The Origin
While exploring the wine industry for Joy Cork, I started subscribing to winery newsletters. Then I kept subscribing. And subscribing.
After a year, I had close to 12,000 emails from wineries across California, Oregon, and Washington. That’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence—if you can make sense of it.
The Problem
Wineries send a lot of email. Most marketing teams have no idea what their competitors are doing, what subject lines work, or when the best time to send is.
Email Explorer visualizes all of this. It’s like a Bloomberg terminal for winery email marketing.
How It Works
- Collection — ActionMailbox receives forwarded newsletters
- Processing — Claude extracts key data: subject, sender, offers, events, wines mentioned
- Categorization — AI tags each email by type (club offer, event invite, new release, etc.)
- Visualization — Dashboard shows trends, patterns, and insights
What We’ve Found
Some early insights from the data:
- Tuesday 10am is the most common send time (but not the most effective)
- “New Release” appears in 23% of subject lines
- Club-exclusive offers get 2.4x higher open rates (based on self-reported metrics)
- Thanksgiving week has 47% more sends than average
What’s Next
- Public dashboard for wineries to benchmark their email performance
- Alert system for competitive monitoring
- AI-generated suggestions for email improvements
- Integration with ESP platforms (Mailchimp, Klaviyo)