Intelligent CIO North America Issue 26 | Page 82

FINAL WORD

The power of competitive email intelligence

Email marketing is a hard skill to get right . New Hampshire-based John Landsman , Manager of Research and Analytics , SparkPost , a Messagebird company , talks to us about how competitive intelligence can make email marketing much easier .

Since the beginning of commerce , organizations have needed and sought out information about their competitors . Decades before any kind of digital marketing , competitors were buying and deconstructing one another ’ s products , collecting and analyzing their print and broadcast advertising , subscribing to their direct mail , shopping in their stores and polling their customers .

If understanding your customers is a central tenet of marketing management , then so is understanding your competitors . Within legal and ethical boundaries , this is a wholly legitimate endeavour – and vital to competitive success .
The whole point of the process is to identify competitive successes , gaps , opportunities and the upside potential of possible remedies and other actions .
Email marketing is fertile ground for demonstrating the need for competitive intelligence – and providing the means for its delivery . However , common methods of garnering information about competitors ’ emails , such as signing up for their newsletters or using industry average benchmark reporting , don ’ t offer full visibility .
There are several insights you should expect to glean from a robust competitive intelligence strategy .
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