If you’re interested in e-mail marketing, probably you’re also interested in web analytics. Remember that high quality traffic in your site is the first step to build a great database for your newsletter.

Google analytics, one of the best  free web analytics systems, has recently added a new optional feature (currently in beta): benchmarking. Now you can share your analytics (remaining anonymous) and benchmark your site with the rest of your competitors:

From Analytics Blog:

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

How to activate it: Click on “Benchmarking”  in the section “Visitors” and go!.