You pay for every visitor an ad sends to your store, and the ones who sign up are the part of that spend you get to keep. Ads stop the day you stop paying, while a list of people who asked to hear from you keeps earning for years if it is looked after. It is one of the few marketing assets a webshop actually owns.

That also makes the list the asset with the most to lose when you change agency.

What can go wrong

One webshop owner told us what happened when she left her previous agency. On the way out, the agency deleted 78,000 of her 88,000 profiles and switched off her flows and her signup form. Revenue per email send fell by about 98%. "And you sit there as the owner, and you can't do a thing," she said. Today that list earns her hundreds of thousands of kroner a month.

Smaller losses are easier to miss: flows nobody can find, templates that disappear, a sending domain that stops working, or months of history that leave with the agency's login.

Before you hire an agency

Own the account. The Klaviyo account should be registered to your company, with someone from your business as owner. The agency gets its own user with the access it needs.

Pay for it yourself. Klaviyo should bill your company's card. If the agency pays for the account and invoices you, the account is effectively theirs.

Connect your shop yourself. The integration between Shopify, or whichever platform you use, and Klaviyo should be set up under your own login, so it keeps working if the agency's user is removed.

Send from your own domain. Your emails should be authenticated on a domain you control, so your sending reputation stays with you.

Agree on the handover in writing. The contract should say what you own when it ends: flows, templates, designs, copy and segments. It should also say what the agency does to help hand over.

While the agency works for you

Export your profiles regularly. Klaviyo lets you export lists and segments as files. A copy every month or quarter means you can always rebuild if something goes wrong.

Keep a record of what is running. A simple document listing your live flows, what triggers them and what they earn makes it far easier to check that nothing has been switched off.

Watch the numbers you would notice first. A sudden drop in list size, form submissions or flow revenue is the early warning. Look at them every month even when someone else runs the account.

When you change agency

Remove the old agency's user yourself, on the day the contract ends, after you have confirmed that flows, forms and segments are still live. Then check list size and flow revenue over the next weeks to see that nothing changed.

If you are changing email platform at the same time, read Switching from an expensive email platform to Klaviyo first. If you are choosing a new agency, the questions in How to choose a Klaviyo agency in Denmark are a good place to start.

Where Markeity comes in

If you want someone to check how your account is set up before a change, book a free 15-minute call.