Apple has the leading market share in email opens, not that its recorded open rates are powerful engagement insights for fund marketers.
TL;DR: report investor clicks and logins as more valuable metrics.
Individual allocators, advisors, and consultants all have a preference for which email provider they use, and the big-hitters seem to be in a war to win over users.
Shown by the data into email client market share – a look into more than one billion tracked emails in July 2026 (and updated in August) – Apple Mail is leading the pack with 62.26% of all opens, up from around 51-52% earlier this year. It is the highest reading that the tracker, Litmus, has published.
Gmail sits at 27.03%, meaning the two top providers account for around nine in ten opens. Outlook lags behind at just over 5%, and Yahoo at 2.59%.
Of course, a fund marketer is not necessarily bothered or alarmed by which email client is generating the most open rates. That’s especially so given that a growing majority of recorded opens are not reliable!
Apple’s growing share is concurrent with its launch of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). Litmus estimates that MPP affects 55-60% of all opens, and it pre-fetches tracking pixels regardless of whether or not a recipient reads the message. In that regard, clicks and conversations are a more valuable barometer when assessing the success of email distribution.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
A firm’s client-share numbers will be very different to the Litmus’ global chart. But fund managers will be glad that their audience base is largely institutional, which skews towards using Outlook generally.
Knowing which email services allocators use is tasked to the IR and marketing teams’, which helps to weigh up which reported open rates can be seen as more truthful. Based on this data, a distribution list that is 40% family offices and advisers on iPhones has a more difficult open rate measurement problem compared to a firm that sells to pension consultants via corporate Outlook accounts.
It is simply part of the job to pay thought to Apple vs Gmail vs Outlook when analysing email content strategies, and the following suggested actions should allow outreach teams to better determine their email engagement going forward.
Firstly, run a client-share report on your own sends, and segment them by investor type. Only then can a 45% open rate on a monthly factsheet actually be proven as 45%, and not 20%.
Also, quit using open rates as a lead score or sales alert trigger for segments that lean into Apple Mail. A signal from an MPP-protected inbox that an email has been ‘opened three times’ is a waste of time for the sales team, who should instead be guided by clicks, reply rates, document downloads and portal logins.
When reporting to executives, present opens and clicks separately, and footnote the Apple share. This demonstrates that open-rate declines or spikes are in line with which email client is used, rather than being due to a fundamental problem with fund content.
These findings also bring UX design priorities into question. 90% of opens being on Apple or Gmail means fund marketers should render content and test dark-mode for these clients first, alongside the ever-popular Outlook for institutional lists. Gmail’s AI-backed inbox summaries and Apple’s previews mean that the pre-open experience (sender name, subject, pre-header) does the majority of the leg work rather than the body copy.
As boards place more heat on marketers to produce the goods from email, at the same time engagement data is becoming less precise. Tracking open rates better is not going to show clear investor appetite. What can, however, is building measurements around actions that a privacy proxy cannot fake.
Source
Litmus, Email Client Market Share
