Global email deliverability rates are now a key metric for IR and marketers. As it turns out, the number of Outlook’s legitimate emails sitting in inboxes is trailing.
According to the 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report by Validity, 2025 saw trillions of inbox placement data points signalling that delivery success was on the up.Not that this was concurrent across every mailbox provider.
Gmail has grown year on year to display 87.2% of legitimate emails. Outlook is notably downstream at 75.6%.This matters a lot for IR teams at alternative funds, with an overwhelming takeup of Microsoft 365 by institutional and RIA audiences: allocators, consultants, compliance officers, and wealth advisors.
If even aggregate open rates for a campaign may appear satisfactory, the unwritten story is that around a quarter of quality outreach is simply not being seen by the prospective allocators that matter, continuing to lie dormant in Spam or Promotions folders.
The report also points to the matter of sending list hygiene, and why managers must better email authentication methods to boost their deliverability. Across the top 1.8 million worldwide domains, DMARC adoption is only accounted for at 52.1%.
Elsewhere, more than half of those domains are listed as “p=none” in their email security records; a monitoring-only policy that cannot stop spoofing, as required by most mail providers’ standards. It diminishes sender trust at the very least.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Delivery problems are exacerbated by treating all providers as a lumped-together analytical warehouse for every investor open-rate.
Ensuring great emailing protocol for Outlook and Gmail is more nuanced than that, especially with the rise of AI-generated Spam, and remedied by taking some affirmative actions:
- Segment inbox placement by mailbox providers in your CRM or Email Service Provider if it is not already.
- Test emails (or ask a vendor to test) manually with seed-list tools before any next campaign is released.
- Authenticate beyond SPF alone, and away from monitoring-only DMARC to strengthen trust signals.
- Audit your email domain’s DMARC policy: moving from “none” to “quarantine” to “reject” will determine if the end-destination of an email is an LPs inbox rather than just looking professional.
Email deliverability fixes are not hugely long-winded. A few weeks’ preparation should have the added payoff of fund content that actually gets received by an LP.
Prospective investors cannot continue engaging with a fund if everything’s stuck in a digital bin, after all. Proactive firms can ensure their mail is safely delivered, no matter which provider is favoured by their target allocators.
Source:
Validity, 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report
