When looking to build the success of their 1:1 marketing program, the first thing many marketers do is fill their inboxes with successful case studies. But did you know that you can learn a lot by studying industry failures as well?

When it comes to personalized URLs, for example, part of the learning curve is how to gather information on the survey page without appearing too intrusive. There are plenty of backroom tales of campaigns in which marketers attempted to maximize their use of the survey questions, only to find that the more information they tried to gather, the more respondents bailed on the survey and clicked out of their personalized URLs altogether.

It’s a fine line. You want to gather marketing information, but once you’ve gone to all the trouble of developing terrific creative, crafting a powerful message and pairing it with a cool incentive, you don’t want respondents to get scared away by questions that scream, “Help us pre-qualify you as a lead so we can hound you incessantly later!”

That’s where learning from your peers’ failures can come in handy. They found out what doesn’t work. This frees you up to try something else.

Take, for example, one marketer that encouraged people to come to its site and download a free white paper. When recipients clicked on the free offer, the site asked them to select which white paper they wanted—the one for small marketers or the one for corporate marketers. Once they clicked on their selection, another screen greeted them that asked whether they wanted the white paper for small marketing budgets or large ones.

In all likelihood, respondents ended up with the same white paper. But what this approach did was allow the marketer to pre-qualify respondents by size and marketing budget without making it obvious.

This is smart marketing. It doesn’t mean that you should use the same approach, but it is a great illustration of learning from someone else’s mistake. After all, if one company’s campaign fails, someone else might as well benefit from it—why not you?

So pay attention to the successes and the failures because you never know when either will come in handy.