AI can do a lot to speed things up in life, which also includes gatekeeping email inboxes, perhaps disregarding the efforts made by fund marketers.
For the very first time financial services and insurance have been studied as a core industry vertical in Zeta Global’s Q2 2026 Marketing Benchmarking Report, tracking email and SMS performance. Similarly, European benchmarks entered the picture, signalling comparison insights to marketers operating across borders.
It all makes for startling reading into how the very nature of email deliverability is changing due to AI-powered features. Gmail and Yahoo are now able to discern what their recipients are able to see before they open the message.
This had a drastic effect on what sorts of email fared well (promotional emails) and what faltered (triggered or automated campaigns). Unsubscribe rates were high everywhere.
Gmail and Yahoo enables summarisation and prioritisation layers, which essentially pre-screens content based on risk signals such as IP reputation, engagement history and relevance besides the old-school Spam filters (which are still in play, of course). These layers decide exactly what gets allowed entry, gets condensed, or buried for good.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
This very existence of an AI-managed inbox is largely underplayed by marketers at investment managers. Needless to say, it needs far more attention…
Inboxes are not the passive delivery channels of the past. They’re now hard-boiled editors in their own right: another sign-off step before an LP or advisor receives a fund update or newsletter. Being disregarded by an AI is the same as never sending an email in the first place!
These days email deliverability is a housekeeping strategy far more in the marketing and IR functions’ court, and not simply forwarded onto the IT desk. Maintaining sender reputations, cleaning subscription lists and ensuring DMARC authentications are critical to becoming a ‘priority’ sender to the AI relevance filter and being let through.
Beyond that, there’s the very makeup of an email template to think about. Subject lines and preheader texts must clear the same relevance filter. This means being readable by human and AI tools to then be rendered fully.
Likewise, it may be worth teams’ while to test the finding that promotional content is outperforming triggered sends. Automated investor communication sequences have been the go-to email strategy for funds for a long while, so may need to be tweaked. Checking internal open, click and unsubscribe metrics for the first half of 2026 which paint a clearer picture of what’s working, and what isn’t.
Sources
Zeta Global, Q2 2026 Marketing Benchmark Report: Email & SMS
Email Marketing Rules
