How to Track When Your Competitors Send Email Campaigns

Email marketing strategy has many levers that marketers need to pull as they work to reach the inbox with the right message send to the right person at the right time.

And while those first two pieces are essential - the right message sent to the right person - they're also easy to track. Sign up for your competitors emails and, even with the limitations of Gmail or Outlook, you'll still get a rough idea of what they're sending and even who they're targeting.

That last one, however, can be especially tricky when it comes to studying how your competitors send emails. Because one thing that Gmail simply isn't designed to do is analyze when your competitors send their campaigns.

Tracking Competitor Email Campaign Timing

When we first built SendView this was one of the things we really wanted to crack as much for ourselves as for our users. We didn't just want to see our competitors emails, we wanted to understand when they were most likely to be sending emails on both an individual and aggregate level. We'd subscribed to our competitors emails for years but all we ended up with was a bloated inbox. We wanted to change that.

Let's dig into three ways you can track when your competitors are sending their email campaigns.

1) Competitor Email Dashboards

These dashboards give you a detailed view of each of your competitors' email marketing strategy and tactics. One of those things, as you guessed, is the timing around when they send their emails. Look at the left column in the screenshot, for example.

You'll see right off the bat a calendar view of when they send emails. It's easy to discern which days are the most popular, but scroll down a little further and you'll have a breakdown of both:

• The most popular day of the week they send emails
• The most popular time of day they send emails
• The most popular minute of the hour they send emails

You can even adjust your time zone to ensure that the hour corresponds to the markets you and your competitors are competing in. After timing you'll be able to answer other questions you may be asked about your competitors' strategy including:

• How long are their subject lines? What are the most common words?
• Are they using new tech like dark mode code? Gmail Annotations?
• Which ESP are they using? Are they using more than one ESP?
• What are they putting for the from name and do they change each time?
• Is their average spam scores high, low, or average?
• Are they signing their emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC?
• How often do they use emoji in their subject lines?
• Do they use animated GIFs? If so, how often?

All of these questions (and more) can be answered from the dashboard.

2) Day of Week & Time of Day Trend Reports

That's great on the individual level, but what about zooming out? In this case you can use the Trends report library to see all sorts of stats across all of your competitors including time of day, day of week insights, and minute of hour insights.

You'll also have a heat map style insight to each individual sender from here as well. This allows you to compare the overall average across all of your competitors (the chart at the top) to how each individual compares at a glance. You can click on any competitor to dig into more detail from their Dashboard.

These reports are some of the most popular email trend reports in SendView.

3) Days Between Email Campaigns

One of the simplest, but most insightful, data points available around your competitors email marketing timing is how long they go between email campaigns. This is something that's easy to view from the Timelines page.

This view shows you all of a competitors emails visual in sequence. And see that black box? Yep, it even shows you how many days and hours pass between each campaign. This is a simple way to not only see how often your competitors are sending emails but how they're spacing those emails out across time.

Track When Every Competitors Sends Email Campaigns

The best part about SendView is that you get to track any company you want exactly how you want. We're not giving you the same insights we're giving everyone else, we're giving you the tools to track a company's email marketing just the way you need to.

Want to track how their email strategy compares between an email attached an account and one that's still a lead? You can do that.

Want to see exactly when each competitors sends emails on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Easy.

Want to view the source code of an email campaign your competitors just send? It only takes one click/

Timing is just of those insights - and it's one of our favorites - but there is so much more to SendView that will help you see exactly when and why your competitors send emails.