When your expertise lives in zero-click answers, someone else owns the relationship.
That’s the reality financial brands face today. Your content informs AI. AI answers the question. The searcher moves on.
Search traffic used to mean visibility. Now it increasingly means feeding answer engines that summarize your insights without sending anyone your way.
This makes email—the channel everyone declared dead a decade ago—more essential than ever.
The control problem
AEOs trained financial marketers to optimize content so AI can extract, cite, and trust it. That work matters. But here’s what AEO can’t do: build relationships.
When someone gets an answer from Gemini, they’re not thinking about your brand. They got what they needed. They left.
Email is different. Email requires permission. It shows up in an inbox they check daily. It builds familiarity through repetition.
Most importantly, you control it. No algorithm decides whether your message gets seen. No platform changes the rules.
In an environment where discovery is increasingly out of your hands, email is the channel where you still have a direct line.
Direct response knows that digital forgot
In the golden age of direct-response marketing, businesses discovered something counterintuitive: the more mail they sent, the more sales they made.
They had an adage: “The money’s in the list.”
Digital marketing spent years chasing discovery. Get found. Rank higher. Optimize for clicks. Build traffic. All of that assumed people would keep coming back to your site. They rarely do.
Email flips the equation. Instead of hoping people find you again, you show up where they already are. Instead of optimizing for algorithms, you optimize for trust.
The old adage still holds, with an important modification: “The money’s in your relationship with the people on the list.”
Frequency builds relationships, not just awareness
So how often should financial brands email their subscribers?
Much more than you think.
According to HubSpot research, companies that sent between 16 and 30 campaigns per month saw significantly better engagement than those sending fewer emails. At this frequency, they achieved a median open rate of 32.4% and a click rate of 6.5%.
That frequency might feel aggressive. But consider what it represents. These people subscribed because they wanted to hear from you.
Most financial brands worry about sending too much. What they should worry about is being forgotten.
When AI answers questions instantly, your expertise has to show up consistently and with a unique POV to stay top of mind. Infrequent emails don’t build relationships. They barely register.
Frequency works because it compounds. Each email is an opportunity to demonstrate value. Over time, that builds familiarity. Familiarity builds trust. Trust drives conversions.
What email can do that AI can’t
AI provides information. Email builds relationships.
That distinction matters in financial services where decisions involve risk, trust, and long consideration cycles.
Zero-click answers can explain what a Roth IRA is. They can’t walk someone through whether opening one makes sense for their situation.
They can’t follow up three months later when tax season approaches.
They can’t build the kind of ongoing familiarity that makes someone comfortable reaching out when they’re ready to act.
Email helps you do all of that.
Making frequency sustainable
Consistency requires discipline. Here are four strategies that make higher frequency work for financial brands:
> Align with the customer journey. Map email topics to where people are in their decision process. Someone researching retirement options needs different content than someone comparing specific providers.
> Let subscribers choose their cadence. Offer a weekly email and a monthly digest. This reduces unsubscribes and increases engagement because people opt into a frequency that works for them.
> Establish recurring formats. A consistent series builds anticipation. Weekly market commentary, monthly planning tips, quarterly reviews—formats like these give subscribers something to expect and make content production more efficient.
> Segment deliberately. Generic emails fail because they ignore where people are and what they need. Segmentation lets you increase frequency without increasing noise.
Email’s infrastructure, not a tactic
Most financial brands treat email as a campaign channel. Something to activate when there’s news or an offer.
That approach misses the larger opportunity.
Email isn’t just a way to promote. It’s infrastructure for building and maintaining relationships at scale.
When search becomes mediated by AI, when traffic no longer guarantees visibility, when your content informs without attribution—email becomes the primary channel where financial brands can demonstrate ongoing expertise and build the trust that drives conversions.
This isn’t about abandoning SEO or AEO or social. Those strategies do matter for discovery.
But discovery without relationship-building is wasted effort. You just inform strangers who never become customers.
Email closes the loop. It turns discovery into a relationship. It gives you a direct line to people who’ve already shown interest. It lets you stay present during the long consideration cycles typical in financial decisions.
In a zero-click world, the brands that win will be the ones that own the relationship, not just the answer.