By Jeffrey Rice, Research Analyst

Where email marketing resides in the budget

Q. Does your organization have a separate line item for email marketing in the budget?


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Email marketing is a separate line item in the budget for just over half of the organizations responding to this survey. With marketing ROI being such a critical issue, it’s surprising that this percentage isn’t higher.

Organization size is the biggest differentiator in whether or not email marketing is a separate line item in the budget. The smaller the organization, the more likely it won’t itemize email marketing. This hinders the ability of smaller organizations to correlate email expenditures with revenue and justify email budget increases in the future.

Email resides within the lead generation budget nearly 2 1/2 times more often in B2B budgets than in B2C budgets. This comes as no shock; lead generation is a primary objective of email for the purpose of targeting businesses.

For additional research data and insights about email marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s soon to be released 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.