Ever wanted to know how many times your competitors were sending out emails and what their subject lines were — without having to sign up for every one yourself? And then spending countless hours going through them all, charting them and trying to find patterns and differences so you could improve your own newsletter?
Well now you can have someone else do all of that for you. Email Data Source founded in 2003, by Bill McCloskey has created the Email Analyst, a proprietary software tool that tracks millions of email marketing campaigns and then compiles useful stats and data to save you typing out spreadsheet after spreadsheet at 2 a.m. to determine how many times your main competitor has used the word “free”, or emailed on a Tuesday.
Bill was kind enough to give me a full walk through of the tool earlier this week, and although I didn't get to play with it myself, I was able to see just how robust and user-friendly their product is.
With more than five million emails in their database in over 200 different market sectors from the past five years from more than 400,000 lists, there's a whole lot of data there to use.
How it works:
Unique email addresses sign up for any and every email list they can find (including third-party, as well as a company's own in-house newsletter for customers). This allows Email Analyst to track how each email address is then used over time. For example — if company XYZ then sold that email, or if only company XYZ emails that address. Talk about valuable information to be able to understand who sells email data (which as we know in Canada is a no-no and of course against best practices in general in other countries). Do I hear list brokers salivating everywhere?
Alexa stats are then layered in to understand if after an email campaign has been sent, if that specific company's website received a spike in traffic. Which then means you can start to establish patterns based on delivery, traffic spikes and offers. How brilliant!
There are three main product offerings that Email Analyst has:
Compare
The Compare tool allows you to purchase competitive domain stats and view the email activity solely on your competitors. Useful for small shops that are not as worried with how they stack up in the industry.
Search
The Google of email tools. You can search for almost anything you can think of — keywords in subject lines, content, domains, companies, etc. — cross-reference and download information (for example how many times has company X used the word free in their subject line) into a useful report that you can then take to your boss to prove why you should be doing more emarketing and how you might be able to improve your ROI.
Prospect
The Prospect tool was the original product from which the other tools have been developed. Since it has been around the longest, it is the most robust and pretty much allows you to do everything stated above — but to then dissect it across market sectors, and each list for understanding of opt-in status (and name selling).
Pricing ranges from $2,500 to as much as $16,000 for all the bells and whistles per year, but is likely worth its weight in gold in terms of the man hours it would take, if you did this yourself.
As you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I'm absolutely in love with this product. And with a hefty blue-chip client list, including JC Penny, HP, UPS, Ogilvy, Exact Target and Doubleclick, I'm obviously not the only one. However, there are a few downsides, so to be fair, there are two main cons I saw, which actually boils down to one if you're a U.S. marketer.
1. While they are working on expanding into Europe and Canada, at this time there are few to no Canadian companies in the database.
2. While you get to see if there was a spike in traffic after an email was sent, or how many times a certain word was used, you won't be able to see if it was delivered to an inbox vs. a junk mail folder, or what the open click-through rate would be (which would be a great violation of competitive intelligence).
So keep in mind that just because your competitor used the word “free” eight times in the last year and saw a spike in traffic, you don't know if their list has 10 names or 10 million names, and whether it had a 20- or 80-per cent delivery rate, or a 10-per cent open rate and the list goes on.
This is definitely a great tool to help give some competitive advantage and insight, but just like any tool, should never be used as the only tool, or in a silo, and should be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts.
Overall, I give Email Analyst a mark of B, but that's just because I can't really use it for my Canadian clients right now. Bill, if you get more Canucks, you'll be upgraded to an A.
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