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.
You’ll recognise this immediately. It’s when someone says:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Leadership doesn’t need a lecture on attribution models. They need:
Here are some lines that tend to land well:
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.
If you build email programmes based on what attribution dashboards reward, you will optimise for the wrong behaviours.
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.
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:
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.