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Lululemon and Old Navy send about the same number of marketing emails. Over the last 180 days, Lululemon sent 4.7 emails a week and Old Navy sent 4.3. In the same period, 95% of Old Navy’s subject lines included an offer or a sale price, compared with 11% of Lululemon’s.

Most of the useful information is in what brands send, not how often they send it.

This post covers what to track, what the data can and cannot tell you, a monthly routine, what to do with the results, and how to do it with Email Love.

What competitor email monitoring is

It means subscribing to your competitors’ emails, keeping them somewhere you can search, and reviewing them for patterns over time, such as how often they send offers, when they send, and how their emails are built.

This is different from a swipe file of good-looking emails. A swipe file is useful for design ideas. Monitoring is about patterns, for example noticing that a competitor includes an offer in almost every subject line.

MailCharts was a common self-serve tool for this. mailcharts.com/pricing now redirects to Litmus, where MailCharts is offered as an upgrade to a larger suite, with pricing available through sales.

What to track

The table below covers eight brands in the Email Love archive. Every figure uses the same period, March 19 to September 15, 2026, so the brands can be compared directly.

An offer means the subject line includes a percentage, a price, or words such as sale, savings, deal, clearance, promo or free shipping. Subject length is in characters. The table is based on 628 emails.

1. Send frequency

Send frequency is easy to measure, but it is mostly useful as context for the other numbers. Lululemon and Old Navy send at a similar rate, but the rest of the table shows two very different programs.

2. Offers and discounts

The offer rate shows how often a brand’s subject lines lead with a price or a promotion. Old Navy (95%), Casper (69%) and Gap (59%) include one in most subject lines. Patagonia (4%), Lululemon (11%) and Nike (13%) rarely do.

A low offer rate only tells you that the subject line does not mention an offer. The email itself may still be focused on selling products.

It is also worth tracking discount depth. Old Navy’s most common figure is 50% off, which appears in 45 subject lines, followed by 60% off in 15. Gap has the same top two: 50% in 28 subject lines, then 60% in 15. Both brands have the same parent company. If you compete with them, these figures are a useful reference for the discount levels shoppers in your category may be seeing.

Casper’s most common figure is 35% (20 subject lines), followed by 5% (10, usually an extra 5% off), then 25% and 20% (7 each). One possible explanation is that Casper tests different discount levels.

Lululemon includes a percentage in only 2 of its 122 subject lines. Most of its offer emails refer to a named sale, such as the Summer Sale or the Mid Year Sale.

All of this comes from subject lines, so you do not need access to a competitor’s ESP.

3. Timing

37% of the emails in the table were sent on a Saturday or Sunday. Old Navy sent 72% of its emails on a weekend. Lululemon sent 10%.

Old Navy, Gap and Sephora send most on Saturdays, Casper and Patagonia on Sundays, and Lululemon on Tuesdays. The data shows when brands send, but not why. After a month or two of tracking, a competitor’s regular schedule is usually easy to see.

4. Subject lines and technology

Subject line length. Old Navy’s subject lines average 63 characters, compared with 31 for Lululemon and 27 for Patagonia. Old Navy’s longer subject lines usually combine several offers, for example “MAJOR savings: 40% off EVERYTHING* + don’t forget $16 Wow jeans ($10 for kids)”.

Emoji. Sephora used an emoji in 83% of its subject lines and Old Navy in 26%. Lululemon, Gap, Patagonia, Everlane and Nike used none in this period. If your team is deciding whether to use emoji, this is a useful reference.

ESP. The sending platform is visible in email headers, so you can see which platform a competitor uses. It does not tell you what kind of emails they send: Lululemon and Old Navy both use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and their programs are very different.

What the data can and cannot tell you

Any email archive, including ours, shows what a set of subscribed inboxes received. It is not a complete record of what a brand sent. Keep these limits in mind.

Counts are samples. If a brand sends different campaigns to different segments, one inbox only receives some of them. Treat counts as a minimum, and rely more on percentages than on totals.

Subscriptions can lapse. In our archive, the most recent email from Glossier is from April 2025, from Wayfair July 2025, and from Warby Parker August 2025. That most likely means our subscriptions ended, not that those brands stopped sending. Check the date of the most recent email before drawing conclusions about a brand’s current activity.

Lifecycle emails are mostly missing. Cart abandonment, post-purchase and win-back emails are triggered by customer behavior, so an inbox that never shops rarely receives them. To see them, you need to create an account and trigger them yourself.

Time periods need to match. A brand archived since 2019 and a brand archived since 2025 will have different all-time averages for reasons unrelated to strategy. That is why every figure in the table above uses the same 180 days.

When you share findings, include these limits.

A monthly routine

This takes about 30 minutes a month.

1. Choose your list. Pick five to eight direct competitors, plus two or three brands outside your category whose emails you like.
2. Record send frequency and offer rate. Two numbers per brand, for the same period each month. Keep them in one place so you can compare over time.
3. Read the subject lines. About ten minutes. Patterns are easier to see in subject lines than in full emails.
4. Open the unusual emails. Look for emails that break a brand’s normal pattern, such as a 40% off email from a brand that rarely discounts.
5. Write down what changed. One sentence is enough. If nothing changed, note that.
6. Pick one thing to test. Turn one finding into a single test for your own program.

What to do with the results

Avoid copying a competitor’s approach directly. Use what you find for three things:

• Benchmarking: whether your send frequency and offer rate are high or low for your category.
• Gaps: formats and send times that no one in your market is using.
• Timing: avoiding big sends on the same days as your competitors.

For example, the two brands with the lowest offer rates use their subject lines for other things. Patagonia’s include “Dinner? Done.”, “Eat your vitamins” and “August Field Notes”. Lululemon’s are mostly new product announcements, such as “What’s new: bold gear for your run”.

This is a small sample. These brands may discount less because people already buy from them at full price, not because of how they write their emails. But if most brands in your category lead with offers, subject lines about something other than price are one way to be different.

Doing this with Email Love

The Email Love archive is free to browse and includes more than 460,000 emails from over 8,500 brands.

Start in the brand directory and find your competitors. Each brand page, such as Lululemon’s, shows the brand’s emails. With a free account, Brand Insights shows each brand’s send frequency, send days, subject line stats and ESP.

Use search to look at offers across several brands. It supports AND, OR and NOT, and filters for date range, email type, holiday, ESP, GIFs and emoji in the subject line. For example, nike OR adidas returns both brands in one set of results. You can also follow brands to get their new emails in a digest, and save searches as alerts.

Automating it with an AI agent

You don’t have to do the monthly routine by hand. If you connect an AI assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT or Codex to Email Love through its MCP server, it can search your competitors’ recent emails, compare them with last month and write up what changed. It needs a free Email Love account.

Give your assistant this prompt and schedule it for the first Monday of each month:

Using the Email Love MCP, for each of these brands: [your 5 to 8 competitors]

1. Use search_emails with the brand filter and a limit of 25 to get
   the brand's most recent emails. Keep only emails with a sent date
   in the last 30 days.
2. From those emails, record: the number of emails, the share of
   subject lines that include an offer or sale price, the discount
   percentages mentioned, and the share sent on a Saturday or Sunday.
3. Compare each number with last month's results.

Then write, in under 200 words:
- Anything that changed by more than 20 percent since last month.
- Any brand with no emails in the last 30 days, flagged as a possible
  lapsed subscription rather than a brand that stopped sending.
- One test I could run next month based on the results.

If nothing changed, say "nothing changed" and stop.

The search returns up to 25 emails per brand, so counts will be incomplete for brands that send more than that in a month.

Much love,
Andy

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove