5 Mistakes Brands Make When Hiring a Retention Marketing Agency—And How to Avoid Them

Hiring the right retention marketing agency can unlock explosive growth for your brand—or drain time and resources if you choose the wrong partner. While most brands understand the importance of retention, they often make avoidable mistakes when bringing in an agency.

Here are five of the most common pitfalls DTC brands face when hiring a retention partner—and how to avoid them.

1. Choosing a Generalist Instead of a Specialist

The Mistake: Hiring a full-service or performance agency to manage retention when their expertise lies in paid media or creative production.

Why It’s a Problem: Retention is a different muscle. It requires fluency in lifecycle strategy, owned channels, data segmentation, and platform-specific execution (think Klaviyo, Yotpo, Attentive—not just Meta ads).

How to Avoid It: Partner with a firm that specializes in retention. Look for demonstrated expertise in post-purchase flows, LTV modeling, and customer journey mapping.

Related: The 2025 Guide to Choosing a Retention Marketing Agency

2. Focusing on Price Over Performance

The Mistake: Prioritizing cost over quality by choosing the lowest bidder or hourly freelancer.

Why It’s a Problem: Low-cost providers may lack strategic rigor, creative resources, or testing frameworks. You might save in the short term but miss out on long-term gains like improved retention rate or LTV.

How to Avoid It: Compare value, not just price. Ask potential partners how their work impacts business outcomes like AOV, CAC payback, and second purchase rate.

3. Overlooking Creative and Testing Capabilities

The Mistake: Assuming retention is just automations and sending emails.

Why It’s a Problem: High-performing retention programs are built on continuous testing—subject lines, CTA placement, segmentation logic, send time, SMS timing, and creative presentation all matter.

How to Avoid It: Look for a retention agency that builds and tests creative assets, runs structured experiments, and shares results transparently.

Bonus: See the Traits of Top Retention Agencies

4. Ignoring Platform-Specific Experience

The Mistake: Hiring an agency that doesn’t understand your core tech stack.

Why It’s a Problem: Each retention tool—like Klaviyo, Recharge, Yotpo, or Attentive—has unique capabilities and limitations. Without platform expertise, agencies can’t fully optimize your lifecycle experience.

How to Avoid It: Ask about hands-on experience with your stack. Great retention partners will know how to use dynamic content, predictive segmentation, and integrations across tools.

5. Expecting Strategy Without Partnership

The Mistake: Hiring an agency and expecting them to “just run things” without internal collaboration.

Why It’s a Problem: Retention lives at the intersection of marketing, CX, ops, and product. Your agency needs to collaborate with internal teams to sync calendars, access product insights, and adjust creative based on feedback.

How to Avoid It: Choose a partner, not a vendor. Ask about communication cadence, onboarding, and how they integrate into your team’s workflow.

Work With a Retention Agency That Gets It Right

At Sticky Digital, we’ve helped hundreds of Shopify brands scale retention through tailored lifecycle strategy, powerful creative, and constant iteration. We’re a retention-first agency built to help DTC brands grow sustainably.

If you're ready to skip the red flags and work with a team that knows what it takes to win, we’d love to connect.

👉 Let’s talk about your retention program.