Attribution is the most lied-about metric in digital marketing. If you look at your dashboards and then cross-reference them with your analytics, you’ll see different stories. Most founders choose the one that makes them feel best, but that’s a dangerous way to allocate a marketing budget.
The Last-Click Lie
One issue in the industry is that the last channel clicked gets 100% of the credit. If a customer sees an Instagram ad, reads a third-party editorial review, and then clicks a "10% off" email to finish the purchase, your email didn't "do" the whole job but closed the deal. When we over-attribute to email, we stop investing in the top-of-funnel awareness that actually feeds the list.
The View-Through Trap
On the other end of the spectrum, some platforms claim credit if a customer merely saw an email and bought something within a three-day window. This "view-through" logic inflates ROI and hides the fact that your content might actually be boring or redundant. It creates a false sense of security while your actual customer acquisition costs (CAC) are skyrocketing.
The Privacy Factor (iOS 15 and Beyond)
Open rates are a vanity metric now. With Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, "opens" are often triggered by proxy servers, not humans. If you are still judging the health of your email program based on open rates, you are navigating with faulty data. (And we know how big of a data person I am!) Click-through rates and placed-order rates are the only metrics that pay the bills.
The Path to Truth: Incrementality
Stop looking for a single source of truth and instead focus on Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and incrementality. At Strategy Maven, we ask: if we didn't send this email, would the sale have happened anyway? By running hold-out tests (where a small group of customers receives no email), you can find the true impact your email program provides. Email is the connective tissue of the brand, and when you stop chasing "perfect" attribution and start looking at how lifecycle marketing supports the total ecosystem, you stop making reactive, bad decisions.
About Amy and Strategy Maven
Both Amy and her business partner experienced toxic work environments and joined forces to never be that kind of agency. Together they founded Strategy Maven Agency, which creates winning email and SMS marketing strategies for D2C brands using no cookie-cutter approaches and only maven solutions. Their work ethic is grounded in honest, straightforward and truthful communications to their clients and creating a safe environment for their employees. Strategy Maven Agency partners with food, beverage, fashion, beauty, health, wellness, and skincare brands handling everything from subscriber acquisition to retention. She has fascinating examples to share on how she takes her clients customers on a journey to experience the brand. To learn more, visit www.strategymavenagency.com.