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I am the first to point out that ROI on email marketing is strong—the strongest, even compared to other marketing channels. And I think there is great value in tracking yours for a number of obvious reasons.

Your finance team, for instance, will want to see that the activity and expenses you’re putting towards email are working. Your content and product teams will want to see what’s driving engagement and more importantly, conversions. Your email team will want to understand what they’re driving today so they can optimize, stretch, and deliver even more tomorrow.

But when we only look at email through an ROI lens—and in many cases that lens is stuck with a last touch view of conversions that you can track back to a single click—you’re missing a huge part of the value that email is driving across all channels, all audiences, every day.

There are also complex multi-touch attribution models and technology out there that can give you a more full-channel view of the overall touchpoints that lead to a conversion but even there we’re missing the point sometimes as we’re orienting the entire experience around desired outcome.

Why is that? Email marketing is more than a channel. It’s a relationship builder. Rarely would a single email drive a strong ROI in isolation (yes, even in B2C!). But it’s the result of a combination of factors that allow you to strengthen that relationship over time.

It all starts with permission

Permission is a roundabout way of saying that the subscriber has already seen some value from your content and brand. Or even more simply: there’s something you have that they want. Products, advice, insights, fashion ideas, gossip. It could be anything that they find valuable about you and your brand.

But the key point is that they’re interested before you engage. By signing up for your email list, subscribers are raising their hands to hear from you. This is critical to the success of email—and you can’t get this kind of brand affinity through any other channel.

Email is critical for brand awareness

Once you have that permission, you need to build a relationship by consistently showing up in the inbox and presenting the best experience of your brand to drive and maintain brand awareness.

In B2B, we talk all the time about how only 5% of your audience is in a buying cycle at any given time. Can you push some of that 95% over into the 5% using email? Yes, sometimes, if carefully and at very low volumes.

The same is true in B2C. Because of the permission standard, you had to put some effort into getting them to sign up. But in reality, one email converting to a sale is the sum reflection of everything you’ve done over time to build interest and trust.

In either case, when the intent isn’t quite there yet, does email put you in a better position to stay top of mind, build trust, plant seeds, and be the first place they go when that prospect is suddenly looking? Much better. And this effort is largely untrackable in an ROI kind of way.

Email reflects the entire marketing funnel

Email is really its own full funnel of activity, engagement, and trust-building at all stages of the buyers journey. It requires different programs and optimization strategies for it to be effective at all.

If you only expect email to drive end conversions, your funnel will dry up and fail to generate more emails for that bottom-of-funnel segment, which will affect your ROI. In practice, investing more in email will lead to better ways to engage your top-of-the-funnel group and move them into a higher-intent segment. That’s not going to show up on your ROI dashboard, but it’s critical to how you’ll get there.

What do we do with this knowledge?

Track your ROI, absolutely. It’s one of the most powerful data points for your team, your leadership, and any case you’re making for future investments.

Should you try to track your email ROI from a last touch perspective? Absolutely. If you can connect the dots back to revenue, or visits, or leads—whatever you can show—it is worth the data pain. The data pain will be even more worth it if you can compare it to what you spend on similar paid media campaigns.

But at the same time, use these opportunities to educate your own team and the powers that be that email isn’t a simple dollars in, dollars out channel. It’s the sum total of a larger experience that reflects the customer journey as a whole.

The ROI is truly just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what you can see, but awareness, retention, and overall engagement are all below the waterline.

Our paid media teams fully understand this. We can’t just “spend more” on conversion ads if we aren’t doing the work to grown the audience and drive their engagement to that point as well. It’s the same in email marketing—we just can’t send more conversion-focused emails without doing the work to build awareness, trust, and relationships along the way.

Calculate your missing email ROI

How much marketing revenue are you missing out on? Use our free ROI Calculator to see how much email-driven revenue you’re leaving on the table.

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