How to send an us vs them email without naming a competitor

Naming a competitor is the version that backfires

You want to line up the brand that keeps beating you and build a feature table. It rarely pays. You've just introduced a competitor to everybody on your list who'd never heard of them, and handed the ones who had a reason to go and look.

There's a second problem. You can't win a comparison you wrote yourself. Readers know the table was built by the brand sitting at the top of it, so every row gets discounted before it's read.

The comparison that does land is against a method, not a company. Not us against them, but this way against the way you're probably doing it now. Nobody feels sold at, and the reader recognises themselves in the losing column.

Find the default your product is actually replacing

Every product displaces something, and it's usually not a competing product. It's a habit, a bodge, a spreadsheet, a supermarket own brand, or doing without. That displaced thing is your them. And it can't complain.

Once the them is a method, the email stops being competitive and starts being useful. You're explaining why a job is annoying and what changes when it isn't.

Write the losing column first, and write it fairly

Draft the description of the old way before you write a word about your product, and write it the way somebody who's done it that way would. If your account of the alternative is a caricature, everybody who's ever used it stops reading.

• Name the job, not the product category, because the reader identifies with the job
• Describe the current method in enough detail that a person doing it nods along
• Concede the one thing it's genuinely better at, usually that it's cheaper or already in the cupboard
• Then show what changes, in the same order, so both versions sit side by side
• Close on the one product that does it, linked once

The concession is the part everybody skips, and it's the part that makes the rest credible. An email that admits the cheap option is cheaper reads as an honest account. Not a sales page.

A table isn't compulsory, and it's often the wrong shape

The tick and cross grid is the default because it's easy to design. It also flattens everything into claims. No evidence behind any of them. Two short columns of prose, or a before and after photograph with a paragraph under each, usually persuade more.

That send is a comparison in disguise. It never mentions a competitor. It just sorts the range by what people are actually trying to do, and the reader sorts themselves. Same job, none of the confrontation.

It belongs to the considering segment, not the whole list

Your customers don't need this email. They've already chosen, and reading a defence of a decision they made weeks ago does nothing for them. Send it to subscribers who've been reading and not buying, and to anybody who's browsed a category more than once without ordering.

It earns its place before a launch too, where the new product needs the old method explained before anybody understands what it improves on. The Shadow Foam programme leans on that order, because the product only makes sense once you've pictured the drawer it replaces.

Ask support what people compared you with

Before you write anything, ask whoever answers your emails what customers say they were doing before they found you. That sentence, repeated back, is the whole campaign. It's usually not the answer the marketing team would have guessed.

Then look at whether your product pages already make the comparison. If they don't, the email will outperform the page it sends people to, and that's a conversion problem before it's an email one. Fix the page while the campaign is in draft. You get both.