Marketing Tips for 2026: Service Experts Address 13 Tricky Questions

Every week, brands bring Netpeak's marketing team the same handful of questions, and most of the myths behind them stopped being true years ago. This article answers 13 of the most common ones, grouped into three areas: 

The pattern that connects all three: brands optimize a proxy metric, such as traffic, ACOS, open rate, page views, instead of the number that actually drives return on investment: target audience fit and conversion. Also, for a broader look at where the industry is headed, see our breakdown of marketing trends for 2026-2027.

Below, Netpeak's marketplace, retention, and UI/UX & CRO specialists break down common false assumptions that keep your marketing behind. 

Marketplace Marketing: 5 Myths Worth Rethinking

Head of Marketplace Cyril Kuznetsov reveals that selling on Amazon, Etsy, or Allegro comes with its own logic, and a lot of brands apply website thinking to a marketplace and wonder why it doesn't grow their business.

1. "I need more traffic on my listing, it will automatically sell-out my products"

Paid traffic to a low-converting product page actively lowers your organic rank. Before you pour budget into ads, make sure conversion is already there, and your listings are optimized. Amazon's Best Match algorithm and Allegro both read conversion rate as a quality signal, so running ads on a weak listing buys you fewer sessions tomorrow than you had yesterday. The paradox: the more you spend before fixing the page, the less visible your brand becomes.

This is exactly the kind of channel-first, page-second mistake we cover in our guide to ecommerce marketing strategy tactics that actually boost sales — fixing the page always comes before scaling the spend.

2. "Returns are a logistics problem"

Returns are a content problem. A high return rate almost always means the product detail page promised something the product doesn't deliver, and on Amazon, that now compounds into account health penalties and the "frequently returned item" badge. A returned customer never becomes a repeat customer, so the same failure kills lifetime value twice: once on the return, once on the lost repeat purchase.

It works: CatsJoys, an Etsy pet-furniture brand, grew organic revenue by 29% and orders by 13% by expanding its keyword set from 27 to 522 tags and optimizing listings first, reducing reliance on paid ads rather than leaning harder on them. 

3. "Marketplaces cannibalize my own site"

Brands running both usually see branded search on their own site rise after a marketplace launch, because the marketplace handles discovery and trust while the site protects margin and repeat purchases. The real cannibalization risk is price inconsistency across channels, not channel overlap. Keep pricing aligned and the two channels reinforce your brand instead of competing against it.

This dynamic is especially visible on platforms built around trust and craft, like Etsy. Check out our full walkthrough of promotion on Etsy as it covers how to use the marketplace for discovery without undercutting your own store.

4. "There's no retention on marketplaces — the customer belongs to Amazon"

Retention exists, it just runs on different mechanics: repeat purchase rate in Brand Analytics, Subscribe & Save cohorts, Etsy repeat buyers, your follower base. You don't own the email address, but you do own the repeat trigger. Based on my experience, brands that treat marketplaces as pure acquisition channels leave the most profitable 20% of their revenue on the table.

5. "ACOS should be as low as possible"

Your best campaign is often the one with the worst ACOS: brand defense, competitor conquesting, new product ranking. A very low ACOS usually signals underinvestment and shrinking share of voice, not efficiency. The metric that actually decides anything is marginal profit per additional unit sold, not the ratio on your ads dashboard.

That balance is exactly what worked for Lemon & Beaker: pausing unprofitable campaigns and rebuilding targeting around real audience data grew Amazon sales by 80% and listing visibility by 50%, while ACOS came down at the same time. 

Retention Marketing Myths That Are Costing You Revenue

Retention doesn't get the same attention as acquisition, mostly because its payoff isn't as visible on day one. That makes it an easy target for myths. Anastasia Rudska, Head of Retention, uncovers five assumptions we hear most from clients.

1. "Email marketing doesn't work anymore. Nobody reads it, not even I myself"

This is one of the most common objections we hear from prospective clients, and it's usually disproven within the first few months of launch. The clearest signal that email still works is the return on investment we consistently see from it — not opinion, but revenue. A few examples from our own client work: 

• The LACE clothing store reached full ROI in four months and now gets 7% of total ecommerce revenue from email.

•  Puma hit a 5,477.3% ROMI in month one.

•  Pandora.kz now generates 30% of total revenue across all sales channels from email.

• Avtokrisla recouped its investment in three months.

Email remains one of the fastest-paying-back channels we recommend to clients: strong operational metrics, solid conversion to target action, and quick time to ROI. Don't design campaigns around your own inbox habits: your target audience may engage with email completely differently than you do. Thoughtful, well-timed, well-segmented sends keep earning attention long after "email is dead" stops being true.

2. "Retention marketing takes too long to pay off"

This myth assumes retention requires months of investment before any revenue shows up. In reality, the first real returns depend on getting the basics right early: an effective way to collect contacts (subscription forms with an incentive, checkout sign-up), high-converting triggered flows (abandoned cart, browse abandonment), and a first batch sent with proper spacing between messages. Set those up correctly and positive results start showing in the first month — they only improve from there as you add omnichannel touchpoints, deeper segmentation, and more trigger types.

Our Mechta.kz case study is a good example: we built retention marketing from zero and reached positive ROI within the first month.

3. "We don't need retention — our call center and personal outreach handle it good enough"

This works fine while your contact list is small enough for a team to handle manually. But manual outreach has a hard scaling ceiling: it holds up at hundreds of contacts and starts breaking at thousands. Automated triggered flows (e.g. abandoned cart, reactivation, first-purchase welcome) run around the clock, aren't dependent on how busy a rep is, and reach each customer at the exact moment a message is relevant, not whenever someone gets to them.

Retention marketing doesn't replace your call center: it takes the routine, predictable work (reminders, confirmations, reactivation) off its plate so the team can focus on deal-closing and objection handling, where personal contact actually matters. It also does more than drive direct revenue: retention builds brand loyalty, keeps your brand top of mind, onboards new contacts, and recovers customers after a bad experience. Our deep dive on building a welcome email series for a service brand shows what that looks like in practice.

4. "We tried retention marketing and it didn't work for our business"

Collecting a list and sending campaigns at random isn't a strategy. Results depend on a real send plan (who, what, when), the quality of the emails themselves, including ecommerce personalization, mobile formatting, and dark-mode support, omnichannel follow-up to push undecided subscribers toward the target action, and proper segmentation. Just as important: your list naturally erodes over time as people unsubscribe or abandon old contact info, so you need active mechanisms to keep growing it, not just maintaining it.

Creative execution matters more than most brands assume. Retro cues can build strong reminiscence and brand loyalty with the right audience. See our piece on retro marketing for clothing brands, and thoughtful design is what turns a routine send into something subscribers actually want to open, which we cover in the creative side of retention marketing.

Want a free audit of your current retention setup, or help building one from scratch? Get a consultation from our email team.

5. "I have one communication channel and it's already profitable. Why add more?"

This looks efficient in the short term but carries real risk over time. Contact lists erode naturally as people unsubscribe, change phone numbers, or stop checking a particular inbox. If you're only reaching customers through one channel, every one of those small failures is a complete loss of contact, with no backup path to reach them.

Different channels also perform differently across your audience: some people open email but ignore push notifications; others are active on SMS or social media but rarely check their inbox. Relying on a single channel means silently losing the portion of your audience that simply doesn't respond to it as those contacts look "dead" in your database, but they're not uninterested, you're just reaching them the wrong way. The stronger approach is two to three channels, with one primary channel (usually email) reinforced by SMS, push, or messengers for specific segments. Channel synergy consistently outperforms betting everything on a single point of contact.

UI/UX & CRO: Where the Real Conversion Growth Hides

Conversion optimization gets less budget than acquisition, mostly because a UX fix isn't as visible as a new ad campaign, even though it's often the faster path to revenue. Danylo Minin, Head of CRO & UX/UI, addresses three assumptions we push back on most.

1. "You can easily grow revenue by just driving more traffic"

Traffic is the most linear lever available: spend more on ads, get more visits. Because budget is traditionally labeled "marketing budget," it defaults to external channels, SEO, PPC, PR. But a large share of that budget's real potential is hiding in tools that make the traffic you already have more effective: user experience, CRO, and retention.

There's also a long-standing assumption that money spent acquiring new customers pays back faster than money spent on existing ones. That's no longer reliable — cost per click and cost per lead keep climbing every year. Keep working the old playbook and your margins erode. The alternative is working with the customers and traffic you already have: improving conversion rate on your site or app and growing your base of loyal, repeat users. That shift alone is often the fastest way to grow your business without expanding the media budget at all.

2. "The biggest conversion wins are at the bottom of the funnel"

When sales drop, most business owners point straight at checkout: "Rebuild the checkout page, conversion is bad there." But, in my experience, the data in Google Analytics tells a different story 90-95% of the time. The checkout page might genuinely be flawed, but it isn't dragging down overall results simply because barely anyone reaches it. You can't meaningfully lift sales by optimizing a cart that only one in a thousand site visitors ever sees.

Most audience drop-off happens earlier — on the homepage, product pages, or service description pages. That's where a visitor decides whether they're willing to move forward with your brand at all. The job is to resolve the pain points and objections at the consideration stage, not to polish the final checkout step in isolation.

3. "A cool design will automatically increase conversions"

"Good design" usually gets judged purely on visual appeal: do I like it or not. But an attractive layout doesn't guarantee people take the actions you actually want. Good design is about 80% usability, and it can't be based on generic market trends or a developer's favorite template, including trends that are already fading, which we track in our 2026 design trends guide. Usable design has to be built on the actual behavior patterns of your visitors: heatmaps, attention and scroll maps, and session recordings. That's the only way to adapt an interface to the people who are genuinely interested in what you're offering.

That approach is exactly what drove results for two of our ecommerce clients: 

• Camotec, a tactical apparel brand, increased overall purchase conversion by 26% and add-to-cart rate by 21.3% after using heatmaps, session recordings, and direct customer feedback to fix specific friction points in the product card, cart, and checkout. 

• Trofim Family, a large wholesale retailer, lifted checkout conversion by 80.6% and search-to-purchase conversion by 150% by rebuilding search, cart, and checkout around actual user behavior data, without adding a dollar of ad spend. 

The Common Thread

Across marketplaces, retention, and UX, the pattern repeats: the tactic that looks efficient on the surface such as getting more traffic, a lower ACOS, a prettier redesign, one working channel, is often the one quietly capping your growth. Fixing the pain points that are actually costing you revenue, whether that's a weak product page, an unsegmented list, or an unusable checkout flow, pays off faster and more durably than chasing another acquisition channel.