Investor intent cannot be discerned from email open rates alone. Still, that metric is often highly lauded by marketers at hedge funds and asset managers.
In this day and age, email metrics are becoming a more difficult nut to crack given the pervasive nature of bad bot traffic and AI-driven inboxes.
This is not only a theory; Zeta Global’s analysis into financial services and insurance email delivery identifies what separates ‘true’ recipient activity from what should be ignored by fund marketing teams.
Across that vertical, unique open rates climbed up to 46.4 % (up 2.6% year-on-year). The total open rate rose massively from 10.5% to 64.8%.
Amazing numbers, right? On the surface, yes. But Zeta’s own “true open rate” measure that strips out bot and prefetch activity fell to 17.9%, while the commonly cited ‘actual engagement metric’ of click-to-open rate slipped to only 2.42%.
Just as worrying is a 25.2% year-over-year increase in unsubscribes rates. Albeit the researchers keep in mind that this figure is slightly inflated due to duplicate unsubscribe requests generated by Gmail’s “Manage Subscriptions” feature.
This is just one Gmail change toward AI-driven inbox behaviour that may cause a lot of headaches for outreach activity, where email remains the most popular investor engagement tool.
Besides some major email service providers pre-screening content before it hits inboxes, Gmail is also reducing precaching (which previously inflated recorded open rates), and pulls through images from a sender’s website rather than the email itself. Elsewhere, Yahoo Mail is increasingly replacing user-written preview text and subject lines with GenAI summaries. A sender’s name remains one of the only elements a brand can control.
Where DMARC is concerned too, the report notes how the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)’s DMARC working group has finalised three new proposed standards (RFC 9989-9991). This will increase mailbox providers’ scrutiny of p=reject authentications that are already strict.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Each of these rapid swifts in email protocols threatens to disconnect marketers from reaching their subscription bases. Even if they do hit inboxes, investors’ actual interaction behaviours are tough to determine from open rates alone.
Those that are reporting open rates as a headline statistic to CIOs and CMOs are looking at ESP behaviours, rather than investor interest. This is not as honest a signal as click-to-open or “true open” rates, which more readily showcase an interested prospect who is delving into a market commentary or following a webinar invite to an external sign-up landing page.
With deliverability standards getting visibly tougher, being marked as ‘unauthenticated’ can derail even the best email campaigns before they get started (and are an immediately worse problem than soft open rates.)
Compliance will always be a defining factor in successful email marketing for highly-regulated funds. Now Yahoo and Gmail’s AI-overwritten text creates more hoops to jump through, where preview text and subject lines have to convey what content is contained within.
As GenAI summaries may often replace user text, it has to be assumed that the AI copy will be seen by an investor first, not the IR or marketer’s own voice. All content must be extremely clear to avoid an email’s meaning being confused without editorial oversight.
Source
Zeta Global, “Marketing Benchmark Report: Email & SMS — Q2 2026”
