Email marketing is a proven technique for achieving your business goals. But to do it right, you need all kinds of data to inform your campaigns, including information about your competitors’ email marketing practices.
Competitor analysis allows you to see where you stand in the market and how you compare to businesses offering the same services and products. It lets you spot and fill the gap in the market to attract more customers and better retain existing ones.
The first step in a successful competitor analysis starts with understanding how your rivals are using email marketing to reach customers and increase sales. Informed about this, you can take steps to adjust your own email marketing strategy to meet the needs of your customers better.
This guide will outline the benefits of competitor analysis and how to check competitors’ email marketing.
Benefits of an email marketing competitor analysis
Having a peek at what your email marketing competitors are doing benefits your business in a lot of ways:
- Gaining insight into competitor approaches: Knowing what works for your competitors can help you decide how to tweak your email marketing to claim a bigger market share. For example, maybe you only send monthly update emails when your competitors send weekly sale notices. This can inspire you to level up your strategy and see whether more frequent emails bring better results. Seeing how your competitors approach personalization and segmentation can also help you better structure your email marketing campaigns.
- Knowing the latest email marketing trends: Competitor analysis gives you the inside track on what’s going on in your industry. It helps you spot the latest trends in email marketing as well as product and service design. You can use this information to decide how you can improve or change your own offerings to give customers more value.
- Getting inspiration for email marketing campaigns: There’s also the chance to be inspired by competitor analysis. Perhaps you see something in others’ email marketing campaigns that works well with your brand. You can get new ideas for email layouts, designs, colors, and content. It can help you bring your marketing up to the next level.
How to conduct a competitor analysis on a budget
While it takes just a few clicks to look at other businesses’ websites or social media feeds, checking competitors’ email marketing campaigns is a bit more challenging. Competitor analysis tools can help you get some insight quicker, but if you’re on a budget, follow these steps:
Finding your competitors
The natural first step in a competitor analysis is to figure out who you’re competing against. Start your search by identifying:
- Who sells the same products or services: Think of this in terms of your target market. If you sell organic, small-batch skincare, your competitor isn’t necessarily a large national brand that sells generic skin products. Your target market is likely consumers who want specialty skin care and who might be within a small geographic area. Who else is selling to this market?
- Who ranks for the same keywords: You’ve probably put some thought into your content marketing, so that people can find your website when they type certain words or phrases into search engines. Have a look at who else is ranking for those same keywords. If they’re also after your target market, they’re your competitors.
- Who attends similar events: Whether you’re attending seasonal markets to sell products or gain awareness of your professional service practice, there are others doing the same. Look at the participant list at the events where you take your business. If there’s a similar product or service on offer, those are your competitors, after the same target market.
You can also ask your team members whom they see as potential competition. Doing a bit of unofficial surveying of your current customers is also an idea. Consider asking general questions like “What other businesses do you love in this neighborhood?” and “What are some of your favorite seasonal events?” on a survey as part of an in-store draw for a gift card.
Of course, having an open invite for feedback can be a great addition to your own email marketing, even as you’re refining your approach.
Once you have a list of competitors, put those names into a spreadsheet. You’ll add lots of detail to that spreadsheet as you start to receive emails from your competitors.
Subscribe
So, how do you receive those competitor emails? The obvious answer is: ask. You can go to their website, social media, or other digital spaces where they invite people to sign up for emails. Then you can, you guessed it: sign-up.
After you subscribe, consider setting a dedicated address for your competitor’s email marketing tracking. That way, those emails won’t get lost in your other business email. They also won’t be accidentally deleted or rerouted to spam where you can’t see them.
Here’s a little trick: instead of just asking for “newsletter” or “what’s happening” emails, try to get on the lists for different audience types. That can help you see how others are changing their message depending on who the target audience is: someone who’s just learning about the brand versus someone who’s shown real interest.
For example, a competitor might offer a free e-book download in exchange for your email address. Or use follow-up email marketing after you show specific interest in a product. That email marketing is probably quite different from the same business’s weekly “what’s new in our industry” mailings you might get from a newsletter signup.
If you want to go all-in, visit a rival ecommerce site and abandon your cart. Chances are, you’ll get an email within minutes of the purchase you “forgot” to complete.
On your spreadsheet, note where and how you signed up for that competitor’s email.
How and what to track
Now that you’ve identified your competitors and signed up for their email lists, it’s time to start collecting data. You might want to wait a few days for the emails to start coming in, so you can get a sense of how many messages you’ll get and how often. Then it might be easier to tweak your spreadsheet.
Here’s what to track in your spreadsheet:
Subject lines
A subject line is an important part of email marketing because it’s the piece of information that leads people to open up the message — or not. As you start tracking competitor emails, you might just cut and paste the subject lines and add them to your spreadsheet for review.
Later, you can look closely for trends. Ask yourself: How long is the subject line? Is it descriptive? Does it contain a call to action? Does it invoke mystery, promise a great deal, or stir emotion? Remember to also ask: Did this make me want to open the email?
Sending frequency
Take note of how often you receive marketing emails and at what time of day. That’s something you will only notice once you receive several messages from a company. It might appear to be infrequent, but after a few weeks, you might see you’re getting a note from the same brand every Monday at 1:00 am. That’s not by accident!
Also, try to note any changes in email frequency. You might notice an uptick in email marketing messages during big buying holidays, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween — these are all potential marketing opportunities, especially for ecommerce sites or sellers of consumer products.
Type of emails
Remember the idea of getting on different email lists with a company? It’s here that you’ll make note of the type of emails you receive. You might get an abandoned cart reminder, a generic newsletter, or more details about a specific product.
Over time, you’ll notice how the structure of the email depends on the type. You might receive a newsletter every week like clockwork, with no end in sight. You might get an abandoned cart email twice or three times before the reminders stop.
Each of those probably has a different subject line, such as “Skin Care Trends This Week” or “Did You Forget To Check Out?” Both are forms of email marketing but are in response to different consumer behavior.
Length of content
It’s no secret that people’s attention spans are shrinking, partly because there are so many emails, tasks, device notifications, and real-life events competing for their time. But the best content isn’t necessarily shorter content. What’s ideal depends on your industry, product, and target audience. That’s why competitor email analysis is so important.
Make a rough estimate of the word count of every email. That’s something else you can link to email type. Abandoned cart emails are probably much shorter than newsletters.
Pro tip: Copy and paste the email text into a Google document and click on Tools>Word Count.
Visual elements
Speaking of attention, let’s not forget that words are just one part of the picture. There’s another part: The visuals! The graphics, color scheme, layout, branding, images, and other visual aspects of the email can have a big role in its impact.
Make note of anything that jumps out at you. Perhaps there are several product images or mood-creating landscapes. Think of those images with special promotions. Black Friday and Cyber Monday email campaigns, for example, always feature strong visuals to help them stand out.
Take a close look at the business’s branding. Where is it in the email? Does the email appear to be a kind of letterhead, with the company’s essential information at the top or nestled at the bottom? Ask yourself: Does it work?
CTAs and links
The idea behind email marketing is to get a response. Look closely at the emails to see how your competitors do this. What were the calls to action (CTAs)? Were they interspersed throughout the email or stuck at the end? Was there just one CTA or several?
If possible, follow the links in the email and see where they lead. Your competitors can send their subscribers anywhere — so where do they want them to go? It might be a specific product page, a newsletter update, or a still-waiting abandoned cart.
Automation
In email marketing, automation is what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s the algorithm that tells the brand to automatically send you two (or three!) follow-up emails if you abandon a cart.
As much as possible, use competitor email data to figure out what automatic actions they have in place. Then you can look at whether it’s something you also do — or might want to consider.
Looking for gaps
So, you’ve gathered the data. Now comes the fun part: Seeing what you can learn. You might decide to elevate your email marketing by adopting some competitor techniques. Or you might discover you’re doing great and don’t need to change a thing.
One big question to ask yourself is: What are my competitors missing? Is there a gap I can fill with my own marketing and bring some of their audience over to my brand?
Here are some other things to think about:
- How does the look of your emails compare to competitors? Is the mood, design, and presentation attractive?
- How do you present your products and services? Does the presentation pique prospects’ interest?
- Is your email content text-heavy or image-heavy? Compared to your competitors, how is your mix of text and images?
- Do you update and vary your email campaigns or use the same template time and again? How does this stack up?
- Is your call to action a link embedded in text or a graphic button?
You can use your answers for a plan of action to tweak your email marketing. If you want to know what changes might work best, you can compare options before a full rollout with A/B testing.
Take your email marketing to the next level
Email marketing is a great way to expand the reach of your brand. To develop the most effective email marketing strategies, it can help to take a peek at what your competitors are putting out there. By investing some time into competitor email marketing analysis, you can find ways to differentiate your brand and build your customer base. Check out Constant Contact for tools to automate and streamline your email marketing. You’ll get access to templates, a user-friendly interface, and tracking tools you can use to monitor the success of your campaigns.
