At some point in the last decade-plus, email open rates became the default measure of whether a financial services marketing program was working or not. It made some sense: if people are opening your emails, then they are likely paying attention to what you have to say.
If they stop opening them, something is wrong.
That made sense when email was the primary channel through which firms communicated with advisors and investors. When the inbox was relatively uncrowded and the act of opening an email was a meaningful signal of interest, tracking opens gave you something real to work with.
That environment no longer exists. The inbox is crowded, the filters are aggressive, and the act of opening an email has become a much weaker signal than it once was. Firms that are still optimizing for open rates are measuring a phenomenon that no longer reliably tracks what they care about. Worse, they are often making decisions based on that measurement that actively degrade the thing they are actually trying to build.
A Broken Metric
Email open rates were always an imperfect proxy. What marketers actually wanted to know was whether their communication was changing how prospects thought about the firm. Opens were a reasonable approximation of that question when the alternative was no data at all.
Two things happened to break that.
- Volume: As email became cheaper and easier to send at scale, the amount of marketing emails hitting investor inboxes increased dramatically. They adapted by becoming more aggressive filterers. Inbox rules, spam folders, promotional tabs, and simple habituation all reduced the signal value of an open.
- Security: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which pre-fetches email content regardless of whether a recipient actually opened the message, threw things off even more. For those with a significant portion of their list on Apple Mail, open rate data has been partially or substantially inflated since 2021. Not a good metric.
Together, these two have turned open rates into a lagging indicator. They tell you something about the past behavior of a list, sort of, through a proxy that was weakening before the measurement problem made it worse. They tell you almost nothing about whether your communication is building the credibility that drives long-term revenue.
What Open Rates Actually Measure
Today, open rates measure list quality and subject line performance. That’s it.
A high open rate on a given email tells you that your list is reasonably clean, your domain reputation is solid, and your subject line was compelling enough to earn a click from people who were already inclined to open email from your firm. These are not nothing. A list with a 40% open rate is a healthier list than one with a 10% rate, and subject lines that earn clicks are better than subject lines that don’t.
All good news, but it’s not enough.
- None of that tells you whether the email changed how anyone thought about your firm
- It doesn’t tell you whether the advisor who opened the message read past the first paragraph
- It doesn’t tell you whether the content was useful enough that the reader came back to it, forwarded it, or thought about it later in the day
- It doesn’t tell you whether the firm’s communication program is compounding credibility over time or simply accumulating list fatigue
These are the things that actually matter in a long sales cycle. Open rates are upstream of all of them and correlated with none in any reliable way.
The Optimization Problem
The deeper issue is what happens when firms optimize hard for a metric that is measuring the wrong thing.
Teams held accountable for open rates learn quickly how to improve open rates:
- Subject lines get more cryptic and curiosity-driven, because cryptic subject lines earn clicks from people who want to know what the email is about
- Send frequency gets reduced, because lower frequency produces higher open rates on any given email as list fatigue eases
- Content gets shorter and less demanding, because shorter emails feel less like work and get opened more readily.
Each of these is a rational response to this incentive, but each of them moves the firm further from the communication program that actually builds credibility.
A subject line optimized for curiosity gets the email opened and then fails to deliver on the implicit promise, which trains readers to open future emails with lower expectations. A reduced send frequency keeps open rates healthy while reducing the consistency that makes a content program compound. Shorter, less demanding content produces better engagement metrics while doing less of the work that changes how advisors think about the firm.
What’s the Alternative?
There’s no one metric out there that will replace the open rate. It’s actually a set of measures that are harder to game and more directly connected to the credibility-building outcomes that drive revenue in long sales cycles.
Reply rate is probably the most undervalued signal in email marketing for financial services firms. An advisor who replies to an email, even briefly, is demonstrating a level of engagement that is categorically different from an open. They took an action that required actual attention. They had something to say in response to what you sent.
Content-driven meeting requests are a direct measure of whether your email program is moving advisors along the credibility curve. When someone reaches out and references a specific piece of content as the reason they want to talk, you have evidence that the content did something. This connects a content program directly to pipeline outcomes.
List quality over list size is a framing shift rather than a specific metric, but it changes what you pay attention to in ways that matter. A list of 500 advisors who are genuinely relevant to your firm’s strategy and who have opted in with real intent is worth more than a list of 5,000 names assembled from conference registrations and purchased databases. Tracking engagement rates within your most relevant segments, rather than across the whole list, gives you a more honest picture of whether your communication is landing with the people it needs to land with.
Recirculation rate, meaning how often your content gets forwarded or shared, is also worth tracking. Content that advisors share with colleagues is content that has passed the most important editorial test in your target market: a professional staked a small piece of their own credibility on it being worth someone else’s time.
The fact is, the inbox is getting harder and harder to reach for everyone, not just funds and advisors. That’s why it’s so important to optimize for the outcomes that really matter to you, rather than just focus on email-level tactics that will be outdated in a month.
Layup is the strategic marketing partner for financial services firms building the authority, credibility, and trust that compounds over time. If you’d like to talk about what that looks like for your firm, reach out at wearelayup.com.