As allocators travel through long fund sales cycles, IRs should reconsider these measures of proper engagement for their email marketing campaigns.
TL;DR: measure email metrics over quarters.
In what has become an industry norm, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has distorted open rates since its introduction in 2021. Not that this is diminishing email marketing’s profound effect on its end users, however.
AI-inbox summaries do allow recipients to take in email messaging without even clicking or opening, and gradual slips in deliverability rates rarely show up in standard reports. But according to UK agency Astral, a quick fix is to treat a list as an audience relationship, and not a sales pipeline.
This way, fund marketers can measure factors over quarters rather than in single sends, with proposed metrics including branded search uplift, replies and forwards, how long contacts remain engaged, and leads and renewals influenced by email.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Rethinking the value of ‘opens’
Asset management leans heavily on open and click data. A usual workflow sees distribution teams pass ‘engaged’ contacts to sales on the strength of one opened factsheet.
Now, institutional clients might read on Apple devices or behind corporate security gateways that pre-fetch content to skew open rates. If a salesperson calls a pension consultant based on one loaded image, time and goodwill gets wasted.
Thinking about long-term email measurements
Allocators will likely rethink or re-review managers every few years, so most of a fund’s distribution list is not ready to buy right now. Commentaries that they receive should show a manager is familiar enough to make their shortlist whenever a mandate does open.
Judging this by next-day clicks pushes teams toward ‘quantity over quality’, and more promotional sends means more bulk-reviews for a compliance team.
Compliance still counts
Crunched-down Inbox summaries may miss the balanced performance contexts and risk warnings your compliance team signed off on, where clarifying fair statements has to be a priority for all emails.
Valuable next steps
- Filter out machine opens and base engagement on stronger signals: document downloads, forwards, return website vitals and meeting requests.
- Report engagement separately from conference lists, consultant databases, website subscribers and platform contacts, so that one weak source does not affect the overall picture.
- Report branded search, inbound RFP, due diligence requests and renewals among engaged contacts quarterly to distribution heads.
- Lead every commentary with a self-contained headline and required performance context to ‘write for the AI-inbox commentary’.
- Audit authentication, list hygiene and gateway filtering at key consultants and platforms before deducing if a channel has stopped working.
Source
Astral: “Is email marketing dead? No, but everything has changed” (via TLDR Marketing)
