Email is one of the cheapest channels a senior living community can run, and the only audience no platform can take away from you. We make that case in full in why email is still the cheapest move-in channel you are not running.
It is also the channel most operators judge on the wrong number.
Why we took the benchmark table down
An earlier version of this post carried a table of open, click and unsubscribe rates for senior living against other industries. We removed it. We could not tie every figure to a named primary source and year, and the open-rate column in particular had stopped meaning what it appeared to mean.
That is not a small caveat. It changes how you should read any email benchmark, including the ones your platform shows you.
Open rates have been unreliable since 2021
In September 2021 Apple shipped Mail Privacy Protection with iOS 15. For anyone who turns it on, Apple Mail preloads images, including the tracking pixel, whether or not the person ever reads the message. The email is recorded as opened either way.
Three consequences follow:
- Open rates are inflated, by an amount that depends on how many of your recipients use Apple Mail. You cannot compare your number to a pre-2021 benchmark, or to another community with a different audience mix.
- Click-to-open rate is distorted too, because opens are its denominator. Inflated opens make it look worse than it is.
- Automation triggered on “opened” misfires. A nurture step that fires when someone opens will fire for people who never saw the email.
So the old story, where senior living opens a little less often than average and acts far more often, may still be true. It can no longer be proven from open data, and we would rather not argue from numbers we cannot stand behind.
What to benchmark instead
Your own trend is the only benchmark that holds audience, list age and platform constant. Track these, monthly, by segment:
- Click-through rate. Clicks are not inflated by privacy features. This is your primary engagement signal.
- Replies and calls from email. Families in a real decision reply. Count them.
- Tour requests attributed to email. Tag every link with UTM parameters and set tour requests up as GA4 key events, so email gets credit for what it produces.
- Unsubscribe rate and spam complaint rate. The two metrics your recipients control deliberately.
- Bounce rate. The early warning that a list is decaying.
If your platform cannot show you clicks separately from opens, that is the first reporting gap to close.
Where the inbox is actually lost
Deliverability. This is the unglamorous one that quietly kills programs. In February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo began enforcing new requirements for bulk senders, which Google defines as anyone sending around 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail addresses. Those senders must authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC policy, support one-click unsubscribe, honor unsubscribes within two days, and keep spam complaints low (Google asks senders to stay below 0.3%). Most single communities send far less than that, but a multi-community operator on one domain can cross the line, and the same practices help every sender. Mail that fails these checks gets filtered or rejected, and your numbers decay while nothing about your content changed.
Sender identity. Mail from a no-reply address or a generic marketing alias reads as a broadcast. Send from a named person at the community, and let replies reach that person.
Mobile rendering. Your platform’s device report will show how many of your recipients read on a phone, and for most lists it is a large share. A layout that breaks on a small screen does not get forgiven. It gets deleted.
Timing. Send-day differences exist but are small. Test it, and do not agonize over it, because it is a rounding error next to deliverability and sender identity.
The unsubscribe number is the one to watch
Unsubscribes are the honest metric, because they are the one your recipients control deliberately. A rising unsubscribe rate means you are sending things people did not want, and no subject line fixes that.
If yours is climbing, the cause is almost always frequency or relevance: one undifferentiated list receiving one undifferentiated newsletter. Under the 2024 rules, a rising complaint rate is also a deliverability problem, not just a content one.
Segment before you optimize anything else
Four audiences on a typical senior living list want completely different mail:
- Prospective families in an active search
- Families of current residents, who want community life and reassurance
- Professional referral sources: discharge planners, home health agencies, elder law attorneys
- Past inquiries who went quiet, and who may come back on a trigger event you cannot see. Re-engaging dormant leads with automation covers how to reach them without annoying them.
The third group is the one nearly everyone neglects. Discharge planners and elder law attorneys send families who are already close to a decision, and almost no community emails them consistently. Building a professional referral program starts with a list and a reason to write.
If you also email job applicants, keep them on a separate list with separate reporting. In our experience caregiver applicants respond better to text than to email, and their numbers will drag down everything they are blended into.
What to fix, in order
- Authenticate the domain. SPF, DKIM, DMARC and one-click unsubscribe. Nothing else matters if the mail does not arrive.
- Send from a named human at the community, not a no-reply alias.
- Split the list into the audiences above, then by care type. How to build a senior living email campaign walks through the setup.
- Start a referral source program. It is the highest-intent audience you are not talking to.
- Measure on clicks and tour requests, not opens.
Only then is it worth testing subject lines.
Where this fits
Email works hardest when it is triggered rather than scheduled, which is where marketing automation takes over: stage-aware sequences that fire on behavior instead of on the calendar. The list itself is built by email marketing, and both report into the same dashboard as paid and organic, so cost per move-in is comparable across channels.
Mail Privacy Protection dates from Apple’s iOS 15 release (September 2021). Sender requirements are from Google’s and Yahoo’s bulk sender guidelines, enforced from February 2024. We no longer publish industry open or click rates for senior living because we could not source them to our standard.
Related from Inertia