Hiring an email marketing agency?
The questions matter. But the answers only help if you know what good evidence looks like.
Use this guide to pressure-test nine answers before you sign.
They say that the answers you get will depend on the questions you ask. More often, this simple tenet is ignored -- in life and with regards to business management.
If you are looking to hire an email marketing agency for your e-commerce business growth, there are certain questions you ask. The answers will make or break just how this relationship will work out with the agency.
Hiring an ecommerce email marketing agency is a big decision — the wrong one burns budget, the right one becomes your best growth channel.
The questions you should ask
Here are some of the questions you must ask (print this out, laminate it):
What do you believe is achievable in terms of performance?
Email marketing is truly as performance-oriented and result-oriented as it gets, maybe only next to paid ads marketing (but with a whole set of goals, for the agency that knows what it's doing).
The agency you are talking to would have a basic idea of how many subscribers and/or customers are likely to sign up through lead generation elements on e-commerce sites, the industry averages, the benchmarks, and more.
So, the simple question to ask is this: What’s a reasonable level of results (across parameters) that we can expect?
Green flag: they give a realistic range tied to your list size, niche, and starting point. Red flag: big promises with no numbers behind them.
Ask them to unpack one result
A logo wall is not proof. A screenshot without context isn't proof either.
Pick one result close to your goal and ask:
- Where did the client start?
- What didn't work?
The agency should still be able to explain the starting point, method, scope, and limits without hiding behind a logo.
What’s the timeline for these goals?
Without timelines, most goals are worth nothing.
You know that, but does the agency in question know it too? For every aspect of email marketing management, there ought to be timelines.
Tasks for projects have timelines.
So, how long does it take to create lead magnets? What’s the time frame to create pop-ups, sticky-bars, and slide-ins? What’s the time for creating a basic set of automations with email marketing?
Green flag: a timeline for each deliverable — lead magnets, pop-ups, automations. Red flag: "we'll get to it" with no dates.
How well do you know our niche? Do you work with other brands in our industry?
While it’s not critical that the “agency must have previous experience working with exactly the same kind of business” before, it should have experience and past history of working with e-commerce nonetheless.
Email marketing for e-commerce isn’t exactly the same as email marketing done for an IT company or a SaaS business (even though that’s e-commerce as well).
It helps if the agency knows and understands your target audience as much as you do.
It helps if your email marketing team knows the pulse of customers even before a single creative or an email is created.
Green flag: ecommerce clients, ideally near your category, and they understand your buyer. Red flag: a portfolio of SaaS or B2B only, and no curiosity about your audience.
Do you produce creative/designs in house? Examples of creative designs?
Email marketing agencies can choose to source designs however they want.
But you’d still want to know how your potential email marketing agency creates email designs, email copy, and more. Are the designs created by in-house teams?
Or are the designs outsourced? Does the agency collective put its brain for designs or are these generated by AI?
You’ll do well to know before signing on for a ride.
Green flag: clear answer on who designs, plus real examples you can see. Red flag: vague on sourcing, no samples, "it depends."
How do you measure success? What does your reporting look like?
If your email marketing agency insists on sending reports that only show you how many emails have been delivered, how many opens were opened, and the average click-rate from your campaigns, you’d want to think again.
Email marketing should lead to revenue ($$$). Sales. Actual, tangible, numbers showing up on your e-commerce dashboard attributed to the email marketing channel.
Before anything else, these numbers should show up (thanks to email broadcasts, email automations, retargeting emails, and so on).
Beyond that, all other numbers are welcome. So, how exactly does an email marketing client report look like, coming from the agency?
Green flag: revenue attributed to email — broadcasts, flows, retargeting. Red flag: the report stops at opens and click rate.
So, open and click reports aren't enough.
Revenue matters.
But "email-attributed revenue" is not one universal number.
It changes (A LOT!) with the platform, the conversion event, the attribution window, and whether an open or click gets credit.
Ask the agency to show the setting behind the number.
How do you optimize email performances over time?
Many businesses think that email marketing campaigns are “set it and forget it” -- these campaigns are anything but that.
Each campaign takes work to create, set up,and roll out. Once campaigns are live, you’d have to measure results, test campaigns out, tweak, and relaunch.
It’s the same for every result-oriented marketing channel. So, how does your agency deal with optimization, campaign management (yes, even for email marketing), email performance, and so on over a period of time?
One non-negotiable check: deliverability and consent
Good creative can't help if the email goes to spam.
Ask who will:
- Check SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and one-click unsubscribe before the first send.
- Monitor spam complaints, bounces, suppressions, and sudden drops in delivery.
- Respond when deliverability drops.
Then ask the agency to explain the first deliverability audit they would run on your account.
If they say compliance is only your problem because they're "just the agency," slow down. That's a BIG red flag. 🚩
How do you gather inspiration and how can we decide on campaigns together?
You’d want to know how and where your agency gets creative inspiration.
Where do they learn from? What are their top sources for getting ideas, understanding email marketing offers, using various angles in email campaigns, and more.
Note: If your agency doesn’t know, recommend Panoramata -- a tool that can help you challenge the relationship with your agency while allowing you to pick from the best email campaigns, ads, and email examples on boards (and lists) for inspiration.
How well do you know our competitors?
Any email marketing agency that does some homework will know about your competitors, even before any work starts. If they don’t, that’s a red flag.
Ideally, they’d have a bunch of tools to help them quickly identify your competitors (or competitors for practically any business, in any industry or vertical) using several tools available in the market. Plus, there are also social media listening tools and brand monitoring tools that help.
If you’d like to add to the list, especially for email marketing competitor analysis, Panoramata helps compare any brand vs. the competition.
Green flag: they did their homework, or have tools to map your competitors fast. Red flag: they've never looked.
What tools do you use?
Email marketing agencies have their own set of tools to work with (and to help deliver email marketing campaigns for clients).
Some of the normal ones used are a clutch of email marketing platforms they have access to, testing platforms like Litmus, benchmarking platforms like Panoramata, and more.
Do ask about some of the tools your email marketing agency uses.
How much does an ecommerce email marketing agency cost?
Most ecommerce email marketing agencies charge one of three ways.
- Monthly retainer — a flat fee for a set scope (campaigns + flows + reporting). Most common for ongoing work. I've seen freelancers charging from $2000/month for 1 newsletter per week, up to $8000 on average for larger agencies and email program. The sky is the limit of course, I've seen retainers up to $30 000/month for some companies, but this is a good range.
- Percentage of email revenue — the agency takes a cut of the sales email generates. Aligns incentives, but check how they attribute revenue - Klaviyo and the others usually default some attribution with some view/send events, or a few days after a click. Make sure you check this carefully with your agency.
- Project / performance mix — a base fee plus a bonus tied to results.
Prices vary a lot by scope and market, so treat any number you see online as a rough guide, not a quote. Ask for the pricing model *before* the price — it tells you how the agency thinks.
