Understanding your competitors' email strategies can give you an edge no matter what industry you belong to.
In fact, email marketing provides critical insight into promotions, engagement tactics, and customer retention that can help you refine your approach.
Whether you need inspiration or a close look at your competitors’ email marketing campaigns, you need the right tools.
With the right tools, you can:
- gain insight into your competitors' email campaigns
- uncover their promotional tactics
- compare their seasonal offers and engagement strategies
Platforms like Milled and MailCharts are popular tools for marketers looking for inspiration and insight from top email campaigns.
However, they focus only on email and rely on standard collections, so you can’t have a holistic view of the company’s marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll compare 5 key features of Milled and MailCharts and highlight their limitations.
So, if you want to improve your email marketing campaigns, keep reading.
Milled VS MailCharts: Features & Limitations
Milled Features
If you're new to Milled, it's a handy tool for researching email marketing strategies by acting as a search engine for newsletters.
It provides access to a vast archive of past email campaigns, making it ideal for marketers looking for inspiration or analyzing how competitors engage their audiences.
1. Email Campaign Inspiration and Discovery
Milled is a great tool for marketers who want to explore the email strategies of top brands.Say you want to launch a new seasonal campaign for your online store.With Milled, you can search for similar campaigns from competitors or industry leaders, filtering by holiday, category, or specific keywords like "Black Friday" or "Summer Sale".
This allows you to discover effective design layouts, engaging subject lines, and promotional tactics that you can incorporate into your strategy.
2. Real-time updates and insights
Milled's real-time updates ensure you never miss your competitors' latest email campaigns.
For example, if a competing brand launches a flash sale, you can see how they structured the offer and act quickly to adjust your own promotions.
This feature is invaluable for reactive marketing, helping you respond to industry trends as they happen.
3. Competitive Analysis and Brand Focus
Milled's features are tailored for global competitive analysis. This means you can see how your competitors structure their emails and newsletters.
Milled lets you view specific campaign layouts, product promotional offers, and call-to-action placements.
This helps you understand what resonates with their audience and gives you ideas for refining your email engagement tactics.
4. Easy-to-use interface
If you're in a hurry and need to check out your competitor's latest email campaign, Milled's intuitive interface makes it easy to find what you're looking for.
Say you're doing research for a marketing meeting: you can easily apply filters, save relevant emails, and share your findings with your team.
The platform's simplicity makes it accessible to those new to email marketing analytics.
Milled Limitations
1. Limited to email only
Milled's exclusive focus on email campaigns means you're missing insights from key marketing channels like social media, SEO, PPC ads, etc.
Especially in e-commerce, understanding a competitor's full digital strategy is essential as customers interact with brands across multiple platforms.
So, without multichannel tracking, you get a partial view of your competitors' efforts, limiting your ability to create a comprehensive marketing plan.
2. Lacks advanced analytics
While Milled provides primary access to email samples, it falls short regarding actionable data.
You'll need to upgrade to a premium plan for deeper analysis, such as identifying trends in open rates, click-through rates, or conversion metrics.
This lack of in-depth analytics can hinder your ability to benchmark performance effectively, making it harder to optimize your own email strategy based on proven data.
3. No custom brand tracking
With Milled, you're limited to browsing a pre-defined collection of newsletters.
You can't choose which competitors to track or request insights on new brands.
This limits your ability to monitor critical players in your niche and adjust your tactics based on direct competitor behavior.
You might need to try other tools like Panoramata, which are more flexible.
Milled Pricing
Milled offers both free access and premium subscription options.
Here are its pricing tiers:
- Free plan: You can access up to 12 months of email data, follow brands, and save emails for occasional research.
- Pro plan: For $99/month or $83.25/month billed annually, you get full email database access, advanced filters, keyword alerts, and custom collections for professional marketers.
- Team Plan: $299.90/month or $249.92/month billed annually. This plan includes Pro features for up to 5 users and is ideal for marketing teams and agencies.
MailCharts Features
MailCharts is another great email marketing intelligence platform that provides competitive insights and industry benchmarks for planning, analyzing, and improving email campaigns.
It is a valuable tool for businesses and email marketing teams looking to understand trends, gain inspiration, and make data-driven decisions.
1. Automated email journey analysis
You can track cart abandonment, welcome series, and post-purchase follow-up flows.
MailCharts provides deeper insights into email automation flows such as onboarding subscription, booking abandonment, or purchase process.
For example, if your online store is experiencing cart abandonment problems, you can use MailCharts to study how competitors structure their recovery sequences.
This includes checking what subject lines they use, when they send follow-ups, and what incentives (like discounts or free shipping) they offer.
However, this feature is accessible only to pro plan users.
2. Competitive analysis
Want to know how often your competitors are emailing their subscribers?
MailCharts provides insight into email frequency and even shows how competitors are using subject lines, emojis, and other design elements.
For example, if you're debating whether to send daily promotional emails, MailCharts can show you that a competitor is sending high-engagement emails three times a week, helping you adjust your approach.
3. Industry benchmark option
With MailCharts' industry benchmarks, you can see how your emails stack up against the competition.
If your open rates are below industry averages, MailCharts will help you identify gaps.
For example, you may notice competitors using shorter subject lines or sending more emails during peak engagement, giving you actionable ideas for improving your performance.
4. Save brands and create custom reporting
If you manage multiple brands or focus on specific competitors, MailCharts lets you save and track them over time.
For example, if you're tracking three key competitors, you can create custom reports detailing their email performance, design trends, automation flows, and even the technologies they use.
These reports are invaluable for sharing insights across your team and aligning your marketing efforts.
5. SMS tracking
As SMS becomes a critical part of e-commerce marketing, MailCharts helps businesses stay competitive by offering a curated database of SMS and MMS campaigns from top brands.
This feature allows you to analyze how competitors use SMS for promotions, reminders, and customer retention.
You can integrate SMS into your strategy by studying message structure, timing, and frequency.
This ensures a cohesive multichannel approach that seamlessly integrates with your email campaigns.
MailCharts Drawbacks
1. Email and SMS only
While MailCharts provides solid insight into email and SMS campaigns, it doesn't track broader digital channels like social ads, content marketing, or website updates and SEO.
The success of most businesses, including e-commerce, requires a cohesive, cross-channel strategy, and you need visibility into these areas to ensure you get all critical aspects into your competitors' overall marketing approach.
2. No custom brand tracking
Like Milled, MailCharts relies on a preset database of brands, meaning you can't request tracking for specific competitors outside the existing list.
This lack of flexibility can be a significant drawback for businesses focused on niche markets or emerging competitors.
This limits your ability to tailor your analysis and fully understand the tactics of the brands that matter most to you.
MailCharts Pricing
MailCharts typically offers a subscription-based pricing model tailored to the needs of the business.
It offers 3 pricing tiers
- Free trial: Limited access to email examples and curated insights.
- Pro plan: $149/month + $49 per additional user and full access to MailCharts’ database, including millions of email
- Enterprise plan: Designed for larger companies or agencies with advanced needs, offering full access to pro plan features + unlimited user accounts, and additional customer support.
You know how to exploit Milled and MailCharts to excel in your email marketing strategies.
Now, let’s check Panoramata, which is an advanced tool for both email and multichannel marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses.
Best Email Marketing Monitoring Platform: Panoramata
Indeed, Milled and MailCharts are great for finding email inspiration and competitive insights.
However, if you're looking for a more complete picture of what's driving engagement and conversions for your competition, Panoramata is what you need.
It offers a sophisticated solution for tracking and analyzing not only email campaigns, but also multiple marketing channels.
Panoramata Features
1. Comprehensive Email Marketing Monitoring
Panoramata stands out for its robust email marketing monitoring capabilities.
It automatically tracks your competitors' emails, including newsletters and automated flows, and organizes them into a searchable database.
This feature allows you to gain insight into their email strategies, frequency and content, allowing you to effectively refine your own campaigns.
2. Multichannel competitive analysis
Going beyond email, Panoramata offers a multichannel approach to competing:
- Ads Monitoring: Track competitors' ads across multiple platforms such as Meta, Display, Pinterest, TikTok and LinkedIn with full historical access.
In the advanced filters section you can search by a specific keyword and analyze if your competitors made effort into creating ads in same theme as they sent their emails and newsletters.
This is a great way to keep an eye on every step of your competitors’ e-marketing strategies, ad designs, and messaging, so you can also refine your creative approach to better resonate with your target audience.
With full historical access, you can see how ad campaigns evolve over time, providing valuable insight into seasonality, product launches, and promotional events.
- Landing page tracking: Landing pages and official websites are critical for improving your own conversion rates.
Most of the time you get your customers’ emails from your email when they subscribe to a free trial or a newsletter.
To make that happen big companies systematically update their website content, call-to-actions, visuals, to make it user-centered and actionable.
With Panoramata's Landing Page Tracking feature you can monitor changes made to competitors' websites, including updates to headline copy, product placements, calls to action, and banner ads.
- SMS Marketing Monitoring: The fact that you receive SMS notifications on new arrivals or seasonal discounts on the brands you’re subscribed to speaks to its relevance in e-marketing.
Panoramata highlights the use of incentives such as discount codes or exclusive offers, helping you understand what drives the highest response rates.
By comparing your competitors' SMS strategies, you refine your own approach to deliver messages that resonate with your audience and merge it with your email marketing efforts.
- Industry benchmarks: This is key to understanding how your marketing efforts stack up against the competition.
Panoramata's industry-specific benchmarks provide detailed performance comparisons across key metrics.
This feature aggregates data from top-performing brands to provide benchmarks on email engagement rates, ad effectiveness, landing page conversion rates, and SMS click-through rates.
By leveraging these insights you optimize your marketing strategy, and make sure to align with industry leaders and drive better results.
3. Curated Content Collections - Holiday Calendars
Panoramata's curated content collections and comprehensive calendar feature make it easy to find inspiration for your seasonal campaigns.
This tool showcases successful email, ad and SMS examples from top brands during key sales periods such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and other holidays.
You can quickly identify trends-such as popular discount strategies, visual themes, and promotion timing-that drive engagement during peak shopping seasons by exploring these curated collections.
4. Custom Brand Tracking and Request Option
Panoramata stands out with its custom brand tracking feature, allowing you to follow specific competitors that are most important to your business.
You can easily add any brand to your watchlist to receive updates on their latest email campaigns, social ads, landing page changes, and SMS tactics.
If the brand you want to track isn't already in the database, simply send a request to Panoramata to add it to our database and ensure you never miss out on valuable insights.
Why Is Email Tracking Important in Digital Marketing?
Email tracking plays a key role in competitive intelligence, providing valuable data and insights into your competitors' strategies and customer preferences.
So if you want to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, consider using tool that ameliorate and facilitate the process of monitoring your competitors.
In summary, Milled and MailCharts provide basic email marketing insights, while Panoramata provides a holistic multichannel view, making it ideal for companies looking to stay ahead in a competitive digital landscape.
FAQ
What are Milled and MailCharts used for?
Milled and MailCharts are tools that allow you to analyze competitors’ email marketing strategies by providing access to their email campaigns. They help brands gain insights into trends, promotional offers, engagement strategies, and design styles in their industry.
Which tool is better for tracking competitors' email campaigns?
Panoramata is a comprehensive alternative to both Milled and MailCharts. It has a constantly updated database that’s fully searchable. The competitor tracking platform can also track any brand, even those not currently on the site. If you want to refine your campaigns and monitor your competitors’ email marketing frequency, performance, ads, and more, Panoramata is the best tracking tool for you.
Can these tools improve my email marketing strategy?
Yes, by studying your competitors’ emails, you can identify successful approaches, avoid their mistakes, and discover content or timing ideas that resonate with your audience. Both tools help refine your strategy with actionable insights and competitive benchmarks.
