Inbound

January 28, 2026

Beyond Acquisition: How to Turn New Users Into Engaged, Lifelong Customers

Most marketers know that retention matters but few treat it like the growth engine it really is. At INBOUND 2025, Enrique Hoyos showed how his team at Pexels achieved a 3x increase in user retention in just two months by prioritizing what happens after sign-up.

See how small changes to onboarding and activation led to massive retention gains and get some tips on how to apply the same thinking to your customer journey today.

Retention Pays the Bills

“A small 5% increase in retention rates can take you anywhere between a 25 and 95% increase in profits.” — Enrique Hoyos

Despite this stat, most marketing still revolves around acquisition. At Pexels (a free stock photo and video site) marketing success relies on attracting users but also, retaining its contributors. Without a steady stream of talented photographers and videographers uploading high-quality content, the platform can’t deliver on its core value to creatives, marketers, and educators who rely on it.

And yet, contributor retention was low. Hoyos’ team saw that top-of-funnel growth was outpacing their ability to keep users engaged. That misalignment led to wasted acquisition spend and slowed momentum. He and his team built a growth strategy around retention because that’s where the compounding gains were.

Try this: Run a cohort analysis on users 30–60 days post-acquisition. Where’s the biggest drop-off? Shift part of your campaign budget toward re-engagement or onboarding content.

Pick One Problem and Go All In

When the team mapped out the contributor journey—signup, upload, approval, stats—they found that the most dramatic fall-off came after signup but before meaningful activity. Contributors were signing up, uploading once, and never returning.

Instead of scattering efforts across multiple experiments, Hoyos’ team zeroed in on one priority: contributor activation. By narrowing their focus, they were able to move quickly, align cross-functional teams, and measure impact clearly.

“Choose the biggest problem or the biggest lever of growth that you can find to dedicate 60, 70% of your resources to.” — Enrique Hoyos

Try this: Identify one high-leverage metric in your customer journey (e.g. trial-to-paid conversion, first feature use). Build one cross-functional sprint to improve just that.

Talk to Users Before You Try to Save Them

Before jumping into solutions, Hoyos and his team went straight to the source. They sent plain-text, personal emails from Hoyos’ address to every new contributor who had recently uploaded content, asking three questions:

Why did you join Pexels?
What did you hope to get out of it?
How did you find us?

The emails were simple and resulted in an 85% open rate with a lot of qualitative data for his team to mine from. Contributors didn’t want money (at least not right away). They wanted to feel seen and they wanted validation, impact, and creative growth.

These became the strategic inputs for how they built out next steps.

Try this: Set up a lifecycle email asking users “Why did you join?” and “What would success look like 30 days from now?” Use those insights to shape onboarding or messaging.

Redesign the Onboarding Experience Around Emotion

Once the team understood what contributors wanted, they audited the current onboarding flow. They discovered that it was too long (11 steps), too transactional, and lacked any form of emotional payoff until 30+ days later:

The first stats email (showing photo views/downloads) didn’t arrive until day 30
New contributors had just a 10% approval rate on their first uploads
The welcome emails were generic and focused on platform features instead of contributor goals

Armed with these findings, the team rebuilt the journey to deliver value and validation faster. They added:

1. Dynamic milestone emails (“Your photo just hit 1,000 views!”)
2. Social media shoutouts for top new contributors
3. Homepage features for standout uploads (seen by 500,000+ visitors/day)

Notes from real curators highlighting what made a contributor’s content special

All of this was created with no engineering support, using just no-code tools, Google Sheets, and email workflows.

Try this: Find one part of your onboarding that delivers delayed value. Can you move that insight, feedback, or recognition to the first 5–7 days?

Launch Fast, Learn Fast

“We weren’t going for perfection. What we wanted to do is find the quickest path to test the hypothesis.” — Enrique Hoyos

The name of the game was to validate before optimizing. The hypothesis was that early recognition would increase retention and they set out to prove it quickly.

With just two months of focused work to rebuild the onboarding strategy, Pexels saw:

Week 5 retention improved from 8% to 24%
Uploads per user grew from 21 to 32
Approved content per contributor more than doubled

Try this: Launch a manual version of your idea using what you have and track behavior before you scale.

The Takeaway

“Acquisition makes the headlines but retention is what really pays the bills,” Hoyos shared.

He and the Pexels team built a better onboarding flow and a marketing-led growth loop around emotional momentum. They listened, simplified, and delivered what creators who join Pexels want: to be seen, valued, and encouraged to keep going.

What You Can Apply Now

Audit the biggest drop-off in your funnel.
Talk to users to gain valuable qualitative data.
Design for emotional payoff.
Use the tools you already have to launch faster.
Treat retention like growth, not support.