subscribers differently than cold traffic

Visitors who've already engaged with email content don't need the same top-of-funnel messaging as someone seeing the brand for the first time — segmenting ad creative accordingly improves efficiency.

Use email data to inform ad targeting

Purchase behaviour and engagement data from email platforms like Klaviyo can inform lookalike audiences and exclusion lists, making paid campaigns more precise.

Coordinate timing around promotions

Running email and paid campaigns on a shared promotional calendar, rather than independently, avoids message fatigue and ensures a consistent customer experience across channels.

The brands seeing the strongest overall growth aren't necessarily spending the most on ads — they're the ones getting the most value out of every visitor paid ads bring in, largely through a well-integrated email strategy.