What to Send an Ecommerce Marketing Agency Before Your First Call

What to send an ecommerce marketing agency before your first call determines how fast the engagement starts producing results. The agencies that ramp fastest in month one are not the ones that ask the best discovery questions. They are the ones whose clients arrived prepared. A brand that sends ad account access, Shopify analytics, email platform data, historical performance, brand assets, an ICP document, and 90-day goals before the kickoff call compresses the agency’s diagnostic phase from four weeks to one. That month of ramp time is not recovered later.

This guide covers exactly what to send an ecommerce marketing agency before your first call, what each asset enables the agency to do faster, and what your preparation signals about brand readiness before a single word is spoken.

The Takeaway: Knowing what to send an ecommerce marketing agency before your first call is not about impressing the agency. It is about buying back the first month of your retainer by making their diagnostic phase redundant before you pay for it.

Table of Contents

→ 1. Ad Account Access: The Highest-Impact Item to Send First
→ 2. Shopify Analytics and GA4: Your Conversion Baseline
→ 3. Email Platform Access: Klaviyo Flow and List Health Data
→ 4. Historical Performance Data: What Actually Happened
→ 5. Brand Assets and Guidelines
→ 6. Your ICP Document: Who Your Best Customers Actually Are
→ 7. Your 90-Day Goals With Named KPIs
→ What Your Preparation Signals to the Agency
→ The Bottom Line on What to Send an Ecommerce Marketing Agency
→ FAQ: Common Questions About Preparing for Your First Agency Call

1. Ad Account Access: The Highest-Impact Item to Send First

Sending ad account access before the first call is the single highest-leverage preparation action in the list. It allows the agency to audit your campaign structure, creative history, audience performance, attribution setup, and pixel health before the kickoff, which means the first call can be a strategic conversation rather than a data collection exercise. Without prior access, the agency spends the first call asking questions it could have answered in 30 minutes of account review.

What to send for paid media: Meta Business Suite admin access (not page admin: Business Suite admin level is required), Google Ads manager access at the account level, TikTok Ads manager access if running TikTok, and Google Merchant Center access if running Shopping campaigns. Always retain ownership of every account. Grant the agency access as a partner or manager, never transfer ownership. An agency that requests ownership transfer rather than partner access is a concern before the relationship begins.

The access request should come within 48 hours of signing. If an agency does not send a structured access checklist within 48 hours of contract signing, that is your first process signal. Strong agencies know that access delays are the primary cause of launch delays, and they front-load the request accordingly. For a full breakdown of what a strong agency does in month one once access is granted, the guide to what an ecommerce marketing agency actually does covers the complete onboarding sequence.

2. Shopify Analytics and GA4: Your Conversion Baseline

Shopify analytics and Google Analytics 4 access gives the agency your real conversion data before the first word of strategy is spoken. Without it, the agency builds its initial recommendations on industry benchmarks rather than your actual store performance. With it, the first call can focus on the specific gaps between your current conversion rates, traffic mix, and revenue per session against what the agency knows is achievable for your product category and price point.

What to send: GA4 Editor access via your agency’s Gmail address, Shopify collaborator access or a read-only staff account, and any existing Looker Studio or reporting dashboards you use internally. If you use a third-party attribution tool such as Triple Whale or Northbeam, include read access to that as well. The agency cannot improve what it cannot measure, and it cannot establish accurate baselines without access to your actual data.

One important flag: if your GA4 is misconfigured, under-reporting, or missing ecommerce event tracking, tell the agency before the call rather than after. Agencies that discover broken analytics during the audit spend their first two weeks on tracking fixes rather than strategy. Knowing the state of your measurement infrastructure upfront allows the agency to scope tracking remediation correctly and set realistic expectations for when campaign optimization can begin.

3. Email Platform Access: Klaviyo Flow and List Health Data

Email platform access before the first call gives the agency a complete picture of your retention infrastructure before anyone discusses strategy. For Shopify brands, this typically means Klaviyo access. What the agency looks for in the audit: which flows are active and what their trigger logic is, list size and recent growth rate, open and click rates against industry benchmarks, deliverability health indicators, flow revenue attribution, and whether SMS is configured alongside email.

Grant the agency Klaviyo Manager access, not viewer-only. Manager access allows the agency to see flow logic, segment definitions, and suppression lists that viewer access hides. If you are not on Klaviyo and use a different email platform, send the equivalent manager-level access. If you have no email flows active at all, send that information directly before the call. It is one of the highest-value gaps an agency can close quickly, and knowing it upfront means the agency arrives to the first call with flow architecture recommendations already drafted rather than discovering the gap during discovery.

4. Historical Performance Data: What Actually Happened

Historical performance data is what separates a first call with an informed agency from a first call with one operating on assumptions. The most useful formats: a 12-month paid media performance export from Meta and Google showing spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA, and ROAS by campaign; a Shopify revenue report showing monthly revenue, average order value, and top-selling products for the past 12 months; and an email performance summary showing list growth, flow revenue, and campaign metrics for the same period.

If your previous agency or in-house team produced monthly reports, send the last three. They contain context the raw data does not: what was tested, what failed, what was deprioritized and why. The pattern in your historical data is often more informative than the numbers themselves. An agency that sees three months of Meta spend cuts followed by revenue decline can immediately identify whether the brand is paid-media-dependent in a way that requires diversification. That is a strategic insight that takes the first call to surface without historical context, and takes thirty seconds to surface with it.

One honest caveat: many Shopify brands arrive at their first agency call with incomplete or inconsistent historical data because reporting was not set up properly under a previous agency or in-house setup. That is not a disqualifier. Send what you have and note the gaps explicitly. An agency that receives incomplete data and does not flag it as a measurement infrastructure issue is a concern. For more on how measurement should be set up from day one, the ecommerce AI search benchmarks guide covers how attribution and citation tracking should work together in a coordinated program.

5. Brand Assets and Guidelines

Brand assets sent before the first call allow the agency to produce initial creative concepts before the kickoff rather than after. What to include: vector logo files in SVG or EPS format, brand color hex codes, approved font files or Google Fonts references, a brand voice and tone guide if one exists, approved photography and lifestyle imagery, and any existing ad creative that has run previously regardless of performance. Include the top performers and the failures. Both inform creative strategy.

If you do not have a formal brand guidelines document, a one-page brief covering your brand voice (three adjectives that describe how you write), your visual aesthetic (three reference brands or campaigns you admire), what your brand never does, and who your customer is covers 80% of what an agency needs to begin creative work. The agency cannot produce on-brand creative without knowing what on-brand means for your store. Brands that skip this step get generic creative in the first month. Brands that provide it get concepts aligned to their aesthetic from week one.

6. Your ICP Document: Who Your Best Customers Actually Are

An ICP document (ideal customer profile) is the context that makes everything the agency does more efficient. Without it, the agency builds targeting assumptions from your product category. With it, the agency builds targeting from your actual best customers. Those are different starting points, and the gap compounds across every creative decision, audience segment, and content angle the agency produces.

What to include in a basic ICP document for an ecommerce agency: your top three customer segments by revenue contribution, what problem each segment is solving with your product, where each segment discovers your brand, what their average order value is, what their repeat purchase rate is, and two or three verbatim customer quotes that capture why they bought. If you have a Klaviyo customer suppression list showing your highest-LTV cohort, include it. The agency that knows your best customers before the first call produces better targeting from week two than an agency that spends six weeks building that picture from scratch.

7. Your 90-Day Goals With Named KPIs

Arriving at your first agency call with named 90-day goals and specific KPI targets is the preparation item most brands skip and most agencies wish they had. Without it, the first call negotiates what success looks like rather than planning how to achieve it. That negotiation, if deferred to post-kickoff, delays the establishment of accountability benchmarks and leaves both sides operating on unaligned assumptions for the first four to six weeks.

Useful 90-day goals for an ecommerce marketing agency engagement are specific and revenue-connected: a target blended ROAS, a cost per acquisition ceiling, a revenue from email as a percentage of total revenue, a citation volume target across AI platforms, or a conversion rate improvement on a specific page type. Vague goals produce vague strategies. An agency that receives “grow our revenue” as a 90-day objective has no accountability anchor. An agency that receives “reach $4 ROAS on Meta and 20% of revenue from email within 90 days” can build a month-one plan directly against those targets.

If you are not sure what realistic 90-day targets look like for your revenue stage and channel mix, ask the agency in the first call to propose them based on your historical data. That conversation is more productive than either side guessing in isolation. For context on what benchmarks to reference, the Shopify marketing agency pricing guide includes performance timeline expectations by channel and stage.

What Your Preparation Signals to the Agency

What you send an ecommerce marketing agency before your first call signals more about your brand’s readiness than anything you say during the call itself. Agencies assess client fit during discovery just as brands assess agency fit. A brand that arrives with complete access, organized historical data, a clear ICP, and named KPI targets signals three things: measurement maturity, operational discipline, and a readiness to hold the agency accountable. Those three signals make the agency’s best people want to work on the account.

The inverse is equally true. A brand that arrives with no access granted, no historical data, and a goal of “just grow our sales” signals that the first month of retainer will be spent building the foundation rather than building the strategy. That is not a disqualifier. Many brands are at that stage and benefit enormously from agency help getting there. But it does mean expectations need to be calibrated accordingly, and the 90-day targets should reflect the setup time required before optimization can begin.

The brands that get the most from ecommerce agency relationships are the ones that treat the first call as a strategy session, not an interview. Preparation makes that possible. An agency that receives seven well-prepared assets before the kickoff arrives ready to talk strategy. An agency that receives nothing arrives ready to ask questions. The difference in the quality of the first call, and the quality of month one, is significant. The Leadsie agency onboarding guide covers the full checklist from the agency’s perspective so you understand exactly what they are trying to collect and why.

The Bottom Line on What to Send an Ecommerce Marketing Agency

Knowing what to send an ecommerce marketing agency before your first call compresses their diagnostic phase, eliminates the most common onboarding delays, and shifts the first conversation from discovery to strategy. The seven items (ad account access, Shopify analytics and GA4, email platform access, historical performance data, brand assets and guidelines, an ICP document, and named 90-day KPIs) are not a bureaucratic checklist. Each one removes a specific bottleneck that otherwise costs time and retainer fees before the agency produces anything of value.

The preparation also serves a selection function. An agency that does not ask for most of these items before the kickoff, or that does not explain why each item matters for their process, is operating without a structured onboarding system. Strong agencies have documented access checklists, structured intake forms, and a clear timeline from contract signing to first campaign live. Your preparation readiness and their onboarding structure are both signals worth evaluating before you sign.

Send the seven items, confirm access is live before the kickoff date, arrive with named KPI targets, and treat the first call as the strategy session it should be. The brands that do this consistently get better results in month one, hold their agencies more accountable through month six, and build the kind of agency relationship that compounds over time rather than degrading after the honeymoon period ends.

Frequently Asked Questions: What to Send an Ecommerce Marketing Agency