A healthy advisor email program usually lands in a band, not at one number. Most published figures put financial-services open rates in the high teens to high 20s, click-through rates between roughly 1% and 3%, and unsubscribe rates at or below 0.2%. Open rates are the least trustworthy of these since Apple's privacy changes, so clicks, replies and booked meetings should carry more weight when you judge your own results.
This guide pulls the reported ranges together, explains why they disagree, and shows how to compare your own numbers against them without fooling yourself.
TL;DR
- Financial-services open rates in recent reports cluster around 17% to 29%, but inflated "total opens" can read above 70%, so always check how a figure was counted.
- Click-through rates typically run from about 1% to 3%, and click-to-open rates from about 2.5% to 13%, depending on the report and its method.
- Aim for unsubscribes at or under about 0.2% and bounces under 2%. A bounce figure far above that points to list hygiene, not content.
- Behavior-triggered and journey emails far outperform one-off broadcasts, so benchmark each email type separately.
- Treat every benchmark as a rough range. Your own trend over six to twelve months matters more than any industry average.
Table of Contents
- The benchmark ranges at a glance
- Why open rates are the shakiest number
- Click-through and click-to-open: the better engagement signals
- Bounce, unsubscribe and deliverability
- Results vary by email type
- What about ROI figures?
- How to use these benchmarks on your own results
- Perspective
- Get a program built for these metrics
- FAQ
- Sources
The benchmark ranges at a glance
No single authoritative "advisor email benchmark" exists. Published figures come from email platforms, custodians, trade media and analytics vendors, each with its own sample, period and counting method. The table lines up what has been reported, so you can see the spread.
| Source | Period | Audience | Open rate | Click-through | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Financial Brand | 2022 | U.S. financial services | 27.1% | 2.4% | 10.1% click-to-open, 0.2% unsubscribe |
| Altruist | 2023 | Financial services | 27.76% | 1.01% | 9.58% bounce |
| Mailgun | 2024 | Finance, global | 17.30% | 1.72% | 0.03% unsubscribe |
| Zeta Global | Q4 2024 | U.S. financial services and insurance | 50.6% unique, 18.5% "true" | 1.27% unique click | 2.50% click-to-open, 0.067% unsubscribe |
| MoEngage | 2025 report | Financial services | 27.42% | n/a | 13.44% click-to-open |
| Email List Validation | 2026 | Advisor newsletters | 28.5% | 3.7% | Hard bounces under 1% |
Read the table as a map, not a scoreboard. The spread between 17% and 28.5% on open rate is not a sign that advisors differ that much. It reflects different data sets and different ways of counting.
Why open rates are the shakiest number
Before comparing yourself to anyone, understand what an "open" is today. Apple Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, preloads email content, which can register an open even when nobody read the message.
The effect is visible in the data. An Omeda analysis found that six months after the change, total open rates had risen from 22.6% to 40.5% and unique open rates from 15.2% to 29.0%. Click rates, by contrast, returned to their earlier levels, which suggests clicks stayed a valid signal. Its author's advice is to lean on clicks rather than opens to measure engagement, and to review any automation that uses an open as a trigger.
Platforms also handle this differently. Epsilon reported that open rates fell about 37% when automated opens were filtered out, comparing July 2021 with July 2022. Some providers kept counting machine opens, which inflates their benchmarks.
Zeta's Q4 2024 report shows the gap clearly for financial services and insurance: a total open rate of 73.8%, a unique open rate of 50.6%, and a "true" open rate of 18.5%. Same emails, three very different numbers.
What this means for you:
- Find out whether your email platform counts machine opens, and whether it reports unique or total opens.
- When you read a benchmark, check which kind of open it uses before you compare.
- Use opens only as a loose trend line within your own program, month over month.
Click-through and click-to-open: the better engagement signals
Clicks are harder to fake, so they deserve more attention. Across the reports above, financial-services click-through rates mostly sit between about 1% and 3%. The Financial Brand put the U.S. sector at 2.4% against an 18-industry average of 2.3%. RIA Intel reported that advisor newsletter click-through averages 2% to 3%, and it cited a 15% to 25% open rate as a good newsletter result. That piece dates from 2018 to 2019, so use it for context, not as a current target.
Click-to-open rate (clicks divided by opens) varies much more, from 2.5% in Zeta's data to 13.44% in MoEngage's. The reason is mostly the denominator. If opens are inflated by machine activity, click-to-open looks low. Omeda notes that any metric built on total opens is less reliable than it used to be, and click-to-open falls squarely in that group.
My practical rule: track click-through rate against your delivered emails, and treat click-to-open as secondary.
What a click should lead to
A click only matters if it leads somewhere useful. For an advisor, the useful destinations are usually a guide download, a webinar or seminar registration, a meeting booking page or a reply. If your emails earn clicks but no registrations, the issue is the landing page or the offer, not the email.
Bounce, unsubscribe and deliverability
These three metrics tell you about list health and sender reputation more than about content.
Bounce rate. Reports vary widely. Altruist lists a 9.58% financial-services bounce rate and says high bounce rates indicate a database needs cleaning. A Validity-based benchmark puts finance and banking at an average of 2.4%, with a good range of 0.5% to 2% and hard bounces below 0.3%. Email List Validation reports average hard bounces under 1% for advisor newsletters. The sensible target is the low single digits at most, with hard bounces as close to zero as you can get.
Unsubscribe rate. The Financial Brand reports 0.2% for U.S. financial services, Mailgun reports 0.03% for finance, and Zeta reports 0.067% in Q4 2024. Anything in the range of roughly 0.03% to 0.2% per send is ordinary. A sudden jump after a particular email tells you what your list did not want.
Authentication. Mailgun's report stresses that SPF, DKIM and DMARC remain critical for protecting sender identity and guarding against spoofing. For a firm whose emails mention money and accounts, this is basic hygiene: ask whoever manages your domain to confirm all three are set up before you worry about subject lines.
Results vary by email type
One blended average hides the most important finding. MoEngage's 2025 report shows that in financial services, broadcast emails perform worst across every metric: a 6.14% open rate and 9.49% conversion rate, against 42.36% opens and 26.49% conversions for behavior-based emails. Journey-based emails converted at 29.15%.
These are a vendor's figures from its own customer base, and "conversion" is defined by that platform, so do not expect to hit them. The direction is the useful part: emails triggered by what a person did (downloaded a guide, registered for a webinar, clicked a topic) outperform the same message sent to everyone.
For an advisor, that translates into separate benchmark lines for:
- Newsletters and broadcasts to your whole list.
- Welcome and nurture sequences that start when someone joins.
- Event emails such as webinar and seminar invitations and reminders.
- Client-service emails such as review reminders.
Mixing these into one average makes your numbers look worse or better than they are.
What about ROI figures?
You will see claims that email returns $36 or $44 for every $1 spent. Treat these with care. Litmus reports that 35% of marketing leaders see $10 to $36 per dollar, 30% see $36 to $50, and 5% see more than $50, based on a global survey of more than 2,000 marketing professionals. That is a spread across many industries, not a promise for an advisory firm.
An advisor's real return depends on long buying cycles, average client value and how many leads become meetings and then clients. If you want to measure it properly, our guide to content marketing ROI for financial advisors walks through the approach.
How to use these benchmarks on your own results
Here is a simple routine that avoids the usual traps.
Step 1: Set a baseline
Pull the last three to six months of sends from your email platform. Record delivered count, unique clicks, unsubscribes, bounces and replies, separated by email type. Note whether your open rate includes machine opens.
Step 2: Pick a range, not a number
Use the ranges above as a sanity check. For example:
- Click-through rate in the 1% to 3% band is ordinary for financial services.
- Unsubscribes at or below about 0.2% per send are normal.
- Bounces under about 2% are healthy. Well above that, clean the list before changing anything else.
Step 3: Judge outcomes, not just activity
A small, well-targeted list of prospects who attend your seminars can beat a large list with a better open rate. Count registrations, booked meetings and replies per send. Those are the numbers that connect to revenue.
Step 4: Change one thing at a time
Test one variable per send: the subject line, the call to action or the send day. With a list of a few thousand or fewer, differences of a point or two are often noise, so wait for a pattern across several sends before declaring a winner.
Step 5: Track the trend
Compare this quarter with last quarter. A steady climb in click-through and registrations means your program is working, whatever the industry average says.
If you are still building the program, our email campaign setup guide covers the groundwork, and our piece on a compliance-first advisor newsletter covers the content side. For a broader look at fundamentals, this overview of what email marketing is is useful for anyone new to the channel.
Perspective
Our team is made up of practicing advisors, so we have lived with the same dashboards you have. The most common mistake we see is chasing the open rate. It is the easiest number to read and, since Apple's privacy change, the least reliable.
We build email programs around what happens after the send: the click, the registration, the booked call. That is why our system pairs automated drip sequences with webinars, seminars and a custom CRM. Each email has a job, and each job can be measured.
Long buying cycles are the other reason we favor sequences over one-off newsletters. A prospect may need months and several touches before they book a conversation. Behavior-based follow-up keeps your firm in front of them in a way that fits how financial decisions actually get made, and our content library is designed to keep that messaging compliance-friendly.
Benchmark yourself against a range, then beat your own last quarter.
Josh
Get a program built for these metrics
If you would rather not assemble this yourself, we offer a turnkey system for independent advisors: email marketing with automated drip campaigns, plus webinars, seminars, a content library, social media and websites, all connected to a custom CRM. We map the strategy first, then implement and support it.
See how the pieces fit together on our services page, or start with a growth strategy conversation. For the bigger picture, read our guide to why email marketing converts advisors.
FAQ
What is a good open rate for a financial advisor newsletter?
Reported figures range from about 17% to 29%, depending on the source and how opens are counted. Because machine opens can inflate the number, treat your own trend as more meaningful than any single target. Pair it with click-through rate for a fuller picture.
What is a good click-through rate for financial advisors?
Most reports put financial-services click-through rates between roughly 1% and 3%. The Financial Brand reported 2.4% for U.S. financial services, and Altruist reported 1.01% for 2023. Newsletters with one clear call to action tend to do better than those with many links.
How often should I check my email benchmarks?
Review each send within a week, and review trends monthly or quarterly. Short windows are noisy on small lists. Comparing quarter to quarter, by email type, shows whether changes are real.
Are industry benchmarks reliable?
They are useful as rough ranges, not as targets. Each report uses its own sample, period and counting rules, and many come from software vendors with their own customer base. Use them to spot a problem, such as a high bounce rate, then focus on improving your own numbers.
Sources
- The Financial Brand: email marketing in banking, key questions
- Altruist: email marketing for financial advisors
- Mailgun: 2024 email benchmarks
- Zeta Global: Q4 2024 email benchmark report
- MoEngage: Email Benchmarks Report for 2025
- Email List Validation: advisor newsletter benchmarks
- Omeda: Apple Mail Privacy Protection six months later
- Epsilon: Mail Privacy Protection one year in
- RIA Intel: why nobody is reading your RIA's newsletter
- AlpacaRelay: finance and banking bounce rate
- Litmus: the ROI of email marketing