Modern marketing technology has enabled marketers to deploy an array of campaigns and programs with ease, allowing them to reach new and existing customers across multiple channels and devices.
The problem is, with so many campaigns in play targeting various segments of customers online and offline, it can muddy the waters of attribution. Trying to figure out exactly which campaigns, segments, or channels are helping move the needle in terms of revenue becomes quite complex.
Your customer engagement platform’s capabilities may enable you to execute whatever campaigns your ambitious marketer heart desires, but without attribution, how do you know which marketing efforts are most effective at driving revenue? Which result-bearing areas deserve more budget allocation? Which losing initiatives should be de-prioritized or dropped altogether? And most importantly — which parts of marketing are producing business outcomes for the company?
To answer these questions, you need to have greater visibility into marketing’s day-to-day impact on revenue.
Putting Marketing’s Impact on Revenue Front and Center
To track performance and business impact, most marketers employ some form of attribution, in addition to looking at more strategic KPIs. According to Google, “76% of all marketers say they currently have, or will have in the next 12 months, the capability to use marketing attribution,” with many already using Google Analytics or a similar provider.
But often these sources for attribution are not front and center for the marketer. Higher-level analytics and data may be housed in different silos across the organization or inaccessible to most marketers interested in viewing the revenue impact of their day-to-day efforts.
In fact, “25% of marketers cited structural and organizational challenges as the No. 1 reason they haven’t adopted data-driven attribution” (Google).
To make revenue attribution immediately accessible for you and your marketing team, you’ll want it visible within your customer engagement platform. This puts the imperative information you need right where you do your most critical work, allowing you to make better decisions about current programs and strategies quickly.
Learn how the Emarsys Summer ’20 Release can help your brand accelerate business outcomes through revenue attribution.
Immediate and Visible Attribution
There’s great value in providing marketing with immediate and visible attribution — specifically, revenue attribution. The reasons for this are twofold.
Practically speaking, visible revenue attribution enables you to see the direct correlation between marketing efforts and the company’s bottom line.
There may be a part of you that geeks out on the granular details of operational and channel-specific KPIs. But those data points won’t mean much to your CEO or the rest of the C-level suite who are focused on business goals of growth and revenue. In other words, having a real-time view of how day-to-day marketing is impacting revenue is more essential (and meaningful).
Another reason: Morale. The ability to see which campaigns brought in more revenue — and to what extent — can do wonders for helping your entire marketing team (including the designers, writers, and other creatives involved) see exactly how their work is driving results for the company. Compare this to a traditional approach, which relies on using campaign metrics as the sole indicator of a campaign performance.
Marketing team members feel more vital in keeping the lifeblood of the business pumping when they see the email program they worked on — enriched by their carefully designed visual assets and diligently crafted email copy — has generated real dollars for the business. If this information is shielded from marketing, or is too far away, or resides with a third party, your team won’t be able to see the fruits of their labor.
Better Allocation (Especially When Budgets Are Tight)
COVID-19 impacted businesses across the globe. In response, many organizations had to tighten and, in some cases, reduce their budgets, especially in marketing. Gartner reports that, “65% of CMOs and marketing leaders report [preparing for] moderate to significant budget cuts due to coronavirus-related disruption.”
If you’re that CMO or marketing leader challenged with optimizing your budget and getting the most value out of the resources you have, you must determine which efforts are the strongest in terms of generating revenue. You’ll want to focus on allocating more of the budget to the channels and programs that are demonstrating the best results and continue to drive profitable growth.
Visible revenue attribution enables you to make these decisions quickly and accurately, and in a way that aligns with the business’s overall goals. When tight budgeting is required — whether due to a global crisis or any other reason — the ability to quickly optimize budget allocation based on what is working gives you a greater degree of flexibility and agility.
Did you know the Emarsys Summer ’20 Release has 26+ new features designed to help brands like yours drive revenue and growth?
Bridge the Gap Between Performance and Strategy
Bridging the gap between operational, performance-based metrics and strategic business metrics requires marketing to demonstrate the impact of omnichannel customer engagement on business outcomes down to the individual campaign level. To do this, you must have better visibility into revenue attribution.
Performance and strategy share a common goal — so when your marketing department rallies to drive greater revenue impact, it is supporting the other functions of your business that are also focused on driving revenue. This makes visibility into attribution even more critical.
Since your customer engagement platform sits at the center of nearly everything you’re looking to do as a marketer, it should contain an accessible and actionable view of the revenue attributable to your efforts. Plus, a tight integration of revenue metrics in the platform makes it easier to prove the ROI of your campaigns.
With an eye on which campaigns, channels, and segments are adding dollars to the company’s bottom line, you can think and act more strategically to drive growth and revenue.
Final Thoughts
Your customer engagement platform may be equipped to help execute a variety of omnichannel campaigns. Yet, if the revenue impact of those campaigns can’t be seen, you’ll face a greater struggle aligning marketing to your organization’s business goals, and earning your marketing team the credit it deserves.
One of the many reasons we’re excited for the Emarsys Summer ’20 Release is because, within the 26+ new features included, lies a key theme of helping marketers measure business outcomes through attribution. These features, integrated directly into the customer engagement platform, offer consistent in-platform reporting on exactly which channels, automations, and campaigns are bringing in revenue for the company.
Ultimately, whether your goal is better budget allocation, optimization of current programs to win and retain more customers, or accelerating business outcomes, you’ll need to have a clear view of how marketing impacts your company’s bottom line. And that starts with revenue attribution.
➢ To find out more about how the Emarsys Summer ’20 Release can help your brand get better visibility into marketing’s impact on revenue, don’t miss this webinar.
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