A Step-by-Step Guide to Monitoring Competitor Emails
For Software and SaaS Product Managers
Introduction
In crowded markets like SaaS and e-commerce, staying competitive isn't just about understanding your users—it's about knowing what your competitors are doing.
And tracking the emails they send is one of the most powerful tools you have. Think about it: emails are where companies drop their latest updates, feature launches, pricing shifts, and promotional strategies—often before you see them anywhere else.
If you work on a Survey Product, reading Typeform's newsletter is a great way to keep tabs on their developments, and understand trends in your industry.
For product managers and marketers, these insights are gold.
Are they launching a new feature that you haven’t prioritized? Are they running a promotion that's drawing customers away from your product? Maybe they’ve figured out the perfect messaging that’s resonating with your shared audience...
But no one wants an inbox overflowing with competitor emails. Luckily, with the right tools, you can organize and analyze these emails efficiently, saving you time while staying informed. In this guide, we’ll show you how to extract valuable insights from competitor emails—without the clutter. Let’s dive in.
What You Can Learn from Your Competitor Emails
Promotions: Understand Their Discounts and Offers
Whether they’re running a seasonal sale or offering special deals to specific customers, these emails can give you clues about how they attract business. You can then decide whether you need to adjust your pricing or offer similar deals.
Companies often announce promotions tied to special events
💡️ Pro Tip: Keep an eye on promotions that overlap with your own customer base. You don’t always need to respond with a counteroffer, but knowing what’s out there helps you make a smart decision.
Product Updates: Keep Track of New Features
Competitor emails often include updates on new features or product changes. If they’re introducing something you haven’t focused on, you might need to consider its importance for your own roadmap. Learning about those new developments also lets your marketing team adapt by highlighting your own strengths, and prepare your sales team to respond to customers asking for those new features.
💡️ Pro Tip: Not every feature your competitor launches is worth responding to. Focus on what matters most to your users.
Customer Communication: Learn from Their Tone and Style
The way your competitors write their emails—tone, language, and format—can reveal a lot about how they connect with their audience. Do they take a formal approach or keep things casual? Are they focused on telling a story or pushing a sale? Observing these choices can help you refine your own positioning and communications.
💡️ Pro Tip: Pay special attention to subject lines and calls to action for ideas to improve your own engagement.
Industry Trends: Spot Where They’re Focusing
Emails that share case studies, customer stories, or thought leadership pieces can show you what your competitors are focusing on in the market. They may reveal where they think the industry is headed and how they plan to lead.
💡️ Pro Tip: Use these emails to identify broader market trends. Are competitors emphasizing things like sustainability, AI, or customer personalization? Paying attention to these shifts helps you refine your knowledge about your industry and prepare for what’s next.
Setting Up a Simple Competitor Email Routine
Setting up an efficient competitor email monitoring routing doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require a thoughtful approach to ensure you’re focusing on the right competitors and extracting the most useful insights.
Here’s a simple framework to get you started:
Step 1: Identify Key Competitors
Focus on direct competitors and those known for innovation. You don’t need to track everyone—just the ones most relevant to your market.
Pro Tip: Include some niche products in your industry. For example, if you are building a generalist HR software, including one company focused on AI Talent Management might bring you some fresh ideas in that space.
Step 2: Subscribe to Relevant Email Channels
To effectively monitor competitor emails, it’s important to subscribe to the right sources. Here’s a few ideas :
Competitor Newsletters
Almost every company has a newsletter that shares valuable updates, from product launches to promotional campaigns. Make sure you’re signed up to receive these.
Register for the Competitor’s Product
If possible, sign up for a free trial or demo of your competitor’s product using the same dedicated email address. Many companies will send you onboarding emails, product updates, and even personalized content.
💡️ Pro Tip: Pay attention to the onboarding emails—they offer insight into how competitors communicate key features, solve user problems, and guide customers through their product. Have your UX Designer and Product Marketer steal the best ideas!
Specialized Mailing Lists (Newsrooms, Product Updates, etc.):
Some companies, especially large ones, maintain dedicated email lists for specific types of updates. Subscribing to these specialized lists can give you timely access to press releases, product updates, and strategic moves that might not appear in standard newsletters.
Workday Newsroom : A specialized mailing list
Step 3: Set a Regular Cadence for Reviewing Competitor Emails
It’s tempting to open competitor emails as soon as they hit your inbox, but that approach can quickly become overwhelming—especially if you're tracking multiple competitors.
Due to the sheer volume of emails and the fact that most updates don’t require immediate action, it’s often more efficient to review them at regular intervals rather than in real-time.
We found that weekly or monthly reviews work best :
- Weekly Reviews: For fast-moving sectors where competitors frequently launch new features or promotions.
- Monthly Reviews: Suitable if your market moves at a slower pace, giving you time to assess trends without drowning in emails.
💡️ Pro Tip: Make email reviews a part of your regular competitor monitoring process. Incorporate them into your broader strategy for tracking competitor moves effectively—check out our main guide on competitor monitoring to learn more.
Step 4: Regularly Review and Adjust Your Monitoring List
Competitor email monitoring needs regular attention to stay useful. Take some time to keep your list manageable and focused:
- Unsubscribe from Noisy or Unhelpful Emails: If you notice certain newsletters or emails aren’t giving you useful insights, don’t hesitate to unsubscribe. Keeping only the most relevant content helps you focus on what’s important.
- Add New Competitors as They Emerge: As the market changes, new competitors might start making waves. Periodically review your list to add these new companies and make sure you’re not missing valuable insights.
Common Problems and How to Fix Them
While competitor email monitoring can provide valuable insights, it’s not without its challenges—especially if you follow a lot of competitors.
Challenge 1: Inbox Clutter
If you’re subscribed to multiple competitor newsletters, it won’t take long before your inbox is flooded. With so many emails coming in, it becomes hard to spot the key updates that really matter.
💡️ Pro Tip: Create a dedicated email address specifically for competitor monitoring. If you use Gmail, you can take advantage of its “+” feature.
For example, if your email is youremail@gmail.com, you can sign up with youremail+news@gmail.com and automatically forward all emails into a specific folder.
Challenge 2: Difficulty Sharing Insights with the Team
Often, one person is responsible for monitoring competitor emails and forwarding relevant information to other team members. In addition to this being a burden, this can lead to missed emails or incomplete information, making collaboration inefficient.
💡️ Pro Tip: Use automation to forward emails into Slack/Trello/Notion: Set up a process where key competitor emails are automatically forwarded or manually copied into shared channels or boards. You can create dedicated channels for each competitor or topic and use threading or comments to discuss insights.
Challenge 3: Identifying Priority Emails
Not all emails sent by competitors are important. Sifting through every update manually to identify which ones are worth reading is time-consuming and inefficient.
💡️ Pro Tip: Use email filtering tools to prioritize emails based on specific keywords. For example, if you're particularly interested in product launches, set up rules that flag emails containing terms like “new feature,” “product update,” or “launch.” Combine filters with email labels to sort by priority level or topic. This allows you to quickly scan for the most important emails and address them first.
How an All-in-One Email Monitoring Tool Helps You Stay Organized
Manual solutions can get you started, but as your competitor monitoring efforts scale, using a dedicated platform can save you time and provide deeper insights. Here’s how an all-in-one tool, like PeerPanda, can solve the common challenges of competitor email monitoring:
All Emails Organized and Easy to Search
Newsletters automatically categorized by competitor
One of the biggest benefits of using a specialized platform is that all competitor emails are automatically captured and organized for you. Instead of manually sorting through your inbox, emails are categorized by competitor, topic, and importance—making it easy to find exactly what you need.
AI-Powered Competitor Insights
What sets advanced tools apart is their ability to analyze competitor emails and provide AI-driven insights. The platform’s AI examines each email, highlighting the most critical information—like new product launches or strategic changes—while ignoring generic content that isn’t useful for competitive research. This helps you focus only on the updates that could impact your strategy.
For example, if a competitor launches a new feature, the AI will summarize the update and categorize it under “Product Developments,” saving you time and effort in sifting through marketing fluff.
Weekly Reports for Your Team
With a weekly digest report, the platform compiles the most important updates from the past week into one easy-to-share summary. This report highlights the key product developments, promotions, and other relevant moves by your competitors, allowing you to keep your team informed without overwhelming them.
💡️ Pro Tip: Use these weekly reports to kick off team discussions about potential opportunities or threats.
All-in-one Monitoring Of Website Changes and Industry Blogs
To truly understand your competitors' strategies, email monitoring is just one piece of the puzzle. Competitor Monitoring Platforms also keeps track of competitor website changes—like updates to pricing or new product pages—and monitors company and industry blogs to give you a comprehensive view of their activities.
💡️ Pro Tip: Use these combined insights to track larger trends and patterns over time. For instance, a competitor might launch new features, adjust pricing, and publish thought leadership content all pointing towards an expansion into a new vertical.
4 Tips for Smarter Email Monitoring
1. Don’t Overwhelm Yourself—Start Small
Tracking every single competitor might sound useful, but it’s a quick way to overwhelm yourself and your inbox. Instead, start with just a few key competitors and gradually expand. A good mix would be your primary competitor, an innovator in your space, and a broader industry newsletter from a neutral source.
2. Use Automation Wisely
Manually tracking every email is both time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, automate as much as possible. Tools like PeerPanda can streamline this by flagging important emails, offering keyword tagging, and even generating AI-based insights. With automation, you’ll save time while still catching crucial updates.
3. Collaborate and Share Insights with Your Team
It doesn’t have to be a solo activity. Get your product, marketing, and sales teams involved. Share the workload by taking turns curating interesting email insights each month.
Consider sharing key insights through regular team updates or creating a shared repository where the entire team can access and review competitor emails.
4. Stay Focused on Actionable Insights
Not every email will be worth your attention. Be selective and focus on emails that contain valuable updates like product launches, pricing changes, or promotional strategies that can impact your business.
It’s better to focus on a few high-quality insights that can directly inform your strategy than to waste time analyzing every email that lands in your inbox. Ruthlessly unsubscribe from irrelevant sources.
Wrapping Up: Stay Ahead by Tracking Competitors Emails
Competitor email monitoring isn’t passively watching what others are doing. By tracking competitor emails, you can spot early trends, product launches, and promotions that could impact your business.
The trick is to keep it simple and focused. Use tools that help you cut through the noise and highlight what really matters. Don’t overwhelm yourself with every email—automate the process, filter for key updates, and look for actionable insights that can inform your strategy.
Ultimately, it’s about becoming a more strategic marketer or product manager. One that can anticipate shifts in the market or customer preferences, and stay ahead of the competition.
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