DMi Partners Blog

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.

6 Questions to Determine Whether an Agency Is the Right Fit for Your Brand

Zach Labenberg — 2026-02-24T10:01:35+00:00

We’ve won and lost our share of clients in the pitch process over the years, and I can say with confidence that the best decisions that lead to the longest partnerships don’t come down to which agency is the best (which is almost impossible to determine) but come down to which agency is the best fit for your brand.

At DMi Partners, we anticipate the questions brand will (and should!) ask in the RFP process. Whether brands ask these questions or not, we proactively address them to guide brands towards making a better decision. Our approach to client service is designed to align with the answers that define a truly great partnership.

Here are some of the key questions your brand should consider:

Is the agency aligned with our business goals?
What kind of brand experience does the agency have with similar goals and growth challenges?
Will the agency be flexible as my brand’s business challenges and goals evolve?
Does the agency have good team continuity?
Will the agency be worth its fees?
What intangibles can the agency offer that will make it a great partner?

You should ask these questions when evaluating potential partners to ensure the agency’s marketing framework aligns with your needs, from the initial RFP process through the entire engagement.

1. Is the agency aligned with our business goals?

First, an agency needs to be thorough in establishing an understanding of the business goals you’re looking to address within the partnership (more on that in a bit). From there, don’t accept staffing and forecasting projections at face value without asking follow-ups questions like:

How will each resource be working to address our business goals?
What kind of process and methodology are the agency’s forecasts built on?
How is each channel in scope projected to help meet or exceed our business goals?
And what kind of reporting can we expect to see to make sure our goals are always the focus of each initiative?

Dive deeper into the agency’s approach to uncover and address any potential weaknesses in executing strategy.

2. What kind of brand experience does the agency have with similar goals and growth challenges?

Most brands ask about experience in their vertical, but while that can be important, we’ve learned throughout our 23 years in business that the more relevant question is whether the agency has a good track record solving similar challenges facing brands at similar stages of maturity.

For example, an agency that has successfully built a full-funnel affiliate program to accelerate customer acquisition is a far more capable partner for a fashion brand with that specific performance goal than an agency with numerous fashion case studies but no proven track record in meeting that goal.

Therefore, prioritize evaluating an agency’s proven ability to solve your specific business challenges, as this is a far more accurate predictor of a successful partnership than industry experience alone.

3. Will the agency be flexible as my brand’s business challenges and goals evolve?

You can get a good read on this right from the RFP process. An agency willing to adapt its fee structures, staffing resources, and scope if needed as the RFP process evolves gives you the best signal that it will be willing and able to adapt with you over the course of an engagement.

4. Does the agency have good team continuity?

One common reason brands leave their agencies is out of frustration with team turnover; it’s a thankless task to re-educate new teams frequently on business goals, strengths, and weaknesses.

There are several ways brands can research an agency’s turnover – Glassdoor is probably the most popular. But make sure your brand pays attention to secondary elements like culture pages, awards, and LinkedIn engagement from team members. Many agencies can sound great on their own website, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily living up to their values from the top down.

At DMi Partners, when we apply for workforce-based awards, we pick the ones based entirely on surveys distributed to the team. Our track record with AdAge, Inc.com, Gallup, and the Philly Inquirer is one that we’re very proud of, since they’re determined on feedback from our team members.

5. Will the agency be worth its fees?

You’ll never truly know if an agency is worth their fee until the engagement is underway, but you can and should ask questions that dig deeper into KPIs like CPA and revenue. Net-new customers tend to be much more valuable (and expensive) than repeat customers, so ask about the ratio of new customers whenever an agency doesn’t volunteer that information.

Ditto incrementality – if an agency can tell you how much incremental growth they drove (not just the revenue it drove), that’s a good sign that it will be worth the fees they’re charging.

6. What intangibles can the agency offer that will make it a great partner?

This question can be broken down into a series of smaller, more specific questions:

Does the agency offer proactive recommendations that go beyond the questions in RFP?
Does the agency describe the process it takes to get the results it cites to try to win your business?
Does the agency ask questions that help it get a better understanding of your goals and challenges?
Does the agency explain how its recommendations will address your business goals?
“Yes” answers to all these questions indicate the agency has strong qualities that bode well for a long, fruitful partnership.

You’ll notice that these questions aren’t necessarily weighted towards the biggest, best-known agencies, and there’s good reason for that. Bigger agencies might seem to carry less risk (kind of like the “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” analogy), but that’s not the same as being the best fit for a particular brand with unique goals and challenges.

If you’re ready to partner with an agency that anticipates your needs, answers the questions you didn’t even know to ask, and delivers results that exceed expectations, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at info@dmipartners.com to start the conversation – no pressure, just straight talk and solutions tailored to your brand’s goals.

Gemini Comes to the GMail Inbox: What to Know

Lauren McGrath — 2026-02-24T10:01:35+00:00

Email marketers who haven’t heavily prioritized improving deliverability, relevance, and the user experience should be very motivated to change that ASAP.

Why?

As an early-January announcement from Google plainly and precisely states, Gmail is entering its Gemini era.

Given Google’s broad push into AI, the incorporation of functions from Gemini, its AI-powered assistant, comes as no surprise. But it does introduce some changes to the inbox experience in both obvious and subtle ways that signal even greater stakes for email marketers to nail a few fundamentals of the trade.

In this post, I’ll look at some of the ways Gemini is changing the inbox, what the near-term significance for engagement and visibility looks like, and how I see long-term effects rolling out over the coming months and years.

Before I dig in here on what’s actually changing, a couple of important notes on the scope of this rollout:

Although Apple is also using Gemini 3 for its AI tools, they’re not (yet) available directly in Apple Mail
Gemini features are, however, available in the Gmail app on iPhones and iPads
Some of these features are being tested right now before they roll out more broadly

Now then…

What changes is Gemini bringing to Gmail?

Gemini is producing the following features for all users (note: users do not have to use these features and are able to write and respond to emails as they choose):

Conversation summaries. When you open an email with dozens of replies, Gmail synthesizes the entire conversation into a concise summary of key points
Help Me Write can be used to polish emails or draft them from scratch (expected this month: an updated Help Me Write feature that integrates context from your other Google apps to improve personalization)
Suggested replies that use the context of your conversation to provide relevant, one-click responses that match how you write
Prioritization of your VIPs based on signals like people you email frequently, those in your contacts list, and relationships Gmail infers from message content

As noted, the ability to ask your inbox questions with AI Overviews is only available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

AI inbox is in testing right now and will be available more broadly in the coming months – though it’s unclear if that will be available to all users or only paid subscribers. It will render in a separate tab like this:

How might these updates affect engagement and visibility in the near term?

One effect of these updates is that AI is scanning and interpreting emails before the user does. Similar to the way iOS 18 impacted performance, we anticipate that there will be a decrease in email visibility in the inbox.

While it’s unclear how many of Gmail’s 3 billion users will have access to AI inbox, which will primarily include conversations and important update emails like bill reminders and likely won’t feature promotional content, I don’t expect this feature to make a huge difference in performance numbers. Gmail already boosts subscriber-specific relevant emails in the promotions tab.

That said, Gmail now shows promotional emails in order of relevance, not recency. Google hasn’t revealed exactly how it determines what’s ‘most relevant,’ but it is likely based on a combination of engagement (how users engage and how often) and content features like discounts and exclusivity language. In other words, email marketers who lead with a deeper understanding of users will gain ground even more quickly now that Gmail is sorting by relevance.

What do these changes signify over the long term?

No matter how tech-forward the updates, Gmail continues to prioritize user experience, which is a trend I think will only continue. I also predict we’ll see more tools and functionality that surface promotional emails based on user engagement – potentially including engagement with emails from competing brands – as the AI learns what types of content and products you interact with most.

Deliverability, which I mentioned earlier in the post, will also become even more critical as Gmail rewards entities that follow bulk-sender requirements. And little visual markers (like BIMI and Annotations) that help emails stand out in the inbox will become more of a necessity than an option.

In other words, the strategies that we know work – deliverability, relevance, and personalized user experience – will continue to work and keep your brand in good competitive stead, even as AI creeps further into the inbox. Test and measure everything you can, but don’t let the bells, whistles, and new features distract you from what’s most important to the user and the spam guidelines.

We’re happy to talk shop about email best practices anytime. Hit us up at info@dmipartners.com.

Email Marketing Development Needs: How to Assess an Agency for Fit

Andrea Nakajima — 2026-02-17T10:01:35+00:00

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.

Affiliate Agencies: Are They Worth Their Costs?

Kevin Dugan — 2026-02-13T10:01:35+00:00

As a brand marketer, deciding where to allocate your marketing budget is no small task - especially when it comes to affiliate marketing.

With its incrementality often under scrutiny, affiliate marketing can feel like a gamble. Add the cost of hiring an affiliate agency to the mix, and the stakes get even higher. So, how do you determine if partnering with an affiliate agency is the right move to maximize this channel’s potential and deliver real value for your business?

There are three key criteria every brand should evaluate when assessing the value of affiliate marketing and the agencies that support it:

Affiliate Marketing Incrementality
Channel ROI
ROI of an Affiliate Agency

As you can imagine, we have this conversation quite often with prospective clients. So, in this post we’ll reveal how to calculate these factors to help you answer whether investing in an agency’s affiliate marketing services is worth their costs.

How do you calculate the incrementality of affiliate marketing?

Let’s start with the affiliate channel. I wrote a separate post about how to measure affiliate’s incrementality; here are the CliffsNotes:

1. Use foundational measurement principles

Affiliate incrementality can’t be measured in isolation. You must evaluate how affiliates influence all conversions across channels, control for seasonality, and separate new and repeat customer acquisition. Without these guardrails, results will be misleading or outright inaccurate.

2. Reference a range of data sources

Effective incrementality measurement relies on multiple data sources: affiliate platforms for publisher paths, web analytics for assisted conversions, and third-party attribution tools for modeled lift. Using both platform and independent data enables cross-verification and reduces bias in conclusions.

3. Employ custom testing methods and analytical rigor

Incrementality requires customized testing, such as geo holdouts, audience splits, or suppression tests, to compare performance against control groups. Advanced approaches may apply weighting models or diminishing-returns curves. Whatever your approach, make sure it’s ongoing and iterative.

4. Use results to inform optimization

Incrementality findings typically drive publisher-level commission adjustments and channel-level budget reallocation. Underperforming publishers shouldn’t be cut immediately; test structural or commission changes first. At the channel level, tests often reveal bottom-funnel tactics are less incremental than last-click metrics suggest, so consider a strategy for determining how to reallocate funds from the bottom of the funnel.

5. Avoid common misconceptions

Low incrementality doesn’t mean a publisher lacks value; some assist conversions without driving net-new demand. Remember: ROAS is not incrementality, especially for last-click tactics. Keep in mind too, that incrementality isn’t binary. Publishers and channels exist on a spectrum that shifts over time.

How do you calculate the ROI of affiliate marketing?

There are a few ways we see our brand partners calculating ROI. Some consider just campaign revenue against commissions; some include their affiliate platform costs along with the commissions; and others include all costs – commissions, platform fees, and agency fees. Obviously, these will yield a decreasing ROI as you add more costs to the denominator of the ROI calculation, but it’s up to our partners to decide the best formula for ROI.

But when our brands are looking for reliable answers to questions surrounding ROI, we like to compare their affiliate channel performance to other paid marketing channels using the Advertising reporting functionality in Google Analytics. The “All Channels” Advertising report will show attributed revenue for affiliate alongside paid search, display, paid social, and any other paid channels being tracked, using GA’s data-driven attribution model (the most advanced model Google provides to arrive at accurate shared attribution).

Your reporting data won’t include affiliate campaign costs without taking the steps to integrate affiliate commissions into GA, but once you export this report you can drop in the commissions, as well as any other costs you want included in the ROI calculation, for the affiliate marketing channel.

It is interesting to note that almost every time we calculate return this way, affiliate has the top ROI of all paid channels, which isn’t surprising given the safeguards the affiliate model provides against a poor ROI.

How do you calculate the ROI of affiliate marketing agencies?

Calculating the ROI of an affiliate marketing agency involves more than just comparing performance before and after they take the reins of your affiliate campaigns. One key consideration is the cost savings from not having to hire in-house specialists - especially when factoring in whether those internal salaries are accounted for in your paid channel’s ROI.

Another critical factor is the agency’s expertise in evaluating affiliate value. While any marketer managing a specific channel will naturally want to present their efforts in the best light, the difference between hiring an in-house affiliate marketing team versus a seasoned external partner (like DMi Partners, for example) lies in the depth and breadth of experience.

With over 20 years in managing affiliate programs for hundreds of brands, we’ve seen it all. No matter the data sources at play, an experienced affiliate marketing agency will know how to piece together the right information to deliver your brand the clearest, most accurate answers to questions about incremental revenue and return on investment.

Working with us, clients gain access to account management expertise, an extensive publisher development team, our affiliate senior leadership, a full creative team, comprehensive analytics tools, and more. With this level of support, you can confidently get data-backed answers to your toughest questions and achieve greater performance at scale to meet your affiliate marketing goals.

We believe these questions are a great starting point for determining whether investing in an affiliate marketing agency is worthwhile for your brand. But if you have any additional questions or would like to learn more about what an experienced agency can offer your business, drop us a line at info@dmipartners.com to get the conversation started with no obligation. We love sharing what we know, and we’re very good at answering questions with straight talk.

Performance PR: Your Secret Affiliate Weapon for Increasing LLM Visibility

Zach Labenberg — 2026-02-03T10:01:35+00:00

Generative search is quickly becoming a primary starting point for shopping discovery. Instead of beginning with a traditional Google query, consumers are increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLM tools to understand which products are the highest quality, best value, and/or most aligned for their needs.

These tools synthesize answers from content across the web, including listicles, buying guides, reviews, and expert commentary published by trusted media outlets. As a result, the brands that show up most often in those resources gain a competitive advantage in heightened visibility in generative search results.

This shift has major implications for how brands should prioritize PR, affiliate marketing, and upper-funnel investment.

How consumers use generative search in shopping journeys

Shoppers are using generative AI to:

Compare products across brands and price points
Identify “best of” recommendations
Validate quality, trends, and social proof
Narrow options before visiting a retailer or brand site

Whether or not users purchase from a link they find in an LLM, their purchase decisions are being highly influenced by the material surfaced by their queries.

Why Performance PR influences LLM visibility

DMi Partners’ research and hands-on experience managing brand programs echoes what we’re seeing in reports from across the industry: Performance PR is emerging as a powerful driver of LLM search visibility.

Performance PR, which is a specific focus of our affiliate marketing team, secures brand inclusion in monetized, high-authority editorial content such as:

“Best of” listicles
Product roundups
Buying guides
Review and comparison articles

These articles act as resource content for LLMs. In short, brands with higher volumes of contextual mentions across trusted publishers are significantly more likely to be surfaced in AI-generated answers, with or without a direct link in those publications.

The competitive advantage of Performance PR at scale

Brands with strong Performance PR coverage gain an advantage because their products are seeded into more of the content LLMs rely on. Over time, this creates a compounding effect:

Greater co-occurrence of brand + category terms
Increased perceived authority and credibility
Higher likelihood of citation in generative answers

This advantage becomes especially pronounced in competitive retail categories, where LLMs often reference the same trusted publishers (Wirecutter, Conde Nast, etc.) repeatedly.

How to improve your LLM search visibility

The fastest path to stronger LLM visibility starts with a smart upper-funnel strategy that includes Performance PR. Because Performance PR partners operate as content affiliates, your brand should use affiliate programs to recruit, educate, and activate publishers who create the resource content LLMs value most.

Earn links and mentions in trusted publications by:

Building editor relationships, not just placements - Editors need to understand what makes your brand and products distinct. Educating them on your value proposition increases the likelihood that those attributes appear consistently in LLM results.
Prioritize high-authority media partners - Major, trusted publications carry outsized weight in generative search. LLMs place significant trust in these sources when constructing shopping-related answers. DMi Partners has invested years of relationship-building with those publications – long before ChatGPT dropped, our clients were enjoying the benefits of increased awareness with net-new audiences. Now the stakes have been raised.

We’re getting a tidal wave of inquiries about how we can help brands and products show up more reliably in AI search results. If your brand invests in Performance PR now, it will be better positioned to win attention, influence purchase decisions, and outpace competitors in the generative search era. If you’re interested in chatting more, reach out to info@dmipartners.com to set up a call.