How to increase conversions using multi-touch attribution

Marketing
August 16, 2021

Getting leads is one thing but converting them into sales is another. You might find yourself in the position where you’re sending emails and can see they’ve been opened or forwarded, but you still have no response from the prospect. 

Many business owners might simply wait for the lead to (hopefully) get back to them. But there’s a way you can accelerate the conversion process and even increase your conversion rates. 

You do this using multi-touch attribution. If this sounds new to you; don’t worry. Below, we explain the entire multi-touch, multi-channel attribution system so that you can increase conversions today. 

What Is Multi-Touch Attribution?

Throughout your B2B marketing funnel, you’ll have one or more touchpoints with the prospect or lead. This touchpoint could be a display ad on a website they visit, or it could be a direct email from you.

The prospect may act on this initial touchpoint, or they might not. Multi-touch attribution is a method of monitoring the effectiveness of each touchpoint in the system. This allows you to attach a value to each touchpoint. This in turn allows you to better structure your sales process to increase conversions.

You might find that a native ad on Instagram converts more than a display ad on a different website. You can then focus your marketing campaign accordingly. This attributes each sale to the specific touchpoint that led to it, hence “attribution.”

But multi-touch attribution – when employed correctly – can also improve your customers’ experience. Through increased personalization and customization, you can make your entire sales funnel more pleasant for your customers. 

Instead of bombarding them with display ads, a more effective native ad on social media might yield more conversions while also being less of a nuisance for your customers. 

Different Attribution Models

There are various different models you can use when applying multi-touch attribution within your B2B marketing strategy. The most basic is linear attribution, which gives equal credit to each touchpoint along the buyer’s journey.

There are U and W shaped multi-touch attribution models, and these give varying, but clear-cut, levels of credit to different touchpoints. Other models exist too, and you can even create your own custom model to suit your business.

This can be tough, as the buyer’s journey may involve various platforms and devices. This makes it hard to assign any portion of the credit to individual touchpoints. However, if you create a custom attribution model in the right way, you can create a very effective way of monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

What Are the Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution?

As we’ve said, being able to attribute sales to different touchpoints along the buyer’s journey is a great way to find out what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategy. This lets you modify your marketing approach to ensure you’re getting the best return on investment possible.

So, not only can you increase conversions with multi-touch attribution, but you can also save money by prioritizing marketing strategies that work. But in order to get the most out of being able to monitor each touchpoint, you need to have more than one in the first place. That’s where the “multi-touch” part comes in. 

Multi-Touch and Multi-Channel Attribution

While the two terms are often used interchangeably, there is a clear difference between multi-touch and multi-channel attribution. The former takes into account the specific touchpoint or ad, including the specific message or sequence of that ad.

Multi-channel attribution only attributes credit to the specific channel and doesn’t take into account the message or sequence of the touchpoint. These channels can be social media platforms or organic search, or even your cold email outreach.

With these differences in mind, it’s clear that a combined approach is best if you want to increase conversions as fast as possible. You shouldn’t just monitor which platforms are most effective for your B2B marketing strategy. You should also measure the effectiveness of the specific message or sequence of the touchpoint.

This is why we always recommend you connect with your leads via LinkedIn, along with any other channels you’re using. Even if you’re just cold-emailing leads, connecting with them on LinkedIn and targeting LinkedIn ads towards them gives you a lot of data to work with from a multi-touch, multi-channel point of view. 

So, how do you get the most out of your multi-touch attribution strategy?

Tips for Your Multi-Touch Attribution Strategy

One of the most important parts of any multi-touch attribution strategy is to ensure you’re taking all of your touchpoints into account. If your strategy involves several ads, emails and other CTAs then you want to ensure you are monitoring all of them.

If you only take certain touchpoints into account, you won’t be painting a full picture of your marketing strategy. This can lead to overspending or underspending on various parts of the process. This can then result in wasted money and possibly wasted leads. 

But you also need to ensure you’re gathering all of the data for each of these touchpoints too. This might seem overwhelming, and this is where marketing automation tools and systems can really make a difference. The more data you capture, the more accurate your multi-touch attribution system will be. 

Using Marketing Automation Effectively

Sales automation tools don’t just make your life easier. As they’re developed for one specific purpose (increasing your conversions) they usually achieve more accurate results than if you try and develop your own marketing automation inhouse. 

At Ubico, we work with your B2B marketing strategy and provide you with weekly reports on your leads. If a lead hasn’t replied to you but has forwarded your email or even just opened it, you’ll be able to see this in your report.

This, paired with an effective multi-channel, multi-touch attribution process allows you to make sure you’re focusing on the right channels. This can lead to higher returns on investment and a better experience for your customers. 

If you want to find out more about our service, get in touch with us today.

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