Last click attribution undervalues email

Could it be that email is undervalued, even by many big brands?

eCommerce brands are the biggest users of email in no small part because revenue tracking makes the business case for email crystal clear.

Social media is fed by the power of email. Facebook is joint third biggest sender of email worldwide, using email to keep bringing people back to Facebook. In fact Facebook sends more email than all of the clients of the world’s largest ESP put together (source Senderbase top senders)

More often than not the value of email is determined by conversion resulting from an email click.

How about when there is no click? Does it mean the email had no value?

It would be strange to consider it having no value, almost like saying that because a TV or Print Advert generates no click it had no value.

It’s just harder to measure and understand the value when there is no click. It doesn’t mean the value wasn’t there.

One of our clients sees a high portion of their search traffic on their brand name. No, it’s not a big well known brand and they don’t running branding advertising. The stats make clear that at least some of the searches are caused by email.

So what do people really do besides clicking?

  • Search for the brand
  • Search for the products promoted
  • Use a bookmark to access the brands website
  • Visit the brands bricks and mortar shop
  • Talk about the brand in social media

The following charts illustrate the value of email beyond clicking is significant and the direct conversion value of email undervalues the channel.

Avg daily by mth

This first chart shows analysis of daily revenue from a site over nine months, giving revenue, excluding that directly attributed to email, on the days when email is sent versus the days when it isn’t. The orange bars that are days with email sent are consistently and significantly higher than the days without email. In fact on average over 20% higher revenue.

A similar analysis but by channel for a particular month shows the impact of email on all other channels. For each channel there are pair of bars. The taller left bar is the channel revenue on the days with email and the smaller right bar of each pair is on a day without email.

October - Last touch revenueFor example, revenue from Direct traffic is 20% higher on the days when email is sent to those without.

Given email doesn’t need a click to deliver revenue it’s surprising that there still isn’t more email being used by High Street stores to drive footfall.

When thinking about the value you get from email you might just get a bigger budget by looking at the revenue driven in other channels too.