When I started my career in proxy solicitation, the technology of the day was a phone room, a mail room and a wall calendar. When a campaign was running behind, you did the only two things available to you: you mailed again, and you called more shareholders. I can still remember standing in a room of callers late on a Friday, with the meeting early Monday morning, watching a fund's quorum inch upward one conversation at a time, knowing the meeting date was set in stone with no ability to adjourn.
Nearly 40 years later, almost every part of that picture has changed. Everyone today owns a smartphone. Initial proxy materials are delivered digitally as opposed to paper. News is distributed over social media platforms; home landlines are virtually extinct, and AI has a comprehensive answer in seconds. What hasn't changed is the math at the end of the campaign: you either have quorum by the meeting date, or you don't, and the funds that get there consistently are almost never the ones that bet on a single channel.
Every proxy season brings a fresh round of predictions that one channel, whether email, text messaging, mobile voting, phone or traditional mail, will finally become the dominant answer to shareholder outreach. I've heard that prediction made about every one of them, including mail. It has never been true, and it isn't true now.
The Retail Voting Apathy Problem Is the Whole Problem
Digital communication has undeniably transformed proxy solicitation. It’s faster, cheaper by touchpoint, easier to personalize and increasingly expected by investors. Mail remains durable and highly visible in the household. Phone outreach provides a personal touch. Advisor communication extends reach through trusted relationships.
But for mutual fund complexes, closed-end funds, ETFs and BDCs, the lesson is not that one channel should replace another entirely. The campaigns that consistently achieve quorum and pass proposals on schedule are designed as omnichannel programs, with each channel assigned a clear role, sequenced deliberately, measured continuously and adjusted in real time.
The reason is the retail shareholder base. Roughly 95% of accounts holding mutual fund shares are retail accounts, and over a recent six-year period only about 12% of retail accounts voted their shares (outside of proactive outreach) compared with roughly 91% of institutional shares voted over the same period. That gap is why fund proxy campaigns are inherently harder, and more expensive, than corporate issuer campaigns. You aren't persuading a small group of professional voters. You're trying to get the attention of a very large group of people who didn't wake up thinking about your proposal and may not even be aware they own shares of the fund (having been placed in the fund by their advisor or purchased a fund for its simplicity in managing the investment).
The Case for Digital: Speed, Cost and Reach
It's easy to see why digital-first thinking has taken hold. Email, SMS and text-to-vote, QR codes and mobile-optimized voting portals reach shareholders almost instantly, at a fraction of the per-unit cost of print and postage, and with real-time tracking of votes, opens, clicks, bounces and delivered messages.
Texting is particularly powerful when permissioned and properly timed and controlled: it lands on a shareholder's mobile device, delivers a short call to action and connects the investor to a voting site in one tap. For a channel that didn't exist for most of my career, it has become an increasingly valuable part of the proxy outreach toolkit.
Regulators are pushing in a similar digital-first direction. In July 2026, the SEC proposed Regulation E-Delivery, which would make electronic delivery the default method for proxy materials, fund shareholder reports and other disclosures for shareholders who have provided an e-mail address. That would flip the current opt-in framework, so digital is the default and paper becomes the exception (subject to a free opt-out and a multi-year transition).
Combined with rising postage and print costs, that regulatory shift is a genuine incentive to lean further into digital channels. The Investment Company Institute has estimated that fund proxy campaigns across 62 member firms, representing roughly 85% of U.S. registered fund assets, cost between $675 million and $1.14 billion from 2020 to 2025. Both ICI and the SEC's own Investor Advisory Committee have cited that figure as evidence that the current, largely paper-driven system is outdated and inefficient.
Why Mail Still Matters Inside an Omnichannel Strategy
Here's the complication: even as digital adoption accelerates, mail continues to play an important role in the overall mix. Industry benchmarks from the ANA/DMA Response Rate Report put average direct mail response rates at roughly 4.4%, more than double digital outreach response rates.
Mail should not dominate the campaign, but it provides persistence and household visibility digital outreach often cannot. An email can be buried within hours in a crowded inbox. A text may get immediate attention, but its useful life is often measured in minutes unless the shareholder acts right away. A mailed piece can sit on a kitchen counter or a stack of household documents for days or weeks, giving the shareholder repeated chances to notice it and act on it. Mail also reinforces the messages you're broadcasting digitally.
For a proxy campaign, that difference isn't academic. It can determine whether you reach quorum efficiently or end up in costly, time-pressured follow-up solicitation as the meeting date closes in. Mail also remains an important coverage channel for shareholders who haven't provided electronic contact information, or don't regularly check it, and for shareholders who opt out of e-delivery. For the foreseeable future, some shareholders will continue to receive communications by mail. Fully transitioning away from physical mail will likely take another generation or two.
In an omnichannel model, mail isn't included because it's old. It's included because it fills gaps that digital, phone and intermediary outreach can't reliably fill alone.
The right conclusion is not "mail versus digital" or "phone as a last resort." It's that a single-channel strategy leaves reachable votes behind. A shareholder who ignores three emails may still open mailed communication. One who sets aside a proxy card may still respond to a well-timed text-to-vote reminder. One who is uncertain about a proposal may need a phone conversation or to talk with their advisor first. Each channel compensates for the blind spots of the others, and each has a different useful life. An omnichannel strategy turns those differences into an operating advantage.
Single-Channel vs. Integrated Outreach
These terms get used interchangeably, but the practical distinction matters when you're designing a campaign.
A single-channel campaign relies primarily on one method, usually mail, email, text or phone, to drive participation. It's simple to execute but fragile in practice. The narrower the strategy, the more likely the campaign is to require expensive late-stage escalation.
Integrated omnichannel outreach combines email, text, mail, phone, QR codes, mobile voting and advisor/intermediary communication with coordinated timing, shared reporting and real-time suppression of shareholders who have already voted, so each touchpoint reinforces the next rather than operating in isolation.
Put side by side:
| Single-channel | Integrated omnichannel |
| Pros: Simpler to launch, easier vendor coordination and lower upfront planning complexity. This can work for very small or low-risk campaigns with highly responsive shareholder bases. | Pros: Balances speed, reach and staying power. Uses email and text for immediate action, mail for durable household presence and phone and advisor outreach for targeted escalation, improving quorum visibility and cost control. |
| Cons: High risk of missed shareholders and digital-only messages can disappear within hours or minutes, while mail-only efforts miss shareholders ready to vote from a mobile link. In this case, late-stage phone follow-up becomes more expensive. | Cons: Requires more planning, deeper analysis and disciplined reporting. The most advanced models require integrated vote-tracking, transfer agent, tabulator and outreach data. |
| Best fit: Only for the lowest-risk campaigns where quorum is highly predictable and the shareholder base is easy to reach in one way. | Best fit: Most mutual fund, ETF, closed-end fund and BDC campaigns, especially where retail ownership is broad, deadlines are firm or proposals require meaningful shareholder participation. |
The issue was never whether mail, email, text, phone or intermediary outreach should lead the campaign in isolation. The issue is whether all channels are deliberately coordinated, measured and sequenced to create awareness, reinforcement, voting and escalation.
The Right Cadence Is Also the Cheapest Path
Sequencing matters as much as the mix. A well-designed cadence gives each touchpoint a distinct job in the shareholder's decision journey, rather than repeating the same message across every medium. It also puts the least expensive channels to work first.
- Extended reach: advisor and intermediary outreach. Educate financial advisors so they can engage their clients.
- Initial delivery: mail and e-delivery. Deliver official proxy materials through each shareholder's preferred channel, explain the meeting agenda and reinforce voting options.
- Awareness: email, SMS/text-to-vote and auto-messaging. Digital outreach is low-cost and repeatable, and it drives early action before the message is buried. Its window of effectiveness is brief, often hours or even minutes.
- Re-engagement: digital, mail and phone. Mail carries a higher per-piece cost but a higher response rate and a longer life in the household. Phone answers questions and converts shareholders who haven't responded.
- Close-out: targeted follow-up. Phone and advisor outreach are the most expensive per contact, so reserve them for the non-respondents identified through real-time vote tracking. That's only possible when channels are coordinated rather than run in isolation.
The goal isn't to prove one channel is superior. It's to use each for what it does best: digital for immediacy, mail for persistence, phone for conversion and intermediaries for trusted reinforcement.
That discipline is also what keeps costs down. A campaign that over-relies on any single channel creates false savings up front and higher costs later, through additional mailings, late-stage calling, adjournments, lapsed advisory contracts or delayed transactions. I've seen budgets protected in month one and blown apart in the final three weeks more times than I can count.
Cost-effectiveness isn't about choosing the cheapest channel. It's about using lower-cost digital outreach, mail where physical delivery adds value, and phone and advisor outreach where they will decide quorum. Sequencing channels properly and suppressing outreach to shareholders who have already voted reduces total campaign cost, even when the strategy requires multiple coordinated touchpoints.
The Bottom Line
Digital communication is an essential component of a successful proxy campaign. Email, texting, QR codes and mobile voting create immediate engagement and lower the friction to vote. Mail provides durable household visibility and coverage for investors who aren't fully reachable electronically. Phone outreach helps convert non-respondents. Advisor and intermediary communication extend reach through trusted relationships.
The funds that consistently achieve quorum efficiently are not choosing one channel over another. They're orchestrating all of them with disciplined cadence, shared reporting, real-time suppression, and continuous adjustment as the meeting date approaches. And as the SEC's proposed e-delivery reforms make clear, the regulatory and cost pressures pushing toward digital are real and accelerating.
Four decades in the proxy industry, my view hasn't changed much since that Friday night in the phone room. The tools are far better. The deadlines are just as unforgiving. The prudent path isn't to replace the mailbox or over-emphasize it. It's to master the omnichannel strategy that makes every shareholder touchpoint count.
The meeting date won't move, so the best time to pressure-test your channel mix is before the campaign launches.
At D.F. King, we have more than 80 years of proxy experience and the technology to engage today's retail shareholders. Talk to my team about your next fund proxy campaign and how we can help you reach quorum.
Sources:
- Broadridge proxy participation and multi-channel proxy outreach materials;
- ANA/DMA Response Rate Report benchmark data;
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Proposed Regulation E-Delivery, Release Nos. 33-11430 et al. (July 16, 2026);
- Investment Company Institute member survey on fund proxy campaign costs, 2020-2025;
- Adobe, Salesforce and Omnisend industry guidance on omnichannel marketing strategy.