Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for nurturing leads, building relationships, and driving conversions. However, succeeding in email marketing isn’t just about sending out newsletters and promotions.
Understanding what your competitors are doing and learning from their tactics is equally important. This article will dive deep into how to check competitors’ email marketing, providing you with insights and actionable strategies to enhance your email marketing performance.
Why check competitors email marketing?
Monitoring your competitors’ email marketing strategy can give you a competitive edge. It allows you to:
- Stay updated with trends: Email marketing is constantly evolving. Keeping an eye on competitors helps you stay on top of emerging trends.
- Improve your strategies: By analyzing what works for others, you can apply successful tactics to your campaigns.
- Identify content gaps: Reviewing competitor emails can reveal opportunities where you can outperform them.
- Understand your market better: You can gain insights into audience behavior, preferences, and pain points.
Subscribe to competitor Emails
The simplest way to check your competitors’ email marketing is to subscribe to their newsletters. Here’s how you can do it:
- Identify your key competitors: Make a list of your top competitors and visit their websites. Most will have an email subscription form. Sign up with a dedicated email address.
- Segment by industry: If your industry has many competitors, break them into categories (e.g., direct, indirect, niche). This helps you stay organized.
- Create multiple personas: You may want to sign up with different personas (e.g., as a new customer, a long-term one) to receive segmented emails and understand how they target different audience segments.
Once you start receiving these emails, regularly monitor their frequency, design, tone, and call-to-action (CTA). You can use this data to identify patterns and strategies.
Analyze Email content
Once you’ve signed up, pay attention to the content and structure of your competitors’ emails. Here are a few key elements to focus on:
- Subject lines: Analyze what type of subject lines your competitors are using. Are they using questions, discounts, or humor? Subject lines play a key role in determining open rates.
- Email design: Evaluate the design, layout, and imagery. Are they using a minimalist design or a colorful and image-heavy approach?
- Tone and language: Is the tone formal, casual, or humorous? Does it match their brand voice?
- Call to Action (CTA): Examine the placement, wording, and frequency of CTAs in each email. Strong CTAs can make or break an email marketing campaign.
- Frequency: How often are they sending emails? Consistency in email marketing is crucial, and knowing your competitors’ frequency can help you optimize your own strategy.
By regularly monitoring these aspects, you’ll better understand the tactics that resonate with your shared target audience.
Use competitor Email monitoring tools
Manually checking competitors’ emails can be time-consuming. Fortunately, several tools can help automate the process:
- MailCharts: A powerful email marketing research tool that lets you view and analyze competitors’ email campaigns. You can access detailed insights such as the type of emails they send, their frequency, and specific campaign examples.
- SendView: This tool tracks competitor email campaigns and helps you compare your email performance against theirs. It also provides insight into the email platforms they use and how their campaigns evolve.
- Really good Emails: A directory showcasing the best email campaigns from various industries, making it easy to find inspiration and competitive insights.
These tools allow you to collect, organize, and compare your competitors’ emails without spending hours combing through inboxes. They also provide valuable metrics like delivery times, open rates, and response strategies, which you can benchmark against your own campaigns.
Reverse-engineer their strategies
Once you’ve gathered enough data, it’s time to reverse-engineer your competitors’ email marketing strategies. Here’s a step-by-step approach:
- Analyze email funnels: Pay attention to how competitors nurture their leads. From welcome emails to follow-up sequences, reverse-engineer how they guide potential customers through the sales funnel.
- Examine their promotions: Track how often they run promotions or offer discounts. Do they use scarcity (limited time offers) or urgency (one-day sales) tactics?
- Monitor personalization: Personalization is key in email marketing. Note how your competitors personalize subject lines, content, and CTAs. Are they using customer names or segmented lists?
- Test for automation: Trigger automated emails by performing certain actions, such as abandoning a cart or signing up for a demo. This will reveal how they use automation in their email strategy.
Understanding how competitors craft their email journeys can help you design more effective email campaigns, targeting potential customers at the right stage of their journey.
Evaluate metrics and performance
Understanding competitors’ email marketing effectiveness is essential. While you won’t have direct access to their performance data, you can make educated guesses based on the following metrics:
- Open rate: Use tools like SendView to estimate how many people open your competitor’s emails. High open rates often correlate with compelling subject lines and strong brand recognition.
- Click-through rate (CTR): CTR can be inferred by the number of actions taken from the email. If a competitor’s emails consistently lead to specific landing pages or promotions, they may have a high CTR.
- Unsubscribe rate: If you notice a reduction in email frequency or major shifts in email design, it could indicate high unsubscribe rates. This is often a sign that a competitor’s strategy isn’t resonating with their audience.
Track email marketing campaigns with Social Media and web analytics
Email marketing doesn’t happen in isolation. To gain deeper insights into competitors’ email performance, cross-reference their campaigns with their social media and web activities. For example:
- Track promo launches: Check if competitors promote the same offers via email and social media channels simultaneously.
- Monitor landing pages: Use tools like SEMrush to track their landing pages’ traffic during promotional periods, which can indicate email campaign performance.
- Observe audience engagement: If competitors push out email campaigns and see significant social media engagement, it could be a sign that the email content resonated well with their audience.
FAQs
How can I sign up for competitor emails without getting noticed?
To stay anonymous, use a dedicated email address or an alias. You can also sign up with different personas (e.g., new customers, returning customers) to receive a variety of segmented emails without raising suspicion.
Can I track competitor email performance without special tools?
Yes, but it will be less accurate. Manually subscribing to emails and analyzing open rates or promotions can give you a rough idea. However, tools like MailCharts or SendView provide much more detailed and actionable insights.
How often should I review competitor emails?
Review them weekly or biweekly to stay updated on any changes in their email marketing strategy. Major changes in content, design, or frequency often signal shifts in their marketing approach.
Are there any legal considerations when tracking competitor emails?
Yes, while it’s legal to subscribe to a competitor’s emails, avoid using unethical methods like hacking into their systems or impersonating individuals. Always respect data privacy regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
How do I know if a competitor’s email strategy is effective?
You can gauge effectiveness by observing their engagement levels on other channels (social media, website traffic) and by tracking repeated promotional themes or design tweaks, which may indicate success.
How do I use competitor email data to improve my strategy?
Analyze what resonates with your shared audience, such as subject lines, design, and CTAs. Incorporate successful elements into your campaigns while avoiding strategies that seem less effective.
How can I check the tools competitors use for email marketing?
Tools like BuiltWith or SendView can reveal the platforms competitors use for email marketing, giving you insight into their automation and design capabilities.
Is it okay to copy competitor email marketing tactics?
While it’s fine to learn from competitors, copying tactics without tailoring them to your brand can backfire. Always personalize strategies to reflect your unique value proposition and audience.