You can pull off good email marketing campaigns with the right approach to segmentation, customer journeys, and automation.

But you won’t achieve greatness in your email marketing without the right dev resources.

We’ve had plenty of new email marketing clients express surprise at the range of capabilities our development team can offer – with a lot of those capabilities paying immediate dividends when put into action.

If you’re in an RFP process for a new email marketing agency, I’ll lay out a bunch of questions that I recommend you ask – and I’ll explain why it’s important to get the right answers.

What are some of your development team’s first steps in a new engagement?

When we start a new engagement, we quickly audit the client’s existing email ecosystem and dynamic logic to make updates to their existing emails within their own code, while also integrating our own, freshly designed templates into their ESP.

Clients, of course, don’t stop sending emails during an agency transition. We step in to keep campaigns moving with a focus on executing their requirements/needs of the send (which can be off-the-cuff and time-sensitive), while ensuring the email renders well, is still aesthetically pleasing and on brand and includes alignment with the client on what we’re testing and what KPIs we’re targeting.

Is your development team versed in ADA compliance?

I wish prospective clients would ask this question more often. It signifies that brands care about a topic with two big layers of significance: inclusivity that engages more users, and risk mitigation from being compliant with enforceable legislation.

At DMi Partners, our CRM team puts a premium on keeping our clients ADA-compliant. We code our emails according to the regulation, and we perform regular checks on things like color combinations to make sure we’re meeting color-contrast requirements. To do this, we leverage third-party tools that have an ADA checker through which we run our templates and one-off designs for compliance. (This comes in very handy for things like off-the-cuff color suggestions that haven’t been checked for compliance.)

For new clients, we’ll audit and refresh a brand’s current email campaigns by taking a deep dive into the style(s) of their one-off emails and their suite of transactional journeys. This helps us get the client up to code on ADA compliance, and we often learn that it’s time for the brand to do a more general overhaul of their broader email content landscape.

One important call-out here is that Dark Mode is a challenging setting that’s getting more popular within email designs. Dark Mode can create massive ADA compliance issues, as each inbox provider translates emails into their own unique version of Dark Mode. At DMi, we ensure our freshly designed templates are legible even within the differing renderings of Dark Mode; we also make sure to retain the visibility of brand logos and evergreen assets (which can sometimes get lost in translated color switches of Dark Mode).

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Which ESPs does your development team have experience with?

Each of the major ESP platforms like Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, eMarsys, and SFMC (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) presents a range of functional complexities that often leave clients needing to submit tickets to the ESP in question and then translate the technical jargon they get in response. We’ve inherited many brands using each of those ESPs who struggled to implement certain tasks (e.g. personalized messaging) on their own, without an agency liaison.

In particular, SFMC’s range of solutions is so robust in the right hands (by which I mean someone with knowledge in coding languages like Ampscript, SQL, SSJS, and more) that you’re wasting money and resources by investing in SFMC without developer skill to match. If an agency does claim SFMC experience, ask a follow-up question about what kind of functionality they’ve employed using SFMC.

Can your development team stay faithful to our branding as we implement different functionalities?

This is a super-smart question that provokes a question back from our team: “Can you provide brand book guidelines, so that we can also ask the correct questions back to further understand your needs?”

Often, the Dark Mode setting I mentioned earlier is the impetus for this question. Certain brands want to use Dark Mode but preserve their logo and evergreen assets (e.g. social media icons) at the same time. This can be a challenge, but we look to balance strict branding compliance with the brand’s eagerness to use Dark Mode and find the best possible (and ADA-compliant) design outcomes.

In this conversation, we can also drill down into issues like customer brand fonts that we can research to see if hosting is required. It sets a good base for a smoother working relationship that won’t result in future issues that pop up to delay campaign sends.

How personalized can we get? We’d like to set up new journeys.

This is another question we LOVE getting, since it’s indicative of savvy client partners and since we’re fully versed in the power of smart automation like Welcome Series, Abandon Cart, flows tailored to interests, and beyond.

This question gives us license to study a brand’s first-party data set-up to see what we can leverage. Information like the user’s first name, user product preferences or affinity, location information, and interests are all highly valuable for crafting relevant journeys that boost engagement.

Final thoughts

If you’ve got 3-4 agencies involved in your RFP, I’m guessing this list of questions will produce a surprising range of answers. Of course, depending on your setup, your ESP, and the maturity of your email campaigns – not to mention your in-house resources – you may not need your email marketing agency partners to flex the most advanced dev muscles you can hire. The important thing is to know what you need and understand the questions to ask to assess whether the agency in question can provide it.

In a landscape of increasingly tight regulation and spam guidelines, not to mention savvy users, the more engaging, accessible, and personalized your email campaigns, the bigger your competitive edge.