• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 19, 2023

Marketers are reaching into their pockets—some, anyway: 47% expect to spend more this year, although 45% say their budgets will remain flat, according to The State of Marketing, a new global study from HubSpot, based on multiple surveys and sources. Only 7% expect a decrease.

But email teams shouldn’t start spending the money: The same marketers expect to make strategic budget cuts in these channels: 

• Paid social media content 
• Print ads
• In-person ownership
• Email marketing
• Physical ads

Why these cuts? For one thing, email open rates went down across the board by over 12% in 2022. It’s not clear if this reflects the impact of Apple’s MPP. 

Web traffic was overall down over 6% in 2022 compared to 2021. 

It’s not all bad news: web conversions rose by nearly 11% increase, and inbound leads by 6.66%.

And even in a recession, marketers expect to keep spending on:

• Content — blog and SEO  
• Podcasts
• Virtual events
• SMS marketing 
• Direct mail
• Long-form video
• Organic social 

What can an email marketer do to keep pace?

As part of the study, Litmus offers these suggestions for maintaining email engagement:

• Create a dynamic birthday email with personalized birthday month graphics 
• Send real-time updates in a dynamic email
• Include timers noting when dynamic content updates. 

In a more general way, it advises marketers to:

• Dynamically update new products based on past purchases 
• Use countdown timers for sales 
• Include dynamic social proof in abandoned cart messages 

Finally, to boost retention, marketers should: 

• Show customers or members what perks they are (and aren’t!) taking advantage of 
• Create personalized guides based on past purchases or actions 
• Create polls to promote products and learn preferences 

It’s not clear how an email unit will achieve all this with a reduced budget. Perhaps the answer is ChatGPT.  

HubSpot conducted several surveys of 1,200 global B2B and B2C marketers.