Many marketers are undervaluing their email campaigns due to last-touch attribution. Multi-touch attribution (MTA) flips that script entirely. Instead of handing all the credit to a single touchpoint, it distributes credit across every interaction a customer has on the path to purchase.

Under last-click attribution, if a customer clicks a retargeting ad and converts, the ad gets 100% of the credit. However, this doesn't show how the brand was originally discovered or any of the touchpoints that happened before the last click. Maybe that customer first discovered your brand through a blog post, then clicked through a few promotional emails over the course of 3 weeks, then saw the retargeting ad.

In this scenario, email did the heavy lifting. However, last click attribution does not show any of that.

When looking at email results through a MTA model, it is clear that it is one of the highest-performing unpaid channels in e-commerce, and one of the most overlooked. Our data shows that across 100 brands, it drove 9.8% of total revenue, putting it ahead of organic search at 6.1%, organic social at 2.4%, and referrals at 3%. Only direct traffic performed better among unpaid sources, accounting for 11.2% of revenue. That's nearly 1 in every 10 dollars earned, driven by a channel that many brands treat as an afterthought.

And while paid ads brought in over 58% of total revenue, they require ongoing spend to maintain. Every dollar of paid revenue has a cost attached to it. Email, on the other hand, costs almost nothing to send once you've built your list. The margins on email-driven revenue are fundamentally different from paid channels.

ThoughtMetric's multi-touch model is the most interesting option for email marketers. It's a data-driven model that splits credit across all the marketing channels that influenced a sale, factoring in data from both the tracking pixel and post-purchase surveys. This combination matters because pixel data captures what customers clicked, while survey data captures what they remember.

Because it tracks the full customer journey from first click to final purchase, you can see not just which emails closed deals, but which ones assisted along the way.

Email is rarely the flashiest channel. But for most businesses, it's quietly doing more work than anything else in the stack: warming leads, re-engaging lapsed customers, and nudging prospects toward a decision.

Multi-touch attribution doesn't change what email does, it changes whether you can see what email does. Once you can see the data clearly, you'll know if you want to invest more or less in the email channel.

Ready to see what your email campaigns are really worth? Book a demo with ThoughtMetric and start measuring the true impact of every touchpoint in your customer journey.