Hi Mark,

We are currently researching an update to our Managing an E-commerce team report (I was the author) which reviews team structures and sizes. The actual size depends on sector, of course, with retail, travel and financial services tending to have the largest teams sometimes numbering over 50 people which are broken down into responsibilities for acquisition, conversion and retention. Depending on size of team there may be specialists for Search, Affiliates or web analytics.

Size also depends on the stage the company is on it's journey - we look at different capability levels.

Please contact me via www.davechaffey.com if you want to discuss further, or here if you prefer.

Dave Chaffey

That's a great checklist of core competencies you need in the team. In the Web 2.0 world, I think for many businesses there also needs to be a reputation management role looking at generating positive PR and identifying / working with partners as well as managing forums/etc. This often isn't picked up by other PR/corporate comms teams elsewhere in the organisation, but is so important to digital.

The challenge for the smaller business is if you just have one or two digital specialists, what can they cover and what do they miss out? Often it is 6 and 7 on your list, the analytics that are missed, but I'm hearing from the interviews in this stage of the research, that devoting time to these is important to getting the best results from the digital channels. Alternatively using resource in Finance or analysis teams tp develop models, review performance.

Many larger businesses now have one person focused on these who is independent from the acquisition, conversion, retention specialist functions, but whose role is to improve performance across all of these areas through mini-projects on / across each. So smaller companies have to make time for the report, learn, refine too - and the successful ones do.

Good point on aligning the team against strategy and objectives too. We will have more focus in the new report report on best approaches for developing goals and strategy.

Dave http://www.davechaffey.com/news

Mark

One of the other way's of making sure you get the right size team is to be clear on what you are NOT responsible for.  You mention other "smaller time consuming tasks".

If these are related to the core work you do then perhaps you are doing them down ie if they are housekeeping tasks to keep databases running or uptodate, or reporting tasks to provide management information.  Should those be properly included in the work of your "team"? would that help show why you need another person?

ON the other hand if they are not really to do with your work, maybe inherited from a previous post or skill set, or dumped with you cos noone else would take it on, should you flag up that these don't require your skills and should move somewhere else?

Hope you get it sorted out, it's hard to get extra resources, particularly if you are doing a good job and actually getting everything done!

On 13:19:02 12 February 2008 MarkSincavage wrote:

Can anyone offer me some guidance on how many people are employeed in your web and/or emarketing department.

I work for a large global company and I'm the sole person responsible for maintaining our website along with overseeing email marketing campaigns. And in addition, I'm tasked with many smaller time consuming tasks.

I am trying to build a case for additional employees/resources to help create a solid web/emarketing team, but I don't have any information to back up my request.

Getting some information about the number of employees that make up a web team or emarketing team in other companies along with a list of associated job titles/functions would help me build a better case by knowing what other companies are doing.

Any information or help would be appreciated.

Thanks!