For Software and SaaS Product Managers
If you’re part of a product team in SaaS, whether you’re shaping the roadmap, fine-tuning positioning, or helping sales close deals, you already know the pace is brutal. Features launch fast, customer needs shift overnight, and new players keep popping up with something flashier, cheaper, or “AI-powered.”
So how do you keep your edge?
Here’s one underused tactic that pays off: watching your competitors’ emails.
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.
Think about it. Emails are often the first place companies reveal their latest moves. New features, limited-time promos, pricing tweaks, even how they’re talking to customers: it all shows up in inboxes before it hits their blog or homepage.
But nobody wants to sign up for 17 newsletters and then spend Friday night sifting through “We’ve Updated Our Terms” messages.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to track competitor emails without drowning in them.
When a competitor runs a “Summer Flash Sale” or slashes onboarding fees, it tells you something. Maybe they’re trying to boost conversions in a slow quarter. Or maybe they’re trying to win over your customers with a sweeter offer.
If you’re in product marketing or enablement, this is gold.
Companies often announce promotions tied to special events
💡 Try this: Track promo themes over time. Are they discounting around renewal cycles? Launching offers right after you do? There might be a pattern worth noticing.
New feature? Major redesign? Slightly suspicious “AI enhancement”? These things usually show up in email campaigns before they get the full treatment elsewhere.
That makes emails a great way to see where your competitors are placing their bets. Not just what’s launching, but how they frame it. Are they selling speed, ease, power, security? That language can clue you into their positioning and how they think the market’s evolving.
💡 Quick tip: Not every update matters. If your competitor ships a minor UI tweak and sends a full newsletter about it, cool. Doesn’t mean you need to match it. Learn to separate the noise from the moves that signal real strategy shifts.
Email tone is revealing. Some companies get personal, others stay buttoned-up. Some shout “AI!” every two sentences, others are storytelling their way through case studies.
Paying attention to this helps you understand how they want to be seen. You’ll see how they handle objections, communicate value, and guide their users.
💡 Pro move: Collect a few subject lines each month that catch your eye. Over time, you’ll spot trends, and maybe even steal a few ideas for your own campaigns.
Sometimes, the real insight isn’t in what they say, but in what they keep talking about.
If your competitors keep sending emails about AI features or expanding into mid-market... that’s not random. It’s a signal.
They’re betting that their audience cares, or will care, about those themes. And spotting those signals early can help your team stay one step ahead.
You’ll start seeing how the market is shifting before it’s fully obvious. And when everyone else scrambles to catch up? You’re already there, armed with context and a plan.
💡 Pro tip: Keep a running doc where you log recurring themes from competitor comms. Every quarter or so, step back and ask: “What’s getting louder? What’s gone quiet?”
It’s easy to say you’ll track competitor emails. It’s much harder to do it consistently without letting it turn into yet another chore.
Here’s a no-fluff framework we’ve seen work well with busy product teams:
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.
To effectively monitor competitor emails, it’s important to subscribe to the right sources. Here’s a few ideas :
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.
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!
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
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 :
💡️ 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.
Competitor email monitoring needs regular attention to stay useful. Take some time to keep your list manageable and focused:
Tracking competitor emails sounds straightforward, until your inbox looks like a hoarder’s filing cabinet and you’re 42 newsletters behind. Then it’s just... noise.
Here are the most common issues we see, and simple fixes that can save your time and sanity.
You sign up for competitor newsletters, product updates, launch alerts... and suddenly your inbox is drowning. There’s no way to tell what’s worth opening and what’s just fluff about company culture or webinar recaps you’ll never attend.
💡️ 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.
This one’s sneaky. You’re the “competitive intel person” by default, or maybe you just care more than the rest of the team, and now you’re stuck forwarding emails, summarizing insights, and wondering if anyone even reads the stuff you share.
Automate it or set up a lightweight system.
Here’s what works:
💡 Better together: Rotate responsibility each month. One month the PMM shares updates, next month it’s a PM or someone from Enablement. Fresh eyes spot different patterns, and it doesn’t always fall on one person.
Not every “Introducing Our New Widget Experience” email is a game-changer. Some are just fluff dressed up with emojis and bullet points. But when you’re skimming 50 of these a month, it’s tough to know which ones deserve attention.
What to do:
Use filters and rules to help surface high-signal emails. Most inbox tools let you sort by keywords—things like:
Label those emails differently or star them so they don’t get lost.
💡 Bonus tip: Create a cheat sheet of “trigger words” for your email filter. If pricing is your Achilles' heel, flag any mentions of cost or discounts. If feature gaps are more pressing, look for “launch” or “upgrade.”
So, you’ve got a system in place. A few filters, a spreadsheet, maybe a shared Slack channel. It works, for now.
But as your company grows, or as you start tracking more competitors, the cracks start to show. Stuff gets missed. Emails pile up. Everyone's relying on someone else to read them all (spoiler: nobody does).
This is where a purpose-built tool works wonder.
Let’s talk about how an all-in-one platform like PeerPanda makes competitor email monitoring way easier, and way more useful.
Newsletters automatically categorized by competitor
A good tool pulls in competitor emails automatically, categorizes them by company, tags the type of content (launch, promo, blog, etc.), and puts everything in one clean dashboard. You can filter by company or topic in seconds, no digging through inbox folders or forwarding chains.
So instead of, “Wait, where was that Mailchimp pricing update from last month?” you get, “Oh yep, here it is.”
Here’s the real time-saver: the AI in tools like PeerPanda doesn’t just collect emails, it skims them for you.
It spots:
Then it summarizes the relevant stuff in plain English (no “synergistic paradigm shifts” here). You don’t need to decode marketing fluff, just skim the summaries and decide what’s worth flagging to your team.
With a weekly digest report, the platform compiles the most important updates from the past week into one easy-to-share summary.
Each week, you get:
It’s everything your team needs to stay in the loop, without having to chase or compile it themselves.
💡 Team tip: Use the digest as a Monday morning warmup. Read it together in your standup or drop the highlights into Slack with a “Worth a look 👀” emoji.
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.
In this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to monitor and analyze your competitors' email marketing campaigns. Tips to spy on your competitors, extract valuable insights, improve your product and marketing tactics, and stay ahead of the competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tracking competitor emails is about spotting the shifts early, before a customer asks about a feature you’ve never heard of, before your sales team walks into a deal blindsided, before you realize too late that a competitor just repositioned themselves right into your territory.
It’s low effort with high return, if you keep it focused.
And whether you’re doing it manually with filters and folders, or you’re using a tool like PeerPanda to make it automatic and scalable, the goal is the same: turning scattered emails into strategic insights
For PMs, PMMs, and sales enablement folks, this is how you stop playing catch-up and start spotting moves before they hit your doorstep.
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