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Email Marketing Attribution and Measuring Impact
Before you dig in, why don't you get access to RE:markable
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
Email is one of the most blamed, and most misunderstood, parts of marketing.
When results are good, email suddenly “works”. When results dip, email is the first thing questioned, cut, or turned into a volume cannon (“send it to everyone, just in case”).
And somewhere in the middle of all that, marketers are expected to prove impact with dashboards that were never designed to measure what email actually does.
Welcome to attribution theatre.
Attribution theatre is when businesses pretend they can measure marketing impact cleanly, while relying on metrics and models that are either wildly incomplete, politically convenient, or both. It looks like certainty. It feels like control. It makes charts. It helps someone in leadership feel like the story is tidy.
But it’s often detached from reality.
And email gets dragged into it more than most channels because email is visible, always-on, measurable on the surface, and touches nearly everything.
This blog is about why email gets blamed or credited unfairly and, more importantly, how to measure email impact in a way that is honest, defensible, and actually useful (to you and to leadership).
Put the kettle on, this is not a quick one.
What attribution theatre looks like in real life
You’ll recognise this immediately. It’s when someone says:
- “This campaign didn’t perform - email doesn't work .”
- “Unsubscribes went up after that send. Stop emailing so much.”
- “Pipeline slowed this month. What’s email doing about it?”
- “We sent an email, and sales jumped. Email is our best channel.”
- “Just prove email ROI so we can justify the headcount or budget.”
The common thread is that email is being treated like a direct response lever, operating in isolation, with a clean line to outcomes. That is not how email works!
Email is rarely a single cause. It’s a system, it's also a visibility layer, a habit channel but most importantly an impact channel. It is, at its best, a relationship function that influences and assists decisions, behaviour and actions over time.
So when a business uses simplistic reporting to make simplistic claims, email becomes a convenient scapegoat or a convenient hero, depending on which story leadership needs that week.
Why email is uniquely vulnerable to unfair blame and unfair credit
Email is particularly exposed to attribution theatre for a few structural reasons.
First: email is the most obvious touchpoint. It arrives in an inbox, it's timestamped and easy to point at. When you’re in a meeting, and someone needs a reason for a spike or dip, “we sent an email” is a simple story to tell.
Second: email touches multiple stages of the journey. It isn’t just “conversion”. Email supports awareness, consideration, retention, reactivation, onboarding, education, customer experience, and (in many businesses) revenue enablement.
When something shifts anywhere in the funnel, someone will look at email and ask, “what changed?”
Third: email reporting is deceptively clean. Open rates, clicks, “revenue attributed”, engagement trends, they look like answers. The problem is that those metrics are often proxies that can be distorted by tracking changes, inbox placement issues, list churn, or measurement limitations.
Fourth: email is often the last visible touch before an action. Someone receives an email, then they go and search for you, visit directly, or convert later through another channel — and the business either credits email entirely or ignores it entirely depending on how attribution is configured.
This is why email gets put on trial in leadership meetings more than it deserves. It’s simply the easiest channel to narrate.
The two unfair stories email gets forced into
1) Email gets blamed
Email gets blamed when leaders treat it as a performance lever that should always produce measurable, immediate results.
Engagement dips? Must of been a BAD email.
Revenue slows? Email must be “tired or not work.”
Pipeline softens? Email must be “not pulling its weight.”
But what’s actually happening is usually more layered.
Sometimes you don’t have an email problem. You have an inbox placement problem (deliverability).
Sometimes you don’t have an engagement problem. You have an expectations and relevance problem.
Sometimes you don’t have a performance problem. You have a list health and churn problem.
Sometimes the email is fine.
The environment is loud, your audience are tired, and your send is landing in the middle of Black Friday or budget season or end-of-quarter chaos.
And sometimes the business has forced email into a corner: “send it to everyone” becomes the strategy, which degrades trust and deliverability, which reduces visibility, which then looks like “email isn’t working.”
Email gets blamed when the business confuses downstream symptoms with root causes.
And the risk of this blame isn’t just emotional or annoying. It leads to damaging decisions: more volume, more pressure, more campaigns, less segmentation, more desperate tactics. The channel gets worse. And then leadership says, “see, email is dying.”
No. Email was pushed off a cliff.
2) Email gets over-credited
The other side of attribution theatre is when email is given credit for outcomes that were going to happen anyway, or that were influenced by many touches over time.
This looks like:
- “We sent an email and sales jumped. Email drove £X.”
- “That blast generated 300 leads."
- “Email is our highest ROI channel.”
Sometimes email did influence (or assist) the outcome. But the problem is the certainty.
Because if you tell leadership “email drove £X” based on last-click or platform attribution, you’re setting a trap for yourself. You are training stakeholders to expect direct lines, instant results, and clean causality.
Then when the numbers wobble, because the market shifts, inbox placement changes, or audience fatigue grows, email suddenly becomes “inconsistent.”
Attribution theatre flatters email in the short term and punishes it in the long term.
Why most attribution models break down (especially for email)
Most attribution models assume people behave like spreadsheets - sorry, but they don't.
People behave like humans with memory, context, competing priorities, and delayed action.
Let’s talk about the real world for a second.
- People read an email on mobile, then purchase later on desktop - or visa versa or even the week after
- People see your email, don’t open it, then search your brand or product names two days later.
- People click nothing, but mention your newsletter in a sales call.
- People engage for weeks, then convert without any obvious “trigger” email.
- People are influenced by the consistency of your presence, not one campaign.
Email impact is often cumulative, not immediate.
It’s also often indirect. Email supports other channels by increasing brand recall, reinforcing messaging, nudging people back into the journey, and keeping you mentally available.
So when you rely on last-click, platform-native dashboards, or “revenue attributed” within the ESP, you are measuring the narrowest, most convenient slice of the truth.
Not because you’re incompetent, because the tools are not built for nuance.
What email actually does (the stuff attribution misses)
This is the part marketers intuitively know but struggle to defend.
Email doesn’t just “convert”. It:
Builds mental availability:
Being seen consistently matters. A lot of email’s value is memory-based: recognition, familiarity, and trust accumulation. People choose the brand they remember when they finally need the thing.
Reinforces positioning:
Even if someone doesn’t click, they absorb tone, worldview, proof points, and differentiation. Email is one of the few channels where you can repeatedly shape perception.
Creates momentum across the journey:
Welcome flows, onboarding, education sequences, and retention journeys move people forward. The influence is often gradual, not “this email = this sale.”
Reduces friction:
Good lifecycle emails help people complete tasks: find info, understand value, feel confident, and take action. That impact doesn’t always show up as a click.
Supports other channels:
Email can lift direct traffic, brand search, content consumption, and pipeline velocity. The action often happens elsewhere, but the influence starts in the inbox.
So if your measurement only captures “clicked from email and converted in the same session”, you are ignoring a massive chunk of email’s real job. Which means the business undervalues it, over-demands from it, and misdiagnoses it when performance shifts.
The dangerous myth: “If it didn’t click, it didn’t work”
This myth is responsible for so much unnecessary panic. Clicks are not “impact.” Clicks are one type of action that happens when someone is ready and your email is the most convenient route.
Plenty of people:
- Read and remember
- Read and act later
- Act via another channel
- Act without opening at all (hello inbox scanning behaviour)
- Convert because of accumulated exposure, not a single email
Email isn’t just a performance channel, it's an awareness and relationship channel too.
If your leadership expects every email to “perform”, you will end up designing emails for the dashboard, not for humans, and the channel will decay.
READ: How to Start Using Email Marketing as an Awareness Channel
Email marketing can be associated more often with bottom-of-funnel than top-of-funnel, and using email as an awareness channel typically isn’t on anyone’s radar for that very reason.
Let’s talk about the untapped email opportunity: awareness.
How to measure email impact without lying to yourself
Now for the practical bit. This is the part you can actually use.
You do not need perfect attribution. You need credible measurement that reflects reality, and that helps you make better decisions.
Here’s how to do that:
1) Separate visibility from engagement
Before you measure impact, you need to know if people are even seeing your emails.
Inbox placement is the silent killer of attribution accuracy. If a chunk of your list is landing in spam, promotions or “Other”, you will misread engagement and assume the content is the problem.
Your baseline must include:
- inbox placement testing (even if it’s lightweight)
- provider-level performance (Gmail vs Outlook vs Yahoo behave differently)
- complaint rates and negative signals
- list health and bounce patterns
Because if deliverability is compromised, performance attribution becomes theatre. You’re analysing behaviour that never had a chance to happen.
2) Stop reporting on the whole list like it’s a single audience
The “send to all” mindset corrupts reporting.
A healthy email programme separates:
- new subscribers vs established subscribers
- intentional opt-ins vs consequential opt-ins
- engaged vs cooling vs dormant
- provider segments (especially if Microsoft is causing pain)
- lifecycle stages (prospect vs customer vs churn risk)
- core persona segments or audience profiles
If you report one open rate or one click rate for “the list,” you are smoothing out reality and making it impossible to see what’s actually happening.
Segment-based reporting is where truth lives.
3) Use leading indicators to explain lagging ones
Engagement is a lagging indicator. It reflects conditions that were created weeks or months earlier.
If engagement is falling, you need to look at leading indicators such as:
- expectation alignment at sign-up
- welcome journey completion
- frequency and cadence stability
- segmentation relevance
- inbox placement consistency
- churn and list hygiene
- content alignment to intent
This is how you stop blaming subject lines for systemic issues.
4) Track “email-assisted” impact intentionally
If you want to show email’s real role, you need to track outcomes that reflect influence, not just direct clicks.
Depending on your business, that can include:
- branded search lift after sends
- direct traffic trends correlated to consistent email cadence
- returning visitor rate by subscriber cohort
- pipeline velocity for nurtured contacts vs non-nurtured
- repeat purchase rate for lifecycle-exposed customers
- time to first meaningful action (especially in B2B)
- retention and reactivation rates by journey exposure
This is where email’s value shows up: not as a single click, but as sustained behavioural movement.
5) Use controlled pilots (your leverage move)
If you want to prove impact without arguing theory, run pilots.
This is the simplest, most defensible method:
- pick a clean engaged segment (5–20%)
- run a structured approach (segmentation, cadence, journey logic)
- compare against a baseline group or previous period
- measure over time, not one send
Pilots reduce confrontation, they create evidence.
And they make it much easier to walk into leadership conversations with something stronger than opinion.
6) Measure the ROI of exclusions (yes, really)
One of the most persuasive ways to demonstrate maturity is to show that sending less can create more impact.
Track:
- revenue per 1,000 delivered
- complaint rate change
- inbox placement improvements
- re-engagement improvements
- pipeline quality lift
Then make the point clearly:
Volume down doesn’t equal impact down. Often it’s the opposite.
This is how you shift leadership away from “send it to everyone” and toward “send smarter”.
READ: Email Is an Impact Channel, Not a Conversion One (And That’s a Good Thing)
Email as a channel is misconstrued, from the way it’s used to the way it’s measured.
But if you want to make email work, and we mean work at its absolute best, you’ve got to flip the script.
How to talk to leadership about attribution without losing your mind
Leadership doesn’t need a lecture on attribution models. They need:
- risk
- opportunity
- clarity
- a decision framework
Here are some lines that tend to land well:
- “Email isn’t a last-click channel. It’s a visibility and momentum channel.”
- “We’re measuring impact over time, not crediting single sends for conversions.”
- “If we degrade deliverability, we lose inbox visibility — and that reduces total marketing impact.”
- “We can prove this with a controlled pilot rather than debating opinions.”
- “Clicks are not the only indicator of influence. They’re one behaviour in a wider ecosystem.”
And if you want the line that reframes everything:
“We’re not trying to win attribution. We’re trying to protect and grow impact.”
That’s the shift. B ecause attribution theatre is about credit, good measurement is about decisions.
Stop making email perform for the dashboard
If you build email programmes based on what attribution dashboards reward, you will optimise for the wrong behaviours.
- You’ll chase clicks instead of actual results & impact
- You’ll chase volume instead of relevance
- You’ll chase last-touch instead of long-term trust
Email is too important to be reduced to theatre!
When you measure it properly, as a system, as a visibility layer, as a relationship function, you stop defending it with flimsy charts and start running it like the strategic asset it actually is.
Want help building a measurement story that holds up?
If you’re tired of email being blamed for things it didn’t cause (or credited for things it didn’t do), I can help you build a measurement approach that leadership actually understands, without pretending attribution is perfect.
That can look like:
- an email ecosystem audit (strategy, data, deliverability, journeys, measurement)
- a deliverability audit (so you know what “visibility” actually looks like)
- stakeholder-ready frameworks and reporting that tracks impact, not vanity
- masterclasses, workshops and training for marketers and their teams who want to stop guessing and start operating properly
Email, CRM and HubSpot Support
I help marketers and businesses globally improve, design and fix their email, CRM, and HubSpot ecosystems, from strategy through to execution.
My services include:
-
Email marketing strategy, audits, training, workshops, and consultancy
-
CRM strategy and enablement
-
Full HubSpot implementations, optimisation and onboarding through my agency
If you’re looking for experienced external support (and lots of enjoyment along the way), this is where to start.
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RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.