MailCharts for Online Retailers — Stop using a secondary Gmail account to plan your emails

MailCharts is an invaluable competitive research tool, and few ecom shops should skip it. In addition to the email marketing specific use cases mentioned, you can use MailCharts as a competitive research database. For smaller companies and startups, it's a sneaky way to piggyback on the hundreds of thousands of dollars of demographic/segmentation research that national brands commission every year.

Tl; dr: MailCharts helps online retailers plan their upcoming email campaigns by leveraging competitive insights—this is helpful for newsletters and trigger-based emails. Hi there, this is [Carl](https://twitter.com/carlsednaoui) from [MailCharts](https://www.mailcharts.com/). Some of you may remember when we [originally launched right here](https://www.producthunt.com/tech... two years ago. Since then a lot has changed. Thanks to you and our successful Product Hunt, my business partner and I have been able to work full-time on MailCharts since then. Continuous user feedback—a lot of which came from initial Product Hunt users—allowed us to understand our value proposition (help you plan your email campaigns by leveraging competitive data) and identify our target audience (online retailers and saas companies). As you know, email marketing is the lifeblood of online businesses—generating anywhere from 20-50% of all company revenue. The problem is that most companies either use an extra Gmail account to plan their most valuable marketing channel, or don’t plan at all. MailCharts help you optimize your campaigns with data from companies you admire as well as competitors. If you’re interested in checking us out, I’m happy to offer Product Hunters a special discount of 80% off for the yearly Ecommerce plan. [Click here to redeem the offer](https://app.mailcharts.com/signu...). This means we’ll work together for a whole year, helping you plan and optimize your email campaigns. (Note: This offer expires in a week.) MailCharts has evolved a lot since we initially launched. Below I’ve included a few of my favorite new features and use-cases. Let me know what you think. - [Comparison report](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...) - Let’s compare J.Crew against a few competitors and come up with A/B test ideas they could use to optimize their email open rate. [Click here to view the example report](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...). - Test using short and snappy subject lines. J.Crew’s average subject line is much longer than the competition. - Include emoji in the subject. Both Express and Urban Outfitters have tried this out in the last month. - Send emails at 5pm, just before everyone gets out of the office. Notice how most of their emails are sent early in the morning. - [Calendar report](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...) - Use this to identify gaps in your competitors’ send schedule and experiment sending on those days. - [Click here to view a sample report](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...). - Search search search - Our email database makes it easy to find competitors emails, emails with short subject lines, animated gifs, and just about everything else. No matter what email you’re planning on sending we’ve got the examples you need to get started. You cannot get this type of data anywhere else—not even with a secondary Gmail account! - [Journey map](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...) - A Journey Map report is the fastest way to understand any customer, cart abandoner, or general subscriber's email journey. [Click here to view an example](https://s3.amazonaws.com/reports...). - Here’s some of the information one can quickly gather from this: - Notice how it took J.Crew around 19 hours to get the shipment out. If fulfillment takes a while, make sure you clearly communicate this with purchasers. - Find follow up opportunities: The post-purchase email (asking for a review) was sent ~3 weeks after the order was placed. There's an opportunity to send this email sooner, when excitement is highest. Also, don't be afraid of following up if a user hasn't left a review yet. - Strive for consistency: The purchase confirmation email did not include product images. The shipping confirmation and post-purchase mailers did include product images. If you have any questions or want a demo, let me know. You can reach me at carl@mailcharts.com.

I used to do all of this tracking manually, I'd use an email ie "ecomnewslettersubscribe@gmail.com" and subscribe to hundreds of eCommerce campaigns. When I discovered Mailcharts (facepalm) I could have saved countless hours, rather than searching through my inbox and documenting how many emails a company sent in the last month/year I could easily see it at a glance. I love it because you can even get the code from the email, so if you see a nice template you'll be able to borrow what works for you and customize it yourself. Pretty sweet tool for email marketers and budget friendly.

Been my go-to place to come up with campaigns for my clients - and I look like a genius every time! Good stuff...

Love this Carl! How did you decide to focus on online retailers?