What an eCommerce Growth Agency Does, and What Done-For-You Actually Includes

An eCommerce growth agency runs acquisition and retention as one engine rather than as two vendors: the ad creative, the media buying, the email and SMS that decide what a customer is worth after the first order, and the reporting that ties all of it back to profit. Hayes Media does that work for eCommerce brands, and the front page of hayesmedia.co calls it exactly that: "Growth services for eCommerce brands." We typically work with brands doing at least $100K per month in revenue, and the work is built to help them scale to and beyond $10M a year. One scoreboard governs the whole thing: lifetime gross profit to CAC.

What an eCommerce growth agency actually does

A channel agency is hired to improve a channel. A growth agency is hired to improve the business the channel feeds. Those sound like the same job until the two numbers disagree, and they disagree constantly. Here is the loop a growth agency owns.

• What a customer costs. Creative quality, account structure, spend, and offer. CAC is customer acquisition cost.
• What a customer is worth. Repeat purchase rate, average order value, and gross margin. LTV is lifetime value.
• The gap between the two. That gap is the business. Everything else is a supporting metric.

The reason the jobs belong to one team is auction math. The brand that can afford the highest CAC wins the most impressions, and what you can afford to pay is set by what a customer is worth after acquisition. Improve retention and your acquisition ceiling rises without a single change to the ad account. Split the jobs across two vendors and nobody owns that relationship. The ads team optimizes for a cheaper first order, the email team optimizes for channel revenue, both hit target, and gross profit per customer can still fall. The math is in eCommerce unit economics.

Customers buy with emotion and they justify with logic. That is true on the ad and in the third email after purchase, which is why the same argument should run through both.

What done-for-you actually includes

Done-for-you is the most used and least defined phrase in this category. The useful test is not what an agency says it covers. It is what you stop doing on Monday.

• Ad creative. What the agency runs: Creator sourcing, ideation, scripting, editing, and the variation volume behind a testing system. What you stop doing: Chasing creators and briefing editors.
• Media buying. What the agency runs: Account structure, budgets, scaling and kill decisions, exclusions. What you stop doing: Watching the ad account daily and guessing when to push or pull spend.
• Email and SMS. What the agency runs: Flow builds, campaign calendar, segmentation, deliverability, SMS as its own channel. What you stop doing: Writing and scheduling sends, rebuilding stale flows.
• List growth. What the agency runs: Onsite capture, offers, placement rules, subscriber quality. What you stop doing: Running one popup and hoping.
• Reporting. What the agency runs: One scoreboard tied to profit, with the data source named. What you stop doing: Reconciling three dashboards that disagree.

Two of those lines are full practices with their own pages: what a Meta ads agency does and what an eCommerce email marketing agency does. This page is the version where you buy both from the same building. Our own site describes the retention line this way: "Your repeat customers are the cheapest revenue you have. We increase your repeat purchase rate and customer LTV through done-for-you Email & SMS marketing."

Done-for-you never means done without you. You keep the brand voice, the product decisions, final approval on anything a customer sees, and the assets: the ad account, the Business Manager, the list, the creative files, the raw footage. An agency that wants to hold those is protecting itself against your leaving. What you delegate is the operating: the volume, the sends, the tests, and the daily judgment calls inside the direction you set.

Growth agency vs channel agency vs in house

Three ways to buy this work, and they fail in different places.

• Scope. Growth agency: Acquisition and retention under one scoreboard. Channel agency: One channel, judged on that channel. In house team: Whatever your headcount covers.
• Who owns CAC to LTV. Growth agency: The agency, explicitly. Channel agency: Nobody. In house team: The founder, usually part time.
• Biggest failure mode. Growth agency: Paying for scope you do not need yet. Channel agency: Channel wins while gross profit falls. In house team: Key person leaves and the function stops.
• Best when. Growth agency: Creative throughput and retention are both constraints. Channel agency: One channel is genuinely the only gap. In house team: You can hire senior operators and keep them busy.

The in house column deserves more than a table row. The honest version, including where hiring wins, is in eCommerce agency vs in house.

Who this is for, and who it is not for

This is for you if:

• You're doing at least $100K per month in revenue, or you have the budget and traction to get there. That is the band we usually work in, and you can hold it against your own P&L before you call anyone. It is a guideline, not a gate. A brand below it with a clear budget set aside to scale and real traction on Meta already gives a testing program plenty to read, and we take those on.
• You want to scale to and beyond $10M a year. That is the outcome the work is built for, put on hayesmedia.co as "Take all three or just the one you need, and scale past $10M/year." A destination, not an entry requirement. The route is in how to scale an eCommerce brand.
• Your CAC has climbed and the ads team and the email team blame each other. That argument ends when one team owns both numbers.
• Creative throughput is your bottleneck. You have budget you cannot deploy for lack of good ads to put behind it.
• Retention is an afterthought. Flows built once at launch, a calendar nobody owns, a repeat purchase rate nobody has looked at. Start with eCommerce retention marketing.

This is not for you if:

• You're pre revenue or pre product market fit. Paid social scales a weak offer into a larger loss, and retention cannot manufacture a reason to buy twice.
• You only have one real gap. If media buying is genuinely the single problem, buy media buying. We rank both fields, including shops cheaper than ours, at best Meta ads agencies for eCommerce and best email marketing agencies for eCommerce.
• You want to approve every ad personally. Volume is the mechanism, and approvals cap the flywheel at whatever the founder can review.
• You already run a senior in house buyer, a studio, and a retention lead. Then yours is a management question, not a sourcing one.

How an engagement runs

The sequence is the same on every account, and the first step never gets skipped, because everything after it depends on what it finds.

1. Audit both sides before anything changes. Every ad that has run and what it earned, plus every flow, its trigger logic, sending reputation, and what it earns. What your customers already responded to is the cheapest research available, and almost nobody reads it.
2. Agree the scoreboard and its data source. Lifetime gross profit to CAC, with platform and channel numbers as supporting views rather than the verdict.
3. Fix what is leaking before adding volume. Deliverability, exclusions, and account structure. Pushing spend through a broken setup buys a bigger version of the same problem.
4. Write the creative strategy. Angles, offers, objections, and the customer beliefs each concept is built to move, mapped to a production plan.
5. Rebuild the flows that carry the most automated revenue, highest earner first. Each ships live as it is finished rather than waiting for the full set.
6. Ship the first creative batch against a kill rule set in advance, then cut. Losers stop. Winners get rebuilt into iteration trees: new hooks, new formats, new creators carrying the same proven argument.
7. Take over the campaign calendar and layer SMS. Segmented sends against a planned offer strategy, with SMS as its own channel rather than a copy of the email.
8. Scale spend behind proven creative, with the retention ceiling now higher. This is where the two sides compound.
9. Report against the scoreboard, then repeat. What spent, what it returned, what those customers are worth, and what changes.

The proof

Every figure below is quoted exactly as it appears on our own pages.

From hayesmedia.co:

• "Growth services for eCommerce brands"
• "Trusted by 57+ eCom brands"
• "Meta ad creative, Meta media buying, Email & SMS. Take all three or just the one you need, and scale past $10M/year."
• "Our Performance Creative Process has produced winning ads that have spent $100,000's with on-target metrics."
• "We run your ads using the media buying strategies that we've refined over 8 years and millions in ad spend."

From our retention practice at email.hayesmedia.co:

• "Trusted by 50+ eCom brands"
• "$500M+ Client revenue driven"
• "15x Average ROI"
• "8 yrs Retention expertise"
• "We grow client lists 3.1x faster. More subscribers, more revenue, lower CAC."

Three case studies published under "Services: Paid Acquisition and Retention Marketing", which is this page's model rather than a single channel.

• Remi. Figures as published: "12,400% Revenue Growth" / "150% ROAS Increase".
• Euclove. Figures as published: "1,200% Revenue Growth".
• Mammoth Headwear. Figures as published: "419% Revenue Growth" / "3.3x Conv. Rate Increase".

ROAS is return on ad spend. One line in the Remi study matters more than any percentage above it. The combined work "turned what was an unprofitable CAC to a profitable CAC for new customer acquisition, and led to tremendous revenue and LTV growth." A revenue percentage says the account got bigger. A CAC going from unprofitable to profitable says the business got better, with both sides moving together.

One more from the retention page, on a single account: "0% → 59% of Revenue from Retention", "+140% Total Revenue YoY", and "54% Returning Customer Rate". Those last two are business numbers, not channel numbers.

One honest limit, the same one we give ourselves in our ranked lists: those case studies are published by us, on our own site. We have no third party review profile.

How to judge any growth agency

Run this on us and on everyone else you are shortlisting. One call.

1. Ask what single number they will be judged on. If acquisition and retention get separate scoreboards, you have bought two channel agencies in one invoice.
2. Ask who raises the acquisition budget when retention improves. A real growth agency moves the CAC ceiling deliberately when LTV moves. If nobody connects those, the connection is decorative.
3. Ask how many creatives they will test per month, and where those come from. Their studio, contracted editors, or your own footage recycled. That tells you whether creative is a function or a favor.
4. Ask what their hit rate is, and what happens to a miss and to a winner. Winners divided by ads tested. A miss should die against a threshold set in advance. A winner should be rebuilt, not just scaled.
5. Ask about their discount policy. What share of sends carry a code, and what they do when revenue is behind plan. This is where retention revenue gets bought with gross margin.
6. Ask who touches the account, and what they will not do. Names and seniority, not a team page, and how many accounts that person carries. An agency that serves everyone at every size has not thought about fit.
7. Ask what leaving looks like. Ad account, Business Manager, pixel setup, list, flows, templates, creative files, and raw footage. This is the question brands most regret not asking.

When this does not fit

Your margin cannot carry paid acquisition at all. Thin gross margin per order and no second purchase in the category is not an agency problem. The fix is pricing, product, or a different channel.

Your constraint is operations, not marketing. Stockouts, fulfillment failures, and an unanswered support queue all show up as a retention problem. Growth spend only makes that louder.

You need the capability on your own payroll. A legitimate choice with a real payoff. Agency work transfers output, not headcount.

You are not willing to share margin data. Lifetime gross profit to CAC needs your cost of goods. Without it, everyone is back to grading dashboards, and you have bought a channel agency again.