DMi Partners Blog

From Keywords to Conversations: How AI is Redefining Organic Search

Joshua May — 2026-06-04T10:01:35+00:00

If you’re managing organic search for a brand right now, you’ve probably noticed that the rules have changed. The strategies that drove results two or three years ago are producing diminishing returns, and the platforms your audience uses for discovery have quietly multiplied. In this post, we’ll walk through the changes we’re seeing in organic search, why they matter, and how to build a strategy that can hold up to the everchanging search landscape.

Understanding the New Search Ecosystem

Before getting into tactics, it helps to reframe what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means today. SEO is no longer just the practice of ranking on Google. It’s the practice of growing a brand’s organic discoverability across the entire digital search ecosystem: traditional search engines, AI assistants, chat-based platforms, social search, marketplaces, feeds, and communities.

That’s a significantly bigger surface area than most brands are currently managing for. And it starts with accepting that Google, while still dominant, is now just one channel among many.

How AI Has Changed the SERP

The most visible shift over the past year or so is how AI has taken over the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Google’s AI Overviews are now often the first thing a user sees, placed above the traditional links that SEO has always been optimized around.

What’s more, AI answers are increasingly linking to website content as sources. We predict that AI will continue absorbing sponsored sections, local packs, and information cards until it becomes the default SERP experience. Brands that aren’t thinking about how AI retrieves and cites their content are already behind.

A Word on Zero-Click

Zero-click behavior (users getting their question answered directly in search results without visiting a site) has increased alongside the rise of AI answers.

While that concept seems scary on the surface, we’ve found that when AI handles the quick, low-intent queries, the users who do click through tend to be more purposeful and further along in the funnel. The quality of remaining traffic improves, and when those visits are properly nurtured, the revenue impact per visitor increases proportionally. Zero-click is a filter, and it’s one that rewards brands investing in genuinely useful content.

AI Evaluates Websites Like a Human Would

One of the more important developments for how brands should approach content: machine learning now assesses websites the same way that real users do. Search engines and AI systems aren’t just crawling for keywords anymore. They’re also evaluating whether the content truly helps people.

Does the page answer the question? Is it written by someone with real expertise? Does it reflect genuine experience? This is the core of Google’s E-E-A-T framework, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and it’s become a central filter for organic performance. Publishing keyword-laced blog posts just to compete for SERP real estate is a failing strategy, and building keyword lists without grounding them in real user intent isn’t enough anymore.

Apps Are Now Search Engines

As AI gets integrated into mobile apps, like Google Maps, TikTok, Pinterest, and beyond, users are increasingly turning to whatever app they already trust to search for what they need. Those apps’ internal search tools have become legitimate search engines in their own right.

A younger consumer looking for a product recommendation isn’t going to Google first. They’re likely searching TikTok, scrolling an Instagram feed, or asking their phone’s AI assistant. A B2B buyer might start on LinkedIn or in a Slack community. This means the keyword has evolved into something broader. It’s now a component of a larger collection of questions, queries, and prompts spread across multiple platforms.

What a Modern Organic Search Strategy Looks Like

Given all of this, the brands that grow through organic search will be those building audience-centered strategies, not search engine-centered ones. Here’s how to put that into practice:

Define Your Search Ecosystem

Not all search platforms serve the same audience, so the first step is identifying which platforms reach the largest share of your specific target audience. A B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) brand and a DTC apparel brand have entirely different search ecosystems. Strategy should follow the audience, not the algorithm.

Research Queries, Not Just Keywords

The old practice of building keyword lists needs to expand into researching the full scope of questions, keywords, and prompts your audience is using. What are they asking? What are they typing into different search bars? What are they prompting AI assistants with? These queries should then be mapped across the funnel so content investment goes where it will have the most impact.

Build Topic Clusters, Not Isolated Posts

Individual posts optimized for single keywords don’t reflect how AI or users process information. Modern content strategy calls for topic clusters, pages that work together to establish depth and authority on a subject. Layer in question-and-answer formats to address specific user queries and invest in original research and expert-led perspectives. Those are the content types that earn citations from AI systems and links from other sites.

Don’t Abandon Technical SEO

Traditional technical SEO is still foundational. AI systems use what’s called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) which is a process where AI pulls information from search engines to generate factual, real-time answers rather than relying solely on what it already knows. If a site isn’t technically sound and properly indexed, it won’t be retrieved. Brands should also strengthen schema markup and structure content in ways that are easy for AI to process and cite.

Rethink How You Measure Success

Traffic volume and keyword rankings alone don’t tell the full story anymore. A brand can lose clicks and still gain significant influence if AI is regularly citing its content as a source. Measurement frameworks should include content engagement, conversion rates, and the impact of AI mentions and citations on branded search and referral traffic.

The Bottom Line

Keywords still matter, because they reflect how real people express real needs. But they’re no longer the organizing principle of a strong strategy. They’re one input into a broader framework built on audience intent, topical authority, genuine answers, and ongoing discoverability across more platforms than ever before.

The brands that get discovered by AI will be the ones creating content that humans love and that search engines want to surface. Build that, and the visibility will follow.

The search landscape is complex, and keeping up takes the right partner. DMi Partners specializes in modern organic strategies built around audience intent, topical authority, and AI discoverability. Reach out to see what that looks like for your brand.

How to Leverage ShopMy for Smarter Affiliate Attribution & Growth

Ellen Hoffman — 2026-05-28T10:01:35+00:00

If you’re managing creator-forward affiliate programs for multiple brands or products, you already know the challenge: there’s no shortage of data, but turning that data into meaningful growth takes the right tools and the right strategy. ShopMy has become a powerful platform in our toolkit for doing exactly that and, in this post, we’ll walk through how we use it, what to look for, and how we applied these practices to a real DMi campaign.

Understanding the ShopMy Platform

Before diving into strategy, it helps to understand what ShopMy actually gives you access to. ShopMy is essentially a creator-driven affiliate platform that allows brands to connect directly with creators, track performance, and manage campaigns all in one place.

Features vary depending on which package a brand is on, so it’s important to know your capabilities before setting expectations.

Communicating with Creators Inside ShopMy

ShopMy offers several tools that make creator outreach and campaign management much more streamlined than traditional methods. Lookbooks for gifting, creator opportunities, and direct messaging all live within the platform, so you can manage relationships and campaigns without bouncing between tools.

These features create a documented trail of communication and campaign activity that feeds directly into your analytics. What makes ShopMy particularly valuable is that it’s one of the first creator platforms to give brands access to individual creator performance data without requiring a significant upfront investment. Having that granular, creator-level data readily accessible makes it far easier to pull insights and translate them into strategic recommendationsm without needing to commit to a multi-thousand dollar campaign just to learn what’s working.

Making the Most of a ShopMy Looker Dashboard

Beyond ShopMy’s native analytics, our team leverages a proprietary Looker Dashboard that consolidates performance data across our entire brand portfolio, giving us a more streamlined cross-brand view. While building something similar requires internal development resources, the underlying principle is essentially: the more visibility you have across campaigns, the smarter your decisions become.

Here are a few ways we use our Looker dashboard:

Find Pre-Existing Brand Advocates

By filtering the date range to before a brand joined ShopMy Pro, we can identify creators who were already promoting the brand on their own without any outreach or gifting. These are warm, authentic advocates who are often the best candidates for deeper engagement.

Understand Retailer-Specific Behavior

If a brand sells across multiple retailers, the dashboard pulls in performance across all of them. That means you might spot creators driving traffic to a retailer’s site instead of the brand’s DTC site, which is a clear signal to reach out and encourage direct linking.

Track Creator Activity Over Time

Digging into the month-by-month view and expanding to the creator level reveals who’s been consistently active, who’s fallen off, and who might be worth re-engaging through gifting or a new opportunity.

Leverage Cross-Brand Learnings

One of the real advantages of managing multiple brands on ShopMy is being able to cross-reference what’s working. If you’re managing two brands in a similar space, you can look at which creators are performing well for one brand and explore whether they’d be a fit for the other.

Building Relationships That Last

Affiliate programs built on one-off transactions rarely perform as well as those grounded in genuine, ongoing creator relationships. The brands that see the best results from ShopMy are the ones investing in those relationships consistently through regular communication, thoughtful gifting, and personalized outreach.

Getting to know each creator’s strengths, content style, and audience helps you tailor your approach over time. That kind of attention builds trust, and trust leads to more authentic promotion, which ultimately shows up in the numbers.

NAADAM: A Case Study

One of our clients, NAADAM, opted into the ShopMy Pro Package in August 2025. Prior to that, the brand was available for creators to link to on ShopMy, but there wasn’t any outreach, gifting, or direct creator engagement.

Once we onboarded them into the Pro Package, the first step was identifying creators whose audiences closely matched NAADAM’s target customer. Using ShopMy’s analytics, we prioritized partners with strong engagement and a demonstrated ability to drive sales.

From there, we set campaign goals and provided detailed briefs so creators knew exactly what the brand was looking for. ShopMy’s platform also gives brands visibility into any competing or complementary brands a creator is already promoting. This is a very strong filter for identifying creators who are already fans of similar, like-minded brands and are therefore more likely to authentically support yours.

The results after just four months:

300% increase in creators promoting NAADAM via ShopMy
1,723% increase in creator-driven revenue
540% increase in creator-driven traffic
200+ creators gifted
60% promotion rate, meaning 6 in 10 creators who received a gift went on to actively promote the brand through linking

Additionally, 7 of NAADAM’s top 10 revenue-driving creators in that period were net-new partnerships sourced through DMi’s efforts. Relationships that didn’t exist before.

These numbers are a strong reminder of what’s possible when strategy, data, and execution come together. The impact wasn’t just reflected in the numbers. Here’s how NAADAM’s team described the partnership:

“Working with DMi has been a great extension of our influencer strategy team. They’ve helped support and manage our affiliate programs while collaborating closely with us to ensure everything stays aligned with our brand goals and priorities. Especially as a seasonal brand, where so much of our effort is concentrated within key time periods, having a strong partner to help execute alongside our internal strategy has been incredibly valuable.” — Luke Roehm, Social, Influencer, and Creative Operations Assistant, NAADAM

NAADAM offers sustainable, quality cashmere clothing and already has a solid brand foundation and popular product. Layered with consistent performance reviews, proactive creator outreach, and ongoing collaboration between the account manager and influencer teams, we were able to elevate their brand on ShopMy and beyond.

Final Thoughts

ShopMy is a powerful platform that can reliably support your affiliate strategy. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to scale an existing program, the key is to use the ShopMy data to build real relationships with creators, and stay closely aligned between your strategy and execution teams. When all those pieces are in place, the growth potential is substantial, and can last longer than a high-quality cashmere sweater (which is 10 years or more, if you can believe it).

Best Practices for Migrating an Affiliate Program to Impact.com

Zach Labenberg — 2026-05-07T10:01:35+00:00

Migrating affiliate platforms is one of the most operationally demanding projects in program management. Common motivators include cost efficiency, improved reporting and attribution, more flexible commissioning, and access to a broader publisher base. In some cases, it’s simply that the current platform can no longer support the program’s growth.

Impact.com has become a go-to destination for brands making this move, thanks to its advanced tracking, automation, and commissioning capabilities. Here are some best practices, tips, and insights to ensure a smooth transition.

What to Confirm Before Migration Begins

Before the work kicks off, align internally on three key areas to avoid surprises mid-migration:

Reporting & Attribution

Impact offers cross-channel visibility and commission de-duplication across channels like email, SMS, or paid media through its Optimize platform. If eliminating commission waste is a priority, that capability alone can justify the migration.

Commissioning Flexibility

Most major networks, including Impact, support dynamic commissions and customizable commission structures, but the depth varies by provider. Confirm your needs around:

SKU-level commissions
New vs. returning customer logic
Partner-specific cookie windows

International Publisher Access

Not all platforms support international publishers equally. Impact supports international publishers across a wide range of markets, making it a strong choice for brands with global programs or international growth goals.

The Migration Timeline

A well-run migration moves through three distinct phases:

Aggregate publisher list for migration and send to Impact to be scrubbed
Build publisher migration tracker + assign priority by partner
Outline all network copy including, but not limited to, marketplace profile, bio, automatic email responders, publisher text links, network sign-up page, migration messaging, etc.
Outline all publisher template T&Cs
List all publisher groups
Pull direct Content partner links

Implement approved copy, as well as upload logos, banner creative, and info for sign-up page
Set up all template T&Cs
Create publisher groups
Tech team to begin implementing tracking

Status of migration will be updated regularly within a shared Migration Tracker
Align on communicated deadline for publishers to move
We recommend giving publishers 4 weeks notice - once at the 4-week point, we recommend sending a NL within the existing network and moving commission to 0%

In terms of overall calendar time, most migrations take roughly 9-12 weeks.

Partner Outreach & Prioritization

Not all partners need to be treated the same way during a migration. Triage your publisher list early and build your outreach strategy around these tiers:

High

Revenue-active partners. These get dedicated, personal outreach first, and should be your team’s primary focus for the first 4-6 weeks. The goal is 100% migration of this tier.

Medium

Click-active partners and high-quality non-actives (well-known publishers, recently joined but not yet generating revenue). These get dedicated outreach but at a lower urgency level.

Low

Non-active partners that still warrant outreach. These are typically identified by reviewing the partner list manually and flagging any publishers worth bringing over even if they haven’t been driving volume.

Note: Outreach should be sent in multiple rounds with a minimum of three touches per partner as a reasonable baseline. After two rounds with no response from a high-priority partner, it’s worth escalating to senior account management.

Influencer Programs: A Special Case

Influencers frequently promote brands through vanity codes rather than tracked links. Even if they have no links to update, they still need to join Impact for their codes to track properly. Export your existing vanity code list from the current network and upload it to Impact immediately at the start of migration. Proactively explain why joining the new platform is required and what they risk (missed commissions) if they don’t migrate. Define and communicate a hard deadline, and enforce it.

Risks & Rewards: Set Expectations

Potential Risks

Temporary drop in active partner count
Revenue gap during transition window
Slow-moving partners causing link breakage
Commissioning nuances not configured in time
Influencer code tracking gaps
Reporting discrepancies between old and new network

Potential Rewards

Lower network cost as % of revenue
Improved ROAS through commission de-duplication
Better partner mix (strategic vs. discount-heavy)
More granular attribution and reporting
Access to publishers not available on old platform
Stronger commissioning flexibility long-term

Migrations involve short-term disruption but long-term upside. Align stakeholders early on the following:

Network Contracts

Watch auto-renewals. Many contracts renew on fixed dates but require 60-90 days’ notice to cancel.
Check non-circumvention clauses. These may restrict outreach to publishers until the current program is fully closed.
Understand breach terms. Inactive or non-compliant programs can sometimes be shut down without notice.

Publisher Migration

Expect added costs. Some publishers charge migration fees.
Plan for partial adoption. Typically, only 50-70% of partners migrate within the first four weeks.
Verify tracking. A partner saying they’ve migrated doesn’t mean links are working.
Run both programs concurrently during the transition. Do not remove the old program’s pixel until the majority of publishers have confirmed migration to Impact.com. Cutting off the old program too early is one of the most common causes of tracking loss during a migration.

Impact.com Setup

Configure commissions upfront. Set rules (codes, customer types, cookie windows) before partners join.
Align reporting early. If you run domestic and international programs, ensure consistent reporting before launch.
Secure vanity codes immediately. Export and upload influencer codes at the start to avoid lost attribution.

Timing Your Migration

Avoid Q4 entirely if possible. We recommend migrating between January and September. Starting in Q4, many publishers enter freezes where they won’t add new tracking, support migrations, or may charge additional fees to do so.
Work around your brand’s key moments. Friends & Family sales, new product launches, major promotional periods, or any other high-stakes moment is the wrong time to be mid-migration. Map out your brand calendar before locking in a start date and build your timeline around it.

A successful migration to Impact.com is an opportunity to reset your program with better infrastructure, a stronger partner network, and smarter commissioning from the ground up. If you treat the transition as a strategic opportunity, paired with the right preparation and the right team, your program can hit the ground running on day one.

Thinking About Migrating Your Affiliate Program to Impact.com?

DMi Partners is an Impact Elite Partner, and we’ve been working closely with the platform for several years. That relationship means we know the platform deeply: how it’s built, where the nuances are, and how to configure it so your program performs from day one rather than after months of troubleshooting.

Our team has managed migrations for multi-million-dollar affiliate programs and understands what it takes to protect performance through a transition. If you’re considering a move to Impact.com, we’d be happy to talk through what it would look like for your program.

How to Get Your Brand Discovered by AI: What Our Latest Research Shows

DMi Team — 2026-05-07T10:01:35+00:00

The way people find and buy products has changed while most brand marketing strategies haven’t. DMi Partners’ new 2026 research report, Winning in the LLM Era: The Affiliate’s New Playbook, breaks down how AI search and LLM visibility are reshaping brand discovery, and what brands can do about it.

We analyzed over 1.96 million AI search sessions and data from 200+ brands. Here’s what we found.

Consumers Are Already Using AI to Search and Shop

Younger shoppers, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, are opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini before they ever type in a traditional search query.

74% of U.S. consumers have used AI tools to discover, compare, or buy products in the last six months
42% of U.S. and European consumers now start their online research with an AI assistant, nearly double last year
AI referral traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 4,700% year-over-year as of mid-2025 (Adobe Analytics)

Those AI-generated answers are shaping purchase decisions before a consumer does their own independent research.

AI Isn’t Citing Your Website. It’s Citing Everyone Else’s.

85% of brand mentions in AI-generated answers come from third-party pages, not a brand’s own site. LLMs are built to trust independent sources over owned content.

AI search tools systematically favor outside consensus. Review articles, expert roundups, comparison guides, and media coverage are now essential for LLM visibility.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: nearly 90% of ChatGPT citations come from pages ranked position 21 or lower in traditional Google results. AI citation potential and Google ranking are not the same, and that’s a significant opportunity for brands willing to think beyond conventional SEO. Adding LLM visibility to your SEO strategy is now a modern-day requirement if you want to be discovered by shoppers.

Key Findings for Brands Trying to Win in the LLM Era

AI-referred traffic converts at dramatically higher rates. Users arriving from AI platforms have already been pre-qualified by the recommendation. They arrive knowing what they want and why.
Over 65% of content cited by leading AI models contains affiliate links or is sponsored. Affiliate publishers are already the dominant voices inside LLM responses.
Content freshness is an LLM visibility signal. Pages updated within the last 30 days earn 3.2x more AI citations than outdated ones. Regular refreshes are essential to maintain relevancy.
The window is still open for early adopters. Most brands haven’t updated their affiliate content standards or measurement frameworks for the AI era yet. Those who act now will build AI citation footprints that are hard for latecomers to displace.

Get Early Access to the Full Report

The complete 2026 research report on AI search visibility and affiliate strategy is coming soon. Contact us to request early access to the full PDF report.

Gamification: Email's AI Antidote

Olivia Tate — 2026-04-21T10:01:35+00:00

In a landscape where AI is summarizing emails before subscribers even open them, email gamification offers something no algorithm can compress: a reason to actually click.

What Is Email Gamification?

Gamification (pronounced Game-ification) is a way to apply interactivity and fun to marketing tactics. In email marketing, this means transforming a static promotional message into something subscribers can participate in.

Rather than sending an email that gets read (or worse, skipped), gamified email campaigns create experiences. A subscriber doesn’t just see your offer. They uncover it, earn it, or play for it. That framing changes the way they engage and leaves a lasting impression.

Why Email Gamification Works Right Now

With AI-powered inbox tools like Gmail’s Gemini integration and Apple Intelligence in iOS 18’s Mail app automatically generating summaries and new preview experiences, traditional promotional emails are getting compressed into a single sentence before a subscriber ever sees them.

Gamified elements create interactive moments that give readers something AI simply can’t compress into a summary. When the email itself is the interaction, skipping it means missing out on an experience. Which can entice subscribers to open your email and engage with it.

Beyond inbox AI, gamification addresses a challenge marketers have always faced: email fatigue. If your campaigns feel formulaic, email gamification shakes things up without requiring you to reinvent your offer or your messaging goals. It creates curiosity and helps encourage subscribers to find out what’s on the other side of a click.

Five Formats to Consider for Your Gamification Email Marketing

Gamification isn’t one-size-fits-all. The right format depends on your audience and your offer. Here’s a breakdown of five common formats, what they’re best for, and what to watch out for:

Spinning Wheel

Best for promotions with variable discounts. Think 10%-30% off or mystery offers. Spinning wheels work because they leverage anticipation and randomness, giving the experience high perceived value. Even a smaller discount feels exciting when it’s been “won.” The watchout: they can attract discount-driven shoppers rather than building long-term loyalty.

Click to Reveal

Best for product drops, exclusive offers, or campaigns where click engagement is a primary KPI. The format works because it creates a curiosity gap and is flexible enough to support personalization (different reveals for different segments). Keep in mind that it’s less of a traditional game format, so it requires strong teaser copy to actually drive the click.

Quiz/Survey

Best for personalization strategies, welcome journeys, or any campaign where learning more about your subscriber adds value. Quizzes work because they make the subscriber feel heard and deliver a more tailored experience. The tradeoff is effort. They ask more of the user, so there needs to be a clear payoff like results, recommendations, or a reward waiting on the other side.

Scratch-Off

Best for VIP moments and holiday campaigns. Scratch-offs mimic a physical interaction, building suspense before the reward is revealed. It’s a tactile, nostalgic experience that’s hard to replicate with other formats. The watchout is execution complexity: if the element doesn’t load or function properly, the frustration can undermine the entire experience.

Riddle

Best for brands with a witty, intellectual, or playful voice, particularly in content-driven emails. Riddles engage the brain rather than just the impulse, and done well, they can create community-building moments around a shared challenge. They’re not universally appealing though, and there’s a real risk of confusion if the riddle is too difficult. Tight alignment with brand voice is essential for this one to feel natural rather than forced.

The Great Wolf Lodge Case Study

Our hospitality and entertainment client, Great Wolf Lodge, wanted to stand out during Cyber Week, a notoriously competitive period when inboxes are flooded with promotions and attention is scarce. The team launched an A/B test to find out whether mystery could outperform transparency.

One group of subscribers received a straightforward email that called out the promotion directly. The other received a “click to reveal” version that teased the offer without disclosing it. Same promotion. Same send time. Very different results.

The mystery version won decisively. Click-through rate increased by 80%, reservation rate increased by 6%, and revenue increased by 5%. An 80% lift in click-through rate is the kind of result that doesn’t just validate a tactic, it reframes the entire approach to promotional email. The offer wasn’t better. The curiosity gap was.

Email Gamification Best Practices

Choose the right moment, and don’t overuse it.

Gamification loses its power when it becomes expected. Be strategic around key seasonal moments, high-stakes promotions, or holiday campaigns where novelty will have the greatest impact.

Keep load times fast.

The interactive element should support the message, not impede it. If a subscriber can’t “play the game” because of a slow load or a rendering failure, the campaign doesn’t succeed. Test across clients and devices before sending.

Make the reward immediately clear.

Always communicate what subscribers are playing for. The prospect of a specific, compelling prize is what drives participation while vague mystery without a clear payoff creates frustration, not excitement.

The Takeaway

Email gamification is a response to a real problem. When inboxes are noisy, AI is skimming on behalf of your subscribers, and promotional fatigue is at an all-time high, standing out has never been harder. Time is a very valuable resource, and brands that get attention are the ones offering something worth spending time interacting with.

An 80% lift in click-through rate started with one test. Find out what a curiosity-driven campaign could do for yours.

Explore Our Email Capabilities

Is Your Email Agency Worth the Fees?

Kevin Dugan — 2026-02-27T10:01:35+00:00

Email marketing may be one of the oldest digital marketing channels, but proving its value - and determining your potential agency’s role in maximizing it - has never been an easy task. When you’re investing in both the channel and an agency to manage it, the real question becomes: is the expertise you’re paying for truly driving results?

The key performance indicators for email marketing are less easily ascribed value than, say, ecommerce conversions, and channel costs aren’t as consistent as “average CPA” is for paid search marketing or “fixed commission rates” are for affiliate marketing. Add an agency’s fees on top of that, and brand marketers often face an uphill battle convincing stakeholders of the value in fully investing in email marketing expertise.

In this post, we’ll help you calculate the value of your email marketing campaigns – and share considerations we encourage brand marketers to take when assessing whether to run email marketing campaigns themselves or work with an external partner.

How to calculate the ROI of email marketing campaigns

The goal of all digital marketing initiatives is to generate loyal customers who return for multiple transactions. But this goal comes into focus even more with email marketing, given the nature of email and its strength in developing long-term relationships with subscribers.

To calculate ROI for your email marketing efforts, focus on key metrics like Lifetime Value at the subscriber level, which isn’t as common to measure across other marketing channels. At the same time, we encourage you to assess leading indicators of success like open rate, click rate, and deliverability.

Unlike other channels, the costs of email marketing can vary, and its value extends far beyond a single user transaction. However, when ROI is calculated – especially with an agency that uses smart campaign strategies and top-tier automated journeys or triggered messages – it’s almost always overwhelmingly positive.

How to assess the value of your email marketing when there’s no direct connection to revenue

Take the total revenue of a specific campaign, triggered message, or journey and work backward to arrive at metrics like revenue per open, revenue per click, and revenue per email delivered. This can be valuable for brands that have costs associated with their sending volume. For brands that pay a flat fee for their email platform, the more controlled costs can create a clearer picture of the ROI and total incremental value being created.

How to calculate the value of new-user acquisition in CRM marketing

It’s important for brands to understand that a new-to-file customer doesn’t hold any inherent value. It takes further marketing to build recurring loyalty from that customer to create the actual value.

While there are clear costs associated with acquiring new customers, it’s crucial for your analytics and reporting teams to provide visibility into the revenue generated from the new records added to your database. Without this data, it’s much harder to optimize campaigns effectively. By closing the loop and tracking new customers back to the revenue they generate, you can identify the right levers to pull and maximize your ROI.

Should you hire an email marketing agency or keep things in-house?

An email marketing agency can often deliver immediate value by uncovering opportunities you might not have tapped into yet. Expanding personalization and implementing automated journeys, for example, are two proven strategies that can significantly boost campaign performance. When agencies find quick wins like these, they often help generate returns that more than justify your brand’s investment.

Another important consideration when evaluating whether to bring on an agency is the potential cost savings compared to hiring in-house experts. While agency fees may seem like an added expense at first glance, they can often offset the costs of building and maintaining an internal team. When assessing your options, think about how partnering with an agency could streamline your resources and reduce long-term expenses.

By asking the right questions, your brand can determine whether email marketing is the right channel for your goals and if partnering with an agency is the smart move to maximize its potential. If you’re ready to explore how an experienced agency can elevate your email strategy, we’d love to hear from you. You don’t need to sign any contracts to pick our brains about email marketing strategy, of course; we’re happy to jump on a call and provide insights on your brand’s specific growth opportunities anytime. Drop us a line at info@dmipartners.com to start the conversation.