I agree with all of the above points. I have spent hours creating custom Attribution Reports to try and gain some insights into email performance, most especially revenue. In my opinion, HubSpot is seriously lacking overall in the reporting area that is specific to Email Marketing. Can we improve this?
What’s more, all Email Revenue is “subject” to an attribution model of choice in HubSpot, but this really just waters down the revenue that was obviously directly generated from a contact clicking a link in an email and then completing a purchase. I have reviewed specific paths of contacts who have purchased, and I can see on a one-to-one basis that a contact received our marketing email, clicked it, and then a deal was closed (contact made a product purchase), but I need to know this data as a whole for an email, not on a contact-by-contact basis. The total deal amount was $1,000 yet through the various attribution models applied, only $200 of that was attributed to the email. When your performance KPIs are based on email revenue, and it is your company’s primary source of revenue, this discrepancy in reporting is major.
How can we calculate revenue for emails without having to use an attribution model, none of which are really geared towards email marketing as a primary revenue source?
For Example:
- First Interaction -- this will pretty much never include Email Marketing, because in order to receive an email from us, contact FIRST has to opt in somewhere, which would be the contact’s “first interaction”.
- Last Interaction -- this will rarely ever include Email Marketing, because a contact will click a link in an email and be taken somewhere to consume content or to buy something, but there will always be clicks in between an email link and the conversion.
In my assessment, too much of the attribution models’ criteria is centered around lead generation (contact creation). Well, if we are emailing a contact, they already exist in our database via previous opt-in, so how can we better measure the effectiveness of specifically our email marketing strategies in HubSpot?