Switching email marketing agencies: how to do it without losing revenue

Who owns your Klaviyo account?

This is the first thing to check, before you tell anyone you're leaving.

Klaviyo allows only one Owner per account. The Owner has full access and full billing control, including closing the account. Only the current Owner can transfer ownership, and Klaviyo says it can't start a transfer without the current Owner's approval.

So if your agency set up the account under their email, they're the Owner, and they hold the keys. Ask them to transfer it to you while you're still on good terms. The new Owner has to be a user in the account first. Once it's moved, the old Owner becomes an Admin, and you can remove them.

If the old Owner has left the business and can't be reached, Klaviyo's help center says to contact support to start a verification process. That takes time, so don't leave it until the last week.

Your flows, templates, segments and profiles live inside the Klaviyo account. If you own the account, you keep all of it when the agency leaves.

What access should each agency have?

Give everyone their own login. Shared passwords make it impossible to see who changed what, and impossible to remove one person cleanly.

Klaviyo has a set of user roles. The ones that matter here:

• Owner: one per account, full access and billing, can close the account. This should be you.
• Admin: full account access, can add or delete users and cancel a paid plan, but can't close the account.
• Manager: access to the core features, but can't edit or delete users or cancel the account.
• Analyst: analytics, segments and reporting, mostly view-only.

Here's how I'd handle it. You stay Owner. The new agency gets the access it needs to build, which is usually Admin or Manager. The old agency stays on until the handover is done, then you remove them. Only Owners and Admins can add or remove users, so make sure you can.

Order matters. Add the new agency before you remove the old one, so there's never a day when nobody can get in if something breaks.

Don't turn flows off mid-handover

This is where switches lose money.

Flows do a lot of the earning. Across 4 consumable brands in my data, welcome email #1 earned about $4.50 per person, and replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person, about 28x the best campaign. For a skincare brand I work with, flows went from 60% to 83% of email revenue after its flows were rebuilt.

Pausing those for two weeks while agencies swap is like closing the store to repaint it. Here's what I'd ask for, in writing:

• The old agency doesn't pause, delete or edit any live flow after notice is given.
• The new agency doesn't switch anything off on day one either. It can build new versions in draft and swap them in one at a time.
• Campaigns keep going. Even a simple weekly send to engaged people is better than three silent weeks.

The one exception is something actively broken: a dead link, a discount code that no longer works, a flow emailing the wrong people. Fix those right away. Clicks with no sales usually means something broke.

A switching checklist for your email marketing agency

Before the old agency leaves, get this written down. Some of it you can pull yourself from Klaviyo. Some of it only lives in their heads.

1. Every live flow: what triggers it, who it's filtered to, how many emails, and what offer it uses.
2. Every segment you send to, and what it's for.
3. The campaign calendar for the next 30 days, including anything already scheduled.
4. Every discount code in use, where it shows up, and whether it expires.
5. Sign-up forms and pop-ups that are live, and what they promise.
6. Integrations connected to Klaviyo, and who set them up.
7. Your sending domain and authentication setup. Owners and Admins can edit domain authentication, so make sure it's set up under your account, not something the old agency controls elsewhere.
8. Any custom properties, code or workarounds that something depends on.
9. Flow and campaign results for the last 90 days, exported.

That last one is your baseline. Without it, three months from now nobody can say whether the new agency helped. Export it before anyone touches anything.

What should the new agency do first?

An audit. Before building anything, the new team should know what's live, what's broken and what's missing. If you want to do a first pass yourself, use my Klaviyo audit checklist.

When I take over from cheap freelancers or a tired agency, the same problems come up: flows with no intention behind them, flows that are missing or broken, and campaigns sent to everyone with no segments, so nobody can tell what worked.

Then the order is simple. Fix what's broken. Keep what's working. Build what's missing. My own rhythm is to get 8 core flows live in the first 7 days, each split into paths for customers and people who haven't bought yet, then personalize them once data comes in. I walked through that in detail in what the first 90 days with an email agency look like.

How do you avoid getting burned again?

If you're switching, something went wrong last time. Before you sign with the next one, check for the things that usually cause it. I covered the warning signs in signs your email agency isn't working, but here are the big three.

• Guarantees. Anyone who promises a number before seeing your account is guessing. I don't guarantee results, and I'd be wary of anyone who does.
• Hand-offs. Ask who will actually be in your account each week. My clients work with me directly, with no hand-offs to someone they've never met.
• No reasons. Ask the new agency to explain why each flow and campaign exists. If they can't, you're buying the same problem again.

If you want to know what agencies charge and how they bill before you start talking to them, I broke that down in how much a Klaviyo agency costs.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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