The Email Research Center

Last week, ExactTarget released a commissioned study from Forrester Consulting titled Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power.  To me, the most sobering statistic is that for 54% of marketers, “each channel they use competes with each other for budget.” Another 28% provided a neutral response to the question. Leaving only 18% that disagree with the statement.



That these budget competitions are occurring is not a surprise to me, but what concerns me is what this leads to—debates about the relative value of each channel for the purpose of re-allocating budgets.

Marketers look to the pseudo-science of marketing attribution to help them resolve these questions and buzz about the topic is picking up again. Shop.org recently announced the creation of a new Online Marketing Attribution group, David Baker wanted a new attribution calculator for Christmas, and Ed Henrich (appropriately) wants to make sure email is included in the attribution equation.

The idea of attribution makes sense. The hope is that by properly attributing the influence of different marketing campaigns on actual conversions will allow marketers to spend their marketing dollars more appropriately. However, the reality of marketing attribution is mired in disagreements about how it should be done. As one marketing manager interviewed in Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power shared, “Multichannel efforts are hard to track. We’ll look at a sale, but it’s hard to determine whether it was the email or the catalog that closed the deal.”

In this age of marketing accountability, have our attempts to answer John Wanamaker’s conundrum about which half of his advertising dollars are wasted gone too far? Is it really necessary to know if it was the email or the catalog that closed the deal? Or do we simply need to know that both played a role and that fewer sales would have occurred if one or the other were to be eliminated?

Would love your thoughts as I continue to ponder…