When You Should Not Hire an Email Agency (From a Founder Who Owns One)

Hiring an Agency Isn’t Automatically the Next Step

A lot of e-commerce brands do not need an email agency, and this is coming from someone who owns one. Hiring an agency isn’t automatically the next step just because your business is growing or you want to make more money from email. Depending on what you already have in place, you might be better off keeping things in-house, getting some strategic help, or just having someone build the foundation for you.

The problem you might be facing is figuring out which one actually makes sense for your business. Because if you ask most agencies, they’re going to tell you you need an agency.

In this video, I want to give you a more objective way to make that decision for yourself. I’m going to walk you through the same things I look at when deciding whether a brand is actually a good fit to work with us, when I think you should keep email in-house, and what kind of outside help makes sense if you do, in fact, need it.

Your revenue alone isn’t going to answer that question. Whether you’re just trying to crack six figures or you’re already doing well over $10 million a year, there are still a few qualifications I’d look for before spending a dollar on an email agency.

Our Approach to Qualifying Brands

If you’re new here, my name is Nick. I’m the founder of Barbs Media. We’re an email and SMS agency, and over the past four and a half years, we’ve generated more than $50 million in revenue for our e-commerce clients.

That said, we actively turn away more leads than we accept. It’s also why our average client tenure is around 22 months, whereas the average agency sits around six months. In fact, on about 75% of the sales calls we take, the business isn’t qualified to work with us for a number of reasons.

In this video, I’m going to give it to you straight. I’m going to show you what our qualification process looks like from the agency side, what we’re actually looking for when we decide whether to work with a brand or not, and the qualifications I think your e-commerce store should have before you even consider hiring an email agency.

1. Do You Have Enough Traffic?

The very first thing I’m looking at is whether you actually have enough traffic coming to your website. If you’re barely spending any money on ads and you don’t have many new customers coming through, I’m going to tell you straight: you don’t need an email agency. You need people to find out who you are.

Think ads, social media, SEO. Spend that money on acquiring customers first, because email marketing needs traffic in order for it to work.

The only thing I would advise is building basic welcome, abandoned cart, and post-purchase flows, and a pop-up as well to collect emails, so that you’re ready when the traffic does come. But honestly, apart from that, don’t bother spending any money on emails until you actually have people consistently going to your site and buying.

Ultimately, every brand wants to make more money, and email marketing can have the potential to do that. However, there are a few things that need to come first. For example, you’re going to need a good product. You need a website that is at least user-friendly. You need traffic coming back to that website. Ideally, you already have product reviews and proof that people actually want what you’re selling.

If you don’t have some of these, you’re just not going to see the value of what email and SMS marketing can do. Think of email as a multiplier. It can exponentially increase the value of your customers, but you need customers to begin with.

2. Does Your Product Lend Itself to Repeat Purchases?

The second thing I’m looking at is what you actually sell. Some businesses naturally have a much bigger opportunity with email because their customers have a reason to keep buying their products again and again.

Think apparel. If you buy a shirt, maybe you’re going to want the shorts. Maybe you’re gonna want to try the hoodies, the socks, etc. Supplement brands: if you like them, maybe you’re going to buy them every two weeks, every 30 days, etc. The same thing goes for beauty products, food, or really anything CPG.

The best products for email are products that, when customers run out, they want to try another style, try another product, or simply come back because they liked what they bought.

Compare that to something high-ticket or one-off, like hot tubs. You could have a very successful hot tub company doing 10 or $20 million a year. But how many hot tubs does one person really need? That doesn’t mean email can’t be valuable for them. It just means the opportunity is much different.

Regardless of how big your business is, ask yourself: how often can customers realistically buy from us, and what can we sell them next? The stronger the answer, the bigger your opportunity is with retention.

Finding Your Email Marketing Opportunity

Maybe you’re in line with some of what I’ve already said, but not all of it, and you still aren’t sure whether there’s an actual opportunity for email marketing in your business. That’s why we built a free calculator that can help you figure out that exact question.

All you have to do is put in a few numbers about your business, and it’s going to show you exactly where you might be leaving money on the table with the customers you already have. Better than that, it’s going to show you the actual opportunity that’s in front of you with email marketing.

I’m going to leave it linked in the description below. If you want to check it out, go for it. But for now, let’s keep going through the qualifications you should consider before hiring an email agency.

3. Do You Already Have the Right People In-House?

The next thing I’m going to look at is who’s currently responsible for your email marketing, if you already have something in place.

If you already have someone in-house who genuinely knows what they’re doing and, more importantly, has the time to do it properly, you might not need an agency or anyone else, for that matter. And I don’t just mean someone who knows their way around Claio.

There’s a lot more that goes into actually managing email well. You need someone thinking about the strategy, planning and creating campaigns, building and optimizing your flows, managing segmentation, testing new ideas, analyzing performance, and constantly looking for opportunities to improve.

If you already have someone doing all of that, amazing. There are actually some big advantages to having email managed in-house. That person or team is living inside your brand every day. They know your products, your customers, your promotions, what’s launching next, what’s happening across the rest of your business. Most importantly, they can move fast, which is super important, especially for bigger brands.

However, where I start to see problems with in-house email marketing is when email technically belongs to someone, but it’s only one of 10 or a dozen other things they’re responsible for. Your marketing manager might also be handling paid ads, social influencers, product launches, website updates, and throwing email on top of that is honestly insane.

At that point, something inevitably gets pushed down the priority list. The question isn’t necessarily whether you have someone who can manage email well. It’s whether you have someone with the knowledge, resources, and time to actually own it.

4. What Level of Help Do You Actually Need?

The next qualification is figuring out how much help you actually need. Because working with an agency doesn’t necessarily mean handing over your entire email program and paying them every month forever. There are different levels of help that you can get, and depending on where your business is at, one might make a lot more sense than another.

If your email marketing is basically starting from scratch, but you’re already getting quality traffic to your website and you have a great product that sells, you could really benefit from something like a one-time setup.

Have someone come in, build your pop-up, set up your core flows, establish your segmentation strategy, and get everything working properly. Then, from there, they can hand it back to your team to manage. You don’t need ongoing management. You don’t need some crazy retainer fee every month. You just need the basics done right, and that’s going to build you a strong foundation.

Then you have brands that are already doing a lot of the right things. They already have their foundation. They have a capable email marketer or marketing team handling the execution. But if this is you, and maybe you’re not confident in the strategy or you’re simply not seeing the results you think you should be, in this situation, consulting could be what your business needs.

Getting Expert Direction

Have someone experienced come in, look at the numbers, identify where the opportunities are, review what your team is doing, and give them the best direction on what needs to change and what they should be testing.

This will prevent you from building everything or spending tons of time creating new flows when you don't actually need that. You really just need better direction.

When Full Email Management Makes Sense

Lastly, you have brands that either don't have the internal resources to build or manage email correctly, or simply don't want to build out an entire email team themselves.

You need help quickly. You want experts, and you want people who have done this successfully again and again to come in and take ownership of the channel. These are the brands that are usually going to be the best aligned with full email marketing management on a retainer or month-to-month fee.

Red Flag: Huge Promises Before Understanding Your Business

Now, if you do need an agency, there's a couple caveats here. There's a couple red flags that you should watch out for.

Number one, be cautious of anyone making huge promises before they actually understand your business. If an agency is telling you, “We can guarantee you an additional $250,000 in revenue,” or, “We'll get you to 30% of your total revenue through email,” before they've even looked under the hood of your business, that's an immediate red flag.

They don't know you or your business enough yet to make that promise. They haven't looked into your account, your customers, your margins, your retention, what's actually holding you back.

A good agency should identify the opportunity first and then tell you what they realistically think they can do with it.

Red Flag: Cookie-Cutter Strategies

Number two, stay away from cookie-cutter strategies. Your email strategy should be built around your products, your customers, how often people purchase, your customer lifetime value metrics, and what you're actually trying to accomplish as a business.

Know Who Will Work on Your Account

I'd also find out who is actually going to be working on your account. This is really important.

If you sign with an agency because you're impressed by the founder or senior strategist, whoever you hopped on the call with, and then immediately you get handed off to a junior account manager who also has 15 other brands under their belt, it's a very different service than what you signed up for.

The whole reason you're paying for an agency is to bring experienced people into your business without having to hire all of them internally. So before you sign anything, make sure you know who is actually going to be developing your strategy, looking at your numbers, and working on your account.

Focus on the Business, Not Just the Klaviyo Account

And finally, make sure your email agency is actually focused on improving the business, not just the Klaviyo account. Yes, email metrics matter, but the goal ultimately is to make your business more money, not the Klaviyo account more money.

If your agency is, for example, hiding the welcome discount in the pop-up, pumping out tons of sales and promotional campaigns, or simply making it difficult for customers to unsubscribe or cancel orders, they might make the Klaviyo numbers look better. But in reality, they're actively hurting and really sabotaging your business.

That's when you should run for the hills, because ideally your email agency should be LTV-focused.

The goal here, like I said, is not just to squeeze as much attributed revenue as possible out of Klaviyo. Really, your email agency should focus on increasing the total profit you generate from each customer over the course of that relationship. The decisions should always be based on what's best for the customer and the long-term economics of the business.

Should You Hire an Email Agency?

So in conclusion, should you hire an email agency? Well, it really depends on what your business actually needs.

If you don't have enough traffic coming to your website yet, I'd focus on acquisition first. Don't spend a dime on email until you figure out how to get people interested in your brand and actually paying.

Now, if you already have a great team internally that has the expertise and time to properly manage email, you might not need an email agency at all. And if there's a clear opportunity, but you don't need someone managing everything for you, a one-time setup or consulting might make a lot more sense.

But if you have the traffic, you have a product people want to buy again and again, and you don't have the resources or expertise internally to take advantage of that opportunity, that's where I think hiring the right agency can be an extremely valuable investment.

And if that sounds like your business, you can use the first link in the description to learn more about working with me and my team at Barbs Media.

The Strategy Behind Your Retention

But whether you decide to hire an agency or decide to do all this internally, the strategy behind your retention is ultimately what matters the most.

So if you want to see exactly how I think about retention for seven- and eight-figure ecommerce brands, watch my retention playbook video next. I break down the strategy we've used across more than $50 million in email sales and how you can start applying it to your own business.

You can go check out that video right here. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.