Financial services’ notorious deliverability reputation looks to be rounding a corner according to recent cross-industry research.
Despite the popularity of email (particularly among institutional investors), for years the sector’s distribution and email maintenance practice has not been brilliant. This includes overly long gaps between sends, low engagement, and cautious subscribers.
However, a CFOtech Asia analysis reveals financial services and education inbox placement rates are at about 90%. The median across all surveyed industries reaches into the high 80% range, and retail and e-commerce’s rates are declining.
The data also reveals a lot about how well the industry’s tight grip on compliance improves email delivery rates. Senders that are able to verify addresses in real time have 0.3% bounce rates and inbox placement as high as 95%.
This is in opposition to senders with poor list hygiene or those that tend to rely on high-volume sending tactics, who see bounce rates exceed 6.5% and lose up to a third of communications to spam folders.
It paints the stern pressure of regulations into a new light: that account alerts and disclosure compliance rules are driving better email discipline.
Then again, email authentication is another issue: DMARC adoption, a gold standard for preventing spoofed emails, is lacking at two-thirds of senders. And email service providers’ changes vary to affect deliverability, too.
For instance, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection auto-loads images on over 50% of opens, skewing open-rate data due to a device fetching an image – and not whether the message was read or acknowledged by the recipient at all!
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
For hedge fund marketers and IR teams, it is easy to assume this data as a win, and carry on with usual methods of sending commentaries and factsheets (as if the blanket financial sector is ‘in the clear’.)
Deliverability success for a firm hinges on its treatment (and investment in) verification and authentication techniques. In which case, there are some recommended courses of action to run:
- Confirm a DMARC policy is set to p=reject or p=quarantine
- See beyond open rates as a valuable deliverability metric, in light of what ‘opened well’ on Apple Mail.
- Allow real-time verifications passes ahead of important material sends (such as fund launch announcements, performance data).
Distribution lists take many manual and digital hours to collate and keep clean. Yet some low-cost oversight to manage them should help protect that all-important sender reputation that, if left unaddressed, can destroy a compliance team’s hard work!
Source
CFOtech Asia, “Why financial services now leads email deliverability”
