Playbook objective
This playbook’s objective is to learn how to use Everest to perform a subject line competitive analysis.
- 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 Everest Basic Setup Guide.
- Competitive intelligence terminology
- Common Competitive Intelligence challenges
- How using Competitive Intelligence fits into your process
- How to use Everest to inform your email strategy with Competitive Intelligence
- What to do next
- Competitive intelligence: The process of gathering and analyzing competitor product and service information to inform your business or email strategy.
- Subject line: The text a recipient sees in their mailbox describing the email’s content.
- Sending volume: The number of emails sent to recipients over time.
- Message patterns: The days, times, and frequency of emails sent to recipients.
- Content strategy: The planning, development, and deployment of email content used to achieve business goals.
Common sender challenges associated with a lack of Competitive Intelligence are:
- We have minimal insight into how our competitors use email marketing
- Tracking our competitors’ emails is a manual process and takes a lot of time
- We want to improve our Competitive Intelligence strategy with additional data points we don’t have right now
By using Everest’s Competitive Intelligence feature, senders gain insights into top competitors’:
- Sending volume
- Message patterns
- Content strategy
Please read Top 5 Competitive Intelligence Challenges from 1,000+ Industry Professionals for additional information.
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 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.
Please read 6 Steps to Design a Successful Competitive Intelligence Process for additional tips.
Compare how your brand measures up to the competition by analyzing their subject lines to gain insight into their content and business strategy.
Add competitors
As you plan for your next email campaign:
1. Make a list of your top 5 competitors and obtain the domain name from their websites
2. Login to Everest
3. Navigate to Pre-Send and click on Competitive Intel
4. Click on New Search
5. Enter one of your competitor’s domains to get started
6. Click Next
- From the list of available domain names, Competitive Intel automatically selects the top domains to track based on the volume percentage of email seen at that domain.
- Select other domains to track by clicking the check box. You can always change which domains to track later if the email from a domain is not useful.
7. Click Save Selection
8. Repeat steps 1-7 for your other top 4 competitors
Analyze Subject Lines
1. On the Search Domains page, click on the details icon to view the sending data for your first competitor
2. Locate the Message Sampling section displaying the subject lines
3. Scroll through the subject lines and note:
- Type and size of offers (% off, $ off, free shipping)
- Use of emojis
- Special promotions (holidays, birthdays)
- Tone (celebratory, empathy, urgency)
- Cross-channel promotions (social media, TV, direct mail)
- Personalization
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each competitor
Use your competitors’ subject lines to help you make decisions about your next campaign.
- Do you want to match their offer?
- Do you want to run a special holiday promotion?
- Do you want to adjust the tone of your content?
- Do you want to synchronize your email campaign with social media?
- Do you want to use more personalization?
As you start creating a subject line for your next campaign, don’t forget to test out your ideas in the Subject Line Previewer. A good subject line can mean the difference between the recipient reading your email or putting it in the trash.
- Navigate to Pre-send>Design & Content>Pre-Flight Checks>Subject Line Previewer
Incorporate Everest’s Competitive Intelligence into your email marketing process to help you beat the competition. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.
