A LinkedIn post made the rounds recently with a bold claim: events were delivering a -7% ROI for the author’s company while their owned email channel, supercharged by AI tools, was generating returns north of 1,350%. Case closed, right? Pack up the booth. Cancel the sponsorship. Go buy the software.
But don’t take the knee jerk approach. The post had problems. The event analysis ignored a substantial list of measurable tactics that any experienced trade show marketer would count and failed to mention that a ton of event success is driven by how well your own team engages. The email figures never established a credible baseline, which means the 1,350% number is more or less meaningless. And buried underneath the whole argument was the fact that the “owned channel” being championed happened to be a product the author was actively trying to sell. None of that was disclosed until you dug into the profile.
This is not a column about that post. It is a column about the question the post was pretending to answer, because it is actually a good one: where does your marketing spend generate the most return, and how do you know?
The Wrong Question Gets You the Wrong Answer
Framing the conversation as “events vs. email” or “in-person vs. digital” is a false choice, and it leads to bad decisions. Your marketing does not operate in single channels. It operates in a combined funnel affected by numerous elements. Every tactic you deploy touches a prospect at some point in a sequence, and the sequence is what converts, not the individual touchpoint.
A prospect meets you at a trade show. They take your card and do not do anything with it. Three weeks later, they receive your follow-up email and click through to your website. A month after that, your sales team closes the deal on a call. Which channel gets the credit? The event introduced you. The email re-engaged them. The call closed it. The answer is all three, and if you strip any one of them out of the attribution model, your ROI math is fiction.
This is where most marketing analyses fall apart, including the LinkedIn post in question. Single-channel ROI calculations are almost always incomplete because they cannot account for the influence of every other touchpoint that contributed to the conversion. They are also almost always motivated by an agenda, whether that is justifying a budget line, defending a program under review, or in this case, selling a product.
What a Real Funnel Analysis Looks Like
If you want to understand where your marketing dollars are actually working, you have to track the complete picture. That means:
Events need to capture lead flow from the floor, categorize leads by quality and intent, and then follow those leads through the pipeline until they either convert or go cold. Booth traffic numbers and badge scans are vanity metrics. Qualified conversations that result in a proposal or a contract are the ones that matter.
Email and digital tactics need to track engagement rates, yes, but more importantly, they need to track which engagement sequences correlate with conversion. An open rate tells you someone clicked. A closed deal tells you something worked. Connect the two, or the data is decorative.
Your CRM needs to be the connective tissue. Every touchpoint, from the first handshake at a show to the last email before a signed agreement, needs to live in the same system so you can see the full path. Without that, you are making decisions based on partial information and calling it strategy.
And your attribution model needs to be honest about time. The question is not just which channel converts, it is which channel combination converts fastest while protecting your margins. A tactic that drives fast conversions at a low cost beats a high-return tactic that takes eighteen months and a large team to execute, every time.
On the Technology Question
The current market is flooded with tools that promise to solve all of this in fifteen minutes with an AI assistant that will make you rich. Some of these tools are genuinely useful. Many of them are dashboards built on top of data you already have, relabeled and resold with a large language model bolted on.
The 1,350% return figure did not come with a methodology. It did not address data privacy regulations or data sourcing practices, both of which carry real legal exposure depending on your market. It did not explain what the baseline cost was or how attribution was calculated. It was a number designed to impress, not to inform.
Real ROI lives in the full funnel. It lives in clean data, honest attribution, and a clear-eyed understanding of how each channel supports the others. It is built over time by marketers who understand that brand, reputation, lead flow, and conversion are not separate metrics but a single system working together. Many current “marketers” have never been trained in the concept of multi-channel attribution and, as such, end up measuring success on a singular tactic instead of what really matters: total ROI and profit margins.
Before you cancel any of your marketing efforts, make sure you are measuring the whole story across all channels with a reasonable attribution model. And if you don’t know how to establish one, work with someone who can.
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