Summary

• Cluttered inboxes filled with competitor newsletters prevent teams from analyzing promotions and answering important questions about timing.
• Relying on emails for benchmarking is cumbersome and highly inaccurate.
• An automated view of past and present promotions can refine promotional strategy.
• EDITED’s Visual Merchandising platform provides historical and up-to-date data to analyze competitors’ emails, websites, and landing pages.
• Using data for timing promotions and optimizing email marketing strategy can increase revenue.
• Swapping manual curation for an aggregated marketplace view can save time and lead to more strategic promotions.

Introduction: The challenge of analyzing competitor promotions

The feeling is probably all too familiar for digital promotions, merchandising/planning and marketing teams. An inbox filled to the brim with emails from other retailers who run the gamut. Everyone’s newsletters, from your closest competitor to retailers who might sit in a more inspirational/aspirational bracket, are likely clogging up your team’s inboxes. 

The result is not only a cluttered mailbox but also constant distraction that prevents your team from getting straight down to analyzing and answering the question: 

What promotions are other retailers running and when?    

Knowing when your competitors are running their promotions can have a huge impact on your business’s revenue, and timing things precisely is essential to retail success. Without a view of when other retailers are launching their promotions, you could be stuck running promotions too late or, on the flip side, too early. The result? Missing out on lost traffic and, ultimately, revenue. 

The limitations of relying on past emails for retail benchmarking

Typically, marketing and merchandising/planning teams have relied on their own inboxes as gateways to the past. They’ll spend hours digging through countless emails to see “what did retailer X do for Black Friday last year?” Or, “How early did brand “Y” start mentioning spring sales?” 

That process is not only a cumbersome one but also a highly inaccurate endeavor. Why? 

1. It would probably drive your team a little crazy to be subscribed to anything more than a dozen or so retailers’ newsletters at a time (meaning you’re probably missing out on many other important competitors).  
2. It’s likely there are retailers who weren’t on your radar for the period you’re trying to benchmark against.  
3. Storing one-off emails in your own inbox makes any kind of aggregated analysis incredibly time-consuming, if not impossible. Yet, pulling together a full view of the types of promotions being messaged, the specific timing of such promotions, as well as the key themes and standout imagery of the retailers you’re trying to benchmark against, is essential to truly gaining visibility of what’s going on across your market.  

Overall, digging through an inbox is a thankless and inefficient task to ask of a team, and can lead to roundabout discussions that end up being swayed by ‘gut’ over fact, and an over-emphasis on analyzing only a handful of competitive retailers, rather than looking at a holistic view of your market. 

The benefits of an automated view of past and present retail promotions

Using historical and up-to-the-day data, your teams can have eyes on the emails, website homepages, and landing pages of every retailer your business cares about. 

Using EDITED’s Visual Merchandising platform, you can refine your promotional strategy with ease, by quickly pinpointing current and historical key promotional points in the calendar. Your team can instantly analyze messaging and the marketing strategy of your competitors without the need for time-consuming and constant manual curation of competitor website pages and inbox-filling email subscriptions.

What does this mean for your business? You’ll be able to launch your promotions at the right time, by having an immediate view of the timing and cadence of specific promotional or discounting messages to influence your promotional and discount strategy.

How EDITED’s Visual Merchandising platform can refine promotional strategy

In addition to launching promotions at the right time, automated benchmarking of your competitors’ emails can also support optimizing your email marketing strategy. 

Lane Bryant, a plus size heritage retailer in the US, was able to identify ideal promotional timing and content. Previously this had been done using historical data, butut with the help of the Visual Merchandising heat map tool, the team was able to pinpoint in real time the optimal timing for this content, changing the email delivery cadence to a day earlier and resulting in an increase in email open rates. “Using EDITED we can see competitors’ and hundreds of other brands’ digital marketing with just a few clicks,” said Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of Marketing.

Overall, using data to guide your decision making when it comes to timing your promotions can have a huge impact on your site traffic and ultimate revenue. Simply swapping manual curation for an aggregated marketplace view will not only free up your team’s time but also ensure that you’re planning promotions in a more strategic way. 

Interested in learning more? Get started here.