How to choose an ecommerce email marketing agency

To choose an ecommerce email marketing agency, first check that you need one: if you don't yet sell consistently, you don't. If you do, look for a team that owns strategy, flows, campaigns, design and reporting, that works inside an account you own, and that explains how it measures results before it promises any. The questions and red flags below are how you tell them apart.

A note before we start: we are an email marketing agency, so this guide has an obvious bias. We have tried to write the one we would want a brand to read before talking to anybody, us included. Where we mention our own terms, we say so.

When you don't need an agency yet

An agency makes money for you by working a list and a flow of orders that already exist. Without them, it has nothing to work with. You probably don't need one if:

• you have just launched and don't yet have sales or recurring traffic;
• your list is small and one person on the team can send one good email a week;
• you expect results in a week or two, which no serious team will promise;
• you don't want to share store data or review anything, because an agency can't write about products it doesn't know.

What to do instead is cheaper and gets you most of the way:

1. Authenticate your sending domain (SPF, DKIM and DMARC). Our email deliverability checker tells you in a minute if anything is missing.
2. Build the four basic flows: welcome, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout and post-purchase. Our welcome flow resource and our abandoned cart guide cover the first two.
3. Send one campaign a week, on a fixed day, and look at revenue per recipient rather than opens.

When those flows run on their own and the weekly email starts to feel like the bottleneck, that is the moment to talk to an agency.

What the service should include

"Email management" can mean anything from sending a newsletter to running the whole channel. Ask for the scope in writing. This is what we consider the full service, and what we would expect from any agency charging a monthly retainer.

Two details tell you a lot. The first is how the work starts: a good agency audits the account, the deliverability and your store in the first days, and asks for a couple of sessions to understand the brand and the products before writing a single email. The second is the report. A table of numbers is not a report. Every number should come with its comparison, the reason behind it and a plan.

Questions to ask before you sign

These are the questions we would ask in your place. The middle column is what a solid answer sounds like.

The attribution question deserves a minute. By default Klaviyo uses a last touch model with a 5-day window for email clicks and another 5-day window for email opens, and you can change both in the account settings. That is a reasonable default, but it means an order from someone who only opened an email can count as email revenue. Neither answer is wrong. What matters is that the agency tells you which settings it uses and keeps them stable, so this month and last month are comparable.

The account question matters even more. A Klaviyo account has exactly one Owner, and only the current Owner can hand that role to someone else. If the agency is the Owner, leaving them means asking them for your own lists, flows and history. Create the account yourself, or have the agency set it up and transfer ownership to you before work starts.

Red flags

• A specific return promised before anyone has looked at your account. No one can know what your list will produce without the data. A good agency promises a method and a timeline for testing, not a figure.
• No access for you, or a report you can't verify. If you can't log in and see the same numbers, you are trusting a screenshot.
• Generic templates. If the emails could belong to any store, the copy wasn't written from your products.
• A calendar that is mostly discounts. It sells this month and trains your customers to wait for the next code.
• No audit before the proposal. A proposal that doesn't mention anything specific about your account is a price list.

How agencies charge

There are three common models. We won't quote other agencies' prices, because they vary with scope and there is no official reference to check them against.

• Monthly retainer. A fixed fee, usually set by how many campaigns go out per week, with flows, segmentation and reporting included. It is the most common and the easiest to budget.
• Setup or project fee. A one-off payment to build the account, the flows and the deliverability foundation. Some agencies sell it alone; others charge it at the start of a retainer.
• Performance-based. The agency is paid a share of what email sells, sometimes with a cap. It aligns incentives, but read how "what email sells" is measured, and expect a longer commitment, because the agency is investing before it gets paid.

For transparency, here are ours. Our monthly plans start at €550 a month for one send a week, with an initial setup billed once, and no minimum term. We also offer a performance-based model with a 12-month agreement, and we only take it on where we see real upside. Whoever you talk to, compare scope against scope, not price against price.

Where to find candidates

Klaviyo runs a public directory of its agency partners at connect.klaviyo.com. You can filter by ecommerce platform, location, services, language, industry, brand size and scope of work, and Klaviyo also offers to match you with partners itself. Partners appear with tiers such as Elite Master or Silver Master. A tier tells you about the agency's relationship with Klaviyo; it doesn't tell you whether they fit your brand. Use the directory to build a shortlist of three, then ask all three the questions above.

If you'd like us to be one of the three, you can book a call. We'll look at your account first and tell you honestly if it isn't the moment.

Sources

Checked on October 5, 2026.

• Klaviyo agency partner directory
• Klaviyo user roles and permissions
• How to transfer account ownership in Klaviyo
• Understanding Klaviyo message attribution