Playbook objective
This playbook’s objectives are to enhance your Competitive Intelligence analysis to inform your email marketing strategy.
- Learn how to increase your competitive advantage with Validity's Certification and View Time Optimization solutions.
- If you are a new Everest customer with no prior relationship with Validity, complete onboarding to ensure you are familiar with navigating and using Everest.
- If you were a Return Path or 250ok customer and are moving to Everest, complete your migration process.
- Ensure you have completed the
- Common Competitive Intelligence challenges
- How using Competitive Intelligence fits into your process
- Creating a process for sharing Competitive Intelligence insights with marketing and sales
- How to use Everest to gather Competitive Intelligence insights
- What to do next
Common sender challenges associated with a lack of Competitive Intelligence are:
- We don't have a process in place for sharing competitive intelligence within our organization
- We'd like to avoid direct competition for the inbox with our competitors during the week, but are not sure when is the best day to send.
- We want to know how our infrastructure and sending reputation compares to our competitors
By using Everest’s Competitive Intelligence feature, senders gain insights into top competitors’:
- Sending volume
- Message patterns
- Content strategy
- Infrastructure compliance
- Sending reputation
A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Competitive Intelligence helps you make decisions about what campaigns to run and when to run them.
Pre-send
- Inform your email campaign strategy with Everest’s Competitive Intelligence
- Plan campaign
- Select target subscriber list
- Design campaign
- Validate target subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation
- Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content
In-Flight
- Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list
- View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement
Monitoring
- Monitor engagement metrics using Everest’s Engagement, your ESP, or internal sending platform.
- Monitor sending reputation metrics using Everest’s Monitoring to understand the deliverability impact.
- Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature.
The need for Competitive Intelligence is clear. Knowing what the competition is doing can help:
- Identify business growth opportunities
- Inform sales and refine pitches
- Monitor industry changes
- Predict competitors' next moves
- Provide awareness of future competitive threats
Competitive insights are worth sharing, not only within the marketing department, but with your sales teams as well. Talk to your marketing and sales managers to determine what information they are interested in and create a process to share Everest's Competitive Intelligence insights on a regular basis. Add new Everest users if direct access to the data is required as part of your process.
Once you have established an internal Competitive Intelligence sharing process, use Everest to gather insightful data and share with your marketing and sales teams.
Analyze sending volume and weekly traffic
Depending on your business strategy, you may decide to go head-to-head with the competition or decide to send email on days where your competitors are not sending a lot of email.
1. Login to Everest
2. Navigate to Pre-Send and click on Competitive Intel
3. Locate a competitor and click the details arrow
4. Change the date range to the last 60 - 90 days
5. Modify the date range as needed to view patterns, trends or recent sending behavior
6. Locate the Volume and Heat Map widget
7. Determine high and low volume sending days or time periods
8. Check for which days of the week have the most and least activity
9. Repeat steps 3-7 for your other competitors
Some competitors may have similar activity patterns which may suggest that they use send-time-optimization (STO) strategies. While using STO can be effective, it may cause some competitors to send email at similar times and days, leading to a crowded inbox.
- Do all of your competitors have similar sending volumes and days that they send?
- Are there any volume patterns or trends?
- Is their volume much higher than yours indicating an attempt to reach more people?
-
Do any days stand out where you and your competitors all send at the same time?
-
Does it make sense to send another day where you can stand out in the inbox?
-
Do you want to get your message to someone in a head-to-head comparison emails with special promotions?
Message sampling
In the Competitive Intelligence beginner playbook, we investigated the use of subject line analysis for gaining insights into your competitor's marketing and content strategy. Build on that analysis to look for other insights in how your competition is trying to reach and entice their prospects and customers.
1. Login to Everest
2. Navigate to Pre-Send and click on Competitive Intel
3. Locate a competitor and click the details arrow
4. Locate the Message Sampling widget and review the subject line data for:
- Price changes
- Webinar topics
- New events and conferences
- New products or features
- Thought leadership
- What content are they sending to prospects and customers? whitepapers, ebooks, educational material?
- Email program insights (e.g. selling focused, lifestyle marketing, tips, inspirational, asking for feedback, alerts, loyalty programs, lottery, layaway program)
- Do they use confirmed opt-in consent, re-engagement, welcome messages, invoicing, and receipts?
5. Click on the From Domain tab
- How are they using subdomains?
- Subdomains are a best practice as they help mailbox providers understand what type of email you are sending so they can establish a domain reputation profile.
6. Click on the From Address tab
- Does the From address suggest insights such as account activations, support requests, mobile volumes, or other information?
Compare your infrastructure and compliance practices
A competitor with poor infrastructure and sending reputation practices has a weakness. If you have good infrastructure and sending reputation practices, you have a competitive advantage.
1. Login to Everest
2. Navigate to Pre-Send and click on Competitive Intel
3. Click the details arrow for one of your competitors
4. Locate the Infrastructure widget
5. Click on each tab to see if your competitor is authenticating email and to view their DMARC policy.
- A reject policy means they are protecting their brand from spoofing, You should work towards a DMARC p=reject policy as well using the Everest Infrastructure playbooks.
6. Click the Compliance tab
7. Locate the List Hygiene: Spam Traps widget and note the types of traps they are hitting
- Pristine: They may be acquiring addresses through higher risk methods such as a list purchase or website scraping
- Recycled: They may not be suppressing unengaged subscribers which may negatively impact their sending reputation.
- Typo: They may have poor data management practices.
Sending to a lot of spam traps can suggest operational inefficiencies and they may be wasting resources on unqualified leads.
8. Locate the Spam Traps widget and note which subject lines are hitting the most traps
- Hitting a lot of spam traps for specific subject lines may suggest they are aggressively trying to reach more people and turning a blind eye to some best practices in pursuit of a competitive advantage.
9. Locate the Blocklist History widget
- Are their IPs listed on important or numerous blocklists? Many mailbox providers block email using blocklists. If your competitor IPs or domains are listed on numerous blocklists, you may have a competitive advantage when it comes to reaching the inbox.
- If you see your competitors listed on blocklists for long periods of time, they either don't know about it or don't care.
Congratulations on completing the Everest Competitive Intelligence: Intermediate playbook. Be sure to share competitive insights within your marketing and sales teams on a regular basis to help give you a competitive advantage. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.
