Want a lesson in email? Just check out the other guys' campaigns. Here's the guide.

Want a cheap source of education or inspiration to boost your email program without having to hire a consultant and pay his pricey hotel tab?

Wander through the websites of your leading competitors or the top companies in your market niche, the thought leaders who always show up in the trades, or even just companies whose marketing efforts, products or business programs you particularly admire.

Then, sign up for their email programs and study every aspect, from the way they build and promote their offerings to data collection, the content they send, how they format messages, how they manage affiliated content like transactional messages, whether the email you signed up for matches what you actually receive, even how they bid you farewell if you unsubscribe.

You can get a fast and cheap education if you're still learning the email-marketing ropes or a shot of inspiration if you need to revamp or resurrect an email program that has gone off the rails.

In short, look for what works when you need a new perspective -- and even (snicker) for what falls flat or doesn't work. We all feel a little better when we see the big guys making the kinds of mistakes we corrected way back when we were email newbies.

So, what can you learn from the other guys? Here's a sample list and even a few of my own personal favorites:

Promoting the program
How well does your competitor promote its offerings? Does the copy make you want to rush to the sign-up page and hand over your email address, or do you have to search for it? See where the company promotes its email program, on which pages, how it writes the copy and whether it uses incentives to get you to click over to registration.

Opt-in procedure
How easy is it to sign up? Do you have to hunt down the registration page and then fill in a long form to get on the mailing list? Or, can you opt in from the landing page with just a name and email address? Does yours look cumbersome or easy in comparison? You might not always see how cumbersome a detailed registration procedure can be until you fill out someone else's. Then, see how long it takes to go from signing up to getting a confirmation or welcome.

Confirmation/welcome
Here you could get ideas for adding value to a confirmation email, welcome email, or thank-you page, or for making new subscribers feel more welcome, because these are the people who are most likely to open your subsequent messages.

Messaging
Have you been thinking about changing your newsletter or promotional message format? See what looks better, a horizontal postcard format or a vertical skyscraper design? Lots of little images or one big one? How well do tricky things like in-email video, forms or dynamic content work on your platform?

I always like to see which brand-name or Fortune 500 senders still stick all the images into a single large image that shows up as a big blank nothing when I view with images disabled. (That's bad, in case you didn't know it.)

Or, who do I not recognize when their messages land in my inbox because they don't put their company or brand name in either the sender or subject lines?

Other Resources
Besides the companies you follow or admire, look at ezines that feature case studies. MarketingSherpa  is a great resource. If you're a retail marketer, you must add Chad White's Retail Email blog to your RSS feed list, or sign up for his email updates. Chad subscribes to scores of retailer email programs so you don't have to and tells you what they're promoting. Internet Retailer also features news and case histories.

Here are three suggestions from my own archives, just to get you started:

All-Around Great Performance: Proflowers  does it all correctly, from a swift sign-up to messages that deliver their meanings with or without their gorgeous images to segmenting that remembers what I bought and keeps pace with the changing seasons. Oh, and it manages to combine a regular email program with logical one-offs that don't strain.

Clever subject lines: "John Cusack Adopts a Martian Child." How can you resist a subject line like that? Others from the Sci Fi Channel are just as clever and intriguing.

Great transactional emails: LEGO doesn't send me just a "thanks" and an order number. Instead, the email is stuffed with information and value, all of which shows up whether I enable images or not: phone and email customer-support contacts, cross-selling and up-selling merchandise images, detailed search options linked to the site, a store locater, and a link to free, online kids' games.

Wendy Roth is the strategic account manager for Lyris Technologies. Read full bio.