Have you received a significant pay raise lately? A new JupiterResearch study suggests that for the majority of email marketers, the answer may be yes.

The average amount companies spend on personnel for e-mail marketing hit $182,067 this year –up from $169,710 in 2005, the last time the company conducted the study– and as part of that salaries are up, too, according to the report, Email Spending and Governance, 2007.

According to the study, which surveyed 630 marketing executives, salaries have increased from an average of $50,526 in 2005 to $63,547. Not surprisingly, companies with annual revenue of more than $500 million spend more, on average, for salaries, budgeting $406,403 for dedicated e-mail marketing staff. Companies with revenue under $500 million pay out an average of $135,065 in salaries.

What is surprising: B-to-b marketers pay better, with a combined yearly expenditure of $186,077 versus $157,462 for b-to-c marketers. And there are companies out there that are taking email marketing even more seriously. A fifth, or 21% of all companies surveyed, spend $200,000 or more on email marketing employees’ salaries.
 

But while salaries are up, they are not up enough to support most
companies’ ever-burgeoning email marketing efforts, said David Daniels,
VP-research director at JupiterResearch, who authored the report. Email
marketing budgets do not match the strategic importance of actual
marketing programs, he said.

Marketers are sending out more email today than they did in 2005. The
average marketer sends out 5.2 million email messages, including
newsletters and one-off campaigns, or an increase of about 24% from the
2005 level of 4.2 million pieces. And not only are companies sending to
more people, they’re also sending multiple communications during the
month. The combination of limited resources and increased messaging will eventually lead to problems, Daniels said.

“While salaries have increased slightly, the number of resources
dedicated to email marketing remains the same, indicating that most
companies will have difficultly keeping up with the growing complexity
of email,” Daniels said.

In the meantime, though, marketers are stretching the resources they have, but it’s only a stop-gap measure, he said.

“Since more marketers are sending more email, and we are beginning to
see gains in adoption of those marketers using tactics such as dynamic
content to improve the relevance of their mailing, companies will need
to allocate more resources to email production,” Daniels said. “More
resources will be needed to manage the multiple iterations of messages
based on growing interest and adoption of tactics such as segmentation
and integration to outside data repositories.”

Source: BtoBonline.com