The world weathered many challenges in 2022. Businesses were deeply affected by labor shortages, supply chain issues, increasing costs for materials, and other external, uncontrollable forces.
But many businesses, learning to operate in a remote-first world, were able to survive and even grow some key metrics.
HubSpot aggregated data from 158k+ of its global customers across industries, and tracked the changes that took place in 2022 for web traffic, inbound leads, web conversion rates, and more to generate insights.
To plan for 2023, it's important to first understand how businesses succeeded or floundered in the year before.
When comparing marketing, sales, and service trends YoY, the data paints a nuanced picture, with some metrics thriving while others faltered.
Web traffic (-6.07%), sales email open rates (-11.61%), and net promoter scores (-1.19%) were all down YoY, with marketing email open rates dropping most sharply at -12.89%.
Inbound leads (6.66%) and ticket close rates both climbed (2.26%); web conversion rates gained the most traction at a 10.95% YoY increase.
Hover over the graphs to expand detailed views.
While top-level trends can provide a helpful snapshot of how the year has gone, understanding what drives these numbers requires deeper analysis by sector.
Across industries, web traffic was down compared to 2021. Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (-7.78%), Construction (-6.84%), and Professional and Business Services (-7.16%) saw the greatest declines.
Leisure and Hospitality was the only sector that saw a rise in web traffic, at 6.35%.
Interpreting your website's analytics is vital to understanding annual declines, and there are many tools and guides available to help you do so.
It's also important to be looking ahead to 2023 and understanding industry trends and the ways other sites are optimizing for higher traffic. Here's a deeper dive into 2022's website performance trends.
Despite the downward trend in website traffic, inbound leads were up overall from 2021.
Leisure and Hospitality (18.29%), and Education and Health Services (10.66%), saw the greatest gains. Only the Construction industry saw a significant decrease (-3.79%).
To keep increasing your inbound leads, Q1 can be a helpful time to brush up on the basics of inbound marketing and creating an inbound strategy.
Using guides can help your business more effectively solve challenges and gain more leads.
Despite web traffic decreasing, web conversion rates were also up overall in 2022.
Professional and Business Services, and Education and Health Services, saw the largest improvements with 13.72% and 11.05% YoY increases, respectively.
No industry saw significant declines in conversion rates.
If your conversation rate numbers are not where you'd hoped they'd be, there are several ways to optimize them and generate more qualified leads and customers.
Businesses sent 11.01% more marketing emails in 2022, compared to 2021, but they were met with a disappointing reception.
Email opens fell -3.32% while email open rates the percentage of total recipients who opened an email took an even bigger plunge at -12.89%.
| Metric | yoy (2022 compared to 2021) | sample size |
| Email sends | 11.01% | 167,457 |
| Email opens | -3.32% | 167,457 |
| Email open rate | -12.89% | 167,457 |
Crafting marketing emails is a time-consuming process, so seeing sharply declining opens and open rates can be frustrating.
As a business owner, try exploring tools that make creating marketing campaigns a lighter lift. Also go back to basics and review marketing email best practices to make sure your communications are up to par and that your subject lines are driving opens.
For a deeper dive into marketing trends and more analysis, check out this page.
Sales email open rates were down across all industries, particularly Leisure and Hospitality (-17.03%) and Financial Activities (-18.36%).
If your business's sales emails are going unopened 2023 would be a good time to experiment with your sales email strategies.
Make sure you are focusing on content that will make customers want to respond, and have email templates that drive higher open rates.
Service tickets rose sharply across industries, indicating that businesses acquired significantly more customers in 2021 who are placing a greater demand on service teams.
Construction (87.09%), Financial Activities (79.74%), and Leisure and Hospitality (94.76%), in particular, saw significant YoY growth.
Ticket close rates stayed relatively flat YoY, though the industries with the largest increases in tickets created also saw the greatest decreases in ticket close rates. (Construction ticket close rates fell -10.31% while Leisure and Hospitality saw -18.22%.)
As tickets increase, it is important to use a reliable ticketing system and software that will allow you to track and analyze tickets smoothly.
If you want a deeper dive into 2022's service trends, check out this piece.
The NPS numbers for 2022 stayed mostly flat, with a slight overall decrease of -1.19%.
Since NPS scores are customer satisfaction benchmarks that indicate how likely your customers are to recommend your business to a friend, it's important that this metric stays positive.
Check out this guide to learn about all things NPS.
If some of these downtrending numbers look familiar to you, don't worry. There are many reasons for fluctuating metrics throughout a fiscal year, and you can take comfort knowing your company is in the same boat as others in your industry.
If 2022 taught us anything, it's that businesses should prepare as best they can to weather difficult times ahead.
To survive and hopefully flourish in 2023, keeping important metrics such as inbound leads, ticket close rates, and web conversion rates rising, and focusing on improving web traffic, sales email open rates, and net promoter scores, will be more important than ever.