At the time I write this there are over 37,000 emails in my Gmail “Promotions” folder.

The vast majority of those are, as you might imagine, emails from competitors, from companies I wanted to keep an eye on. If I could I knew I’d get ideas and best practices for my own.

The problem?

Gmail is designed for reading emails, not analyzing them.

The Idea
A few months ago as I typing my email into yet another opt-in form, I had a thought:

“What if I wasn’t signing up for these lists with my normal address, but a special address that would take those emails, break them up into their key pieces, and store them in a database. In that format, what kind of insights could I tease out?

A month later I had a prototype.

A month after that I had data.

And a month after that (today), I have something that’s really, really intriguing.

I’m calling it SendView.

Instead of signing up for newsletters with your work or personal email, SendView creates a list of personal, private emails addresses you can use instead. The difference is that every email send to these addresses is parsed and put into a simple, easy-to-use reporting interface.

It starts with a snapshot of all the decisions and elements that make up any given message, but click on any one metric and get a birds eye view of all your peers’ strategy.

These reports cover things like:

• Average spam scores for their subject lines
• How many links or words or images go into each email.
• SPF/DKIM usage
• Template responsiveness
• Sending patterns and timing

In other words, not just emails. Insights.

Want to try?
I’m writing this today because I’ve officially opened up SendView to the public.

If you’d like to get your hands on a free beta account or just watch a quick walkthrough video, send me and email or reach out on Twitter (@greggblanchard).

I’m excited to see this tool begin to help other marketers as much as it’s already helped me.

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Solving…Problems
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