How to Track & Analyze Your Competitors’ Email Spam Scores

A spam score is not a perfect number that tells you everything about your competitors' style of marketing, but it does tell you something. That is true on the individual campaign level when you dissect an email with an unusually high spam score and it's true on the aggregate when you compare the average spam score of one company to another. It tells you when they're pushing the limits a little more and when they're getting more aggressive with their campaigns. It can tell you when their tactics change or when they hire a new agency or copywriter.

Spam scores going up or down can be a meaningful competitive insight to track. So how do you track the spam scores of your competitors' email campaigns? Luckily, SendView makes this easy. Here's how.

1) See Individual Campain Spam Scores in the Inbox

The first place to see your competitors' spam scores is in your SendView inbox. When you subscribe to your competitors' emails with SendView, spam scores are automatically captured for each one. This column can be toggled on/off in your inbox and you can even search for campaigns based on their spam score. It's an easy way to keep tabs on the spam scores of email campaigns.

You can also see spam scores when you click on any one of those campaigns in the details view to the side of the HTML for that email. This is also visible in the Timelines area which uses a similar layout for those details. In each case, spam scores is easy to find.

2) Track Average Spam Scores on the Dashboards

Next, you can view a specific sender's average spam score by going to their SendView Dashboard. Here, you'll see lots of stats around their timing, tech stack, and content. You'll also see in the center column the average spam score for the date range you're looking at. This will also compare their spam scores to the average scores of your competitive set to give this number a bit more context and meaning.

This will also show you whether their average spam score is trending up or down. Want to compare multiple senders' spam scores? You can use compare mode to see up to three competitors side-by-side in the Dashboard tool. This will include all of the metrics available in the Dashboards feature - timing, content, tech stack, authorization, etc. - including spam scores.

3) High Level Spam Score Trends

The third way to analyze and track your competitors' spam scores is using the Trends area of SendView. This allows you to zoom about and see average spam scores across all of the competitors and brands you're tracking. You can see the highest spam score during this time frame, the lowest spam score, and a histogram that groups spam scores by their average to see how the distribution of scores looks to help you see where the bulk of campaigns is falling.

You'll also notice that it breaks down the spam score for each senders you're tracking as well so even if you're not on the Dashboard for a specific competitor you can still see the high level spam score averages for that company.

4) Spam Score Change Alerts

The fourth way you can track spam scores is with the automated alerts feature. SendView will tease out the times when a sender's average spam score suddenly spikes or drops as well as individual campaigns with an usually high spam score. These can all be found by clicking on the Alerts tab from anywhere in the app and you can use the right dropdown to only show spam-related alerts.

These alerts are discovered automatically for every competitor you track, so all you have to do is click "Alerts" and see what the app has found. There is nothing to turn on or adjust, the system teases out these insights automatically in the background.

Bonus) Track DMARC, DKIM, and SPF

While these insights aren't technically spam scores, they do represent a key reason why emails might end up in the spam folder. Understanding whether or not your competitors sign their emails with DMARC, DKIM, and SPF is one of the first, big indicators of how likely they are to achieve solid deliverability with their email marketing efforts. You can see these indicators from the inbox, email details view, dashboards, as well as the Trends reports.

You can also view trend reports for DKIM and SPF as well. Each trend reports will include how many emails are being signed and breakdowns for each competitor.

Track You Competitors' Spam Scores with SendView

We're really proud of SendView and what is possible when it comes to keeping an eye on your competitors' spam scores on the individual email and aggregate level. We've tried to weave these insights into every corner of our platform to make it easy to understand how successfully your competitors are staying out of the spam folder.

Want to better track these insights for the company's you compete with? Maybe it's worth giving SendView a try.