It’s so prevalent in the industry that it’s become a running joke. When someone asks what the best, highest, fastest, most impactful tactic or strategy is? We say, “Let’s test it!” Not sure how to show your team that your brilliant idea is the right way to go? Better test it.

A few months back, I wrote about using data to determine the timing, content, and impact of your email marketing campaigns (See: 6 Steps to Putting Data to Work in Email). In the last few months, the element I find myself discussing most with colleagues and clients is the latter: What data can we use to attribute the impact of our hard working email marketing campaigns?

When it comes to challenges in attribution, I’ve heard it all:

We know that email is a money-printing machine. (Flash to the hundreds of articles that quote the outrageous and unbeatable Return on Marketing Investment.) As I often say with clients and at conferences, “Why wouldn’t you stand in front of the email marketing machine and just put in all your money?”...

It’s now 2017. We marketers have been chanting for “More data!” for years… and I think we can agree: we got it. Marketers use between 3 and 15 (!) data sources in their marketing, and the problem more often than not is that it doesn’t all live somewhere we can get to it or make sense of it.

Jessica Best will be presenting "Getting Jiggy with Animation & Video for Email Marketing" at this year's Email Innovations Summit, April 19-21st in Las Vegas.