The chief concern amongst business owners and marketers is that they are receiving revenue from their marketing efforts. This is not any different for the email marketing channel.
Attributing revenue from email marketing sometimes isn’t very clear. This channel plays a role mostly in the nurturing stage of any marketing funnel and most likely isn’t the direct source of any conversion. However, it does store value because it does play a factor at some point in most conversions.
Tools like Google analytics do have the ability to attribute conversions to email marketing, but they honestly don’t tell you everything you need to know to make an effective decision to scale or reduce your email marketing efforts.
In this article, we will discuss the most effective way to measure email attribution to your business as a whole.
What is Email Attribution?
When you have a conversion on your website, you need to link that conversion to some marketing effort. In this case, email attribution is when a sale occurs that can be traced back to an email campaign or automated message.
Email marketing has always been a very lucrative marketing channel for revenue generated. For every dollar spent on email marketing about $38 is returned on investment. Most businesses must have some form of email marketing accounted for in their marketing plans.
However, since email marketing is primarily a tool for nurturing leads, there is a risk that email attribution can be overtaken by other marketing channels like social media. A lot of marketers make the mistake of relying solely on Google analytics to assist their attribution efforts.
Why Google Analytics is Not The Best Tool for Email Marketing Attribution?
Based on the different ways attribution can be tracked using Google Analytics, you can see that there aren’t any effective ways to determine the impact email marketing has on conversions.
What are the Most Common Marketing Attribution Models Found in Google Analytics?
First Click
First click attribution occurs when a conversion is credited to the source the purchaser was generated from. If a lead was generated through an email sign-up but converts through a social media ad later down the funnel, attribution will be 100% given to email marketing.
This approach is a bit outdated. It is great for making adjustments to the top of the funnel experience. However, you are not getting the full picture as you are ignoring the impact of other touchpoints beyond the first interaction.
Last Click
Last click attribution is what most people are used to because it is the default setting for Google Analytics. Last click attribution simply means that the conversion is credited to the last source in which the user clicked.
For example, if you sent an email marketing campaign to a user which linked to your online store, and the user clicks on the link to convert, attribution is going to be given to email marketing.
This form of attribution is great if you have a shallow marketing funnel as you will know directly where the conversion came from but for longer and more elaborate marketing funnels, you run the risk of not getting all the information you need about the customer journey.
The issue resides in that most customers don’t rely on only one channel for their information. This is the reason for the rise of omnichannel marketing.
Let’s say someone enters your funnel through an email sign-up. The person gets several emails about a product but then sees a post about the product on Linkedin, clicks, and converts. Last click attribution is going to credit that conversion to social media (specifically Linkedin) overplaying the fact that email marketing did most of the leg work to get that conversion.
Linear Tracking
Linear tracking in theory can be considered an effective method to assign attribution to your email marketing methods. Linear tracking assigns attribution to every touchpoint within your funnel. This is contrary to the first and last click that only credits either the very first or last touchpoint in the customer journey.
Linear tracking helps you identify the different channels that play a role in a conversion from a high level but it doesn’t give you an insight as to which channels played a larger impact versus another channel.
Time-Decay Tracking
Time Decay Tracking is an interesting concept that assigns more attribution to the channels used toward the end of the customer journey.
For example, if a user enters the funnel through an email sign up, goes through an email automation program, speaks to a salesperson, and then converts because of a social media retargeting ad, the most attribution will be given to the salesperson and social media campaign instead of email marketing.
This is great for knowing the channels that most impacted the conversion however, the longer the customer journey is, this attribution model might display diluted results. If someone has been in the cycle for nearly a year, receives nurturing emails consistently, and only starts to convert because they see retargeting ads on social, you might attribute the reason for conversion as mostly social media but in reality, email marketing played a bigger role.
Google Analytics is Not Made For Email Marketing
Since email marketing could potentially have a long life in terms of the number of touchpoints needed for a customer to make a conversion, there is no way any marketer or business owner can make economic decisions of whether to invest more or less into the channel if they base their decisions on performance from Google Analytics.
Also, Google Analytics completely ignores other email marketing key performance indicators like open rate, click-through rate, and click to open rate.
How Do You Properly Attribute Conversions to Email Marketing?
The most effective way I stumbled on how to attribute the role that email marketing plays in driving conversions is through implementing “control groups”.
When working with control groups, you are segmenting your audience and analyzing performance based on whether they were exposed to an email campaign or not. You are taking a look at which of your audience segment (people that receive emails vs people that do not receive emails) drives more revenue per single action event.
In this case, let’s say you run an email campaign promoting an online sale to 1000 recipients. These email recipients will be your first control group.
To get your second control group, you then select 1000 sessions to your online sale from any other source (direct, social media, etc).
Once both groups reach their test size (in this case, 1000 total visitors from each group), you then begin to monitor the number of sales that each group brings in.
This method will answer the question of the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns versus other forms of marketing campaigns. You can also apply different measurement tools like return on campaign investment to help make the picture a bit clearer for yourself.
Conclusion
Relying solely on what Google Analytics tells you for your email attribution sometimes doesn’t paint the most accurate picture of how your email marketing campaigns are performing in comparison to other marketing methods. Using a control group test allows you to determine how much revenue your email campaigns are generating versus a focus group not exposed to any email content. This will provide an accurate assessment of the effectiveness of your email marketing.
