Checking your competitors’ email marketing strategy can help in unravelling several key insights that can greatly help in improving your email marketing strategy. This practice assumes great significance considering that even today email marketing among all the digital marketing strategies is still known for offering comparatively higher ROI to marketers and brands alike. Therefore, if the question of how to check competitors email marketing strategy is plaguing your mind then this latest blog post deserves your rapt attention.
Importance of competitor analysis in Email Marketing
Before heading to the core topic, let us first talk about the importance and benefits of competitor analysis in email marketing.
Spotting Current Trends: By snooping into your competitors’ emails, you get fair idea about what’s currently working and what’s not and accordingly align your campaign to these changing trends. It goes without saying that aligning with current best practices always increases the chances of success of your campaigns, be it email marketing or otherwise.
Identifying gaps and weaknesses: You get a fairly clear idea about the shortcomings of your campaign as compared to your competitors. You may discover that overall design and UX is poor, subject-line is very generic or call to action is simply not appealing enough. Such important findings help in taking corrective actions at appropriate time.
Benchmarking your performance: You come to know whetheryour key email metrics like open rates, click-through-rates and conversions is in tune with the industry standards or better/worse than your competitors. Comparing critical metrics helps you in taking data driven and well-informed decisions for making further improvements in your campaign.
Gain inspiration and ideas: Analysing your competitors’ emails can seriously help you in breaking your creative deadlock. You can get several refreshing ideas about which type of design template can be more suitable for your campaign, how to improve your content, ideas for compelling call-to-actions and much more. This helps in pushing your envelope higher and improving your overall performance benchmark.
Get insight into valuable data: You can get access to some priceless information that can be incredibly useful and game changer for your campaign. For instance, you can track the specific times and days that your competitors send their mails. You can also find out which particular time or days give high engagement rates to your competitors. Additionally, what type of CTAs do they use and how often they are incorporated and which subject lines are helping your competitors in grabbing the attention of their target audience.
Learning from your competitor’s success: If your competitor’s email marketing strategy is indeed fetching them good ROI then getting insight inro what’s really working for them can equally help in turning around your sluggish campaign. The great thing is that the learning curve isn’t very steep, which means you can learn pretty quickly and implement these learnings into your campaign quite swiftly.
Tips for Checking competitors Email Marketing Strategy
Now let us finally turn our focus on how to go about in implementing competitor analysis.
Signing up newsletter & email list: This is by far the simplest and obvious. Simply go to your competitor’s website and sign up for their mails. By singing up or subscribing to your competitor’s newsletter, you essentially come to know about three important things. These three things are as follows:
- Email content (what is tone of the content & overall quality including subject line & call-to-action).
- Frequency: How often the competitors send their mails (is the frequency too high or low. Are mails sent daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly)
- Design: The visual and the overall design aesthetics of the email template.
Create a speed sheet to track data: This step is continuation of the first step. Once you sign up for the competitor’s mail and start getting regular mails, create a spreadsheet to track and analyse several key data. This includes subject lines, frequency, call-to-action use of GIFs, personalized content so and so forth.
Leveraging competitor analysis tools: Using competitor analysis tools is by far the most effective and also easiest way of analysing your competitor’s mails.
These tools provide troves and troves of useful data and deep insight, which otherwise remains inaccessible to you.
From content insight that tells what kind of content your competitors use, the subject line, to monitoring the timing and frequency of the mails and much more.
We again can’t overstate the fact that these tools are goldmine of priceless and invaluable data, giving almost decisive edge to your email marketing campaign.
Although these tools are paid tools and also bit expensive, they are still worth it. Professional email marketers and companies that are serious about securing higher ROI certainly can’t take the risk of not using competitor analysis tools.
Popular competitor analysis tools:
Look for information in public domain: More often than not many companies share information about their successful email marketing campaigns in the public domain. Most companies share this valuable information through their blog posts, usually found in the blog section of the company’s official website. If your competitor had hired a digital marketing agency to run its email marketing campaign then it is recommended to check the agency’s blog section.
Although it is highly unlikely that they would share step-by-step strategies, you can still extract many useful information about their campaigns.
Analyse the competitor’s website: Analysing competitor’s website can give fair idea about how they are using and integrating email marketing campaign into their marketing funnel. Examine their pop-ups, forms and call-to-actions on the competitor’s website that are generally used to collect emails for triggering marketing funnels.
Social media and forums: B2B social media platforms like LinkedIn and industry specific forums are some of the other popular public domain platforms where your competitors are likely to share their email marketing strategies. Type your competitors name or try some keyword variations and if lucky does shine then you might bump into some vital information about their email marketing strategy.
Attending industry events: Industry events, whether it is in-person or webinars, can be a good source to know the tactics and strategies deployed by your competitors. At these events, industry veterans and captains including your competitors often openly flaunt about their successful marketing strategies that is paying dividends for them.
Things to focus When Checking Competitors Email Marketing Strategy.
Any convincing explanation or answer to the question how to check competitors email marketing strategy will remain incomplete unless there is ignorance about the important things you should be focusing on.
These important things have already been mentioned & shared in above sections or paragraphs. However, we’d like to reiterate it again so that there is no confusion whatsoever.
- Content:
- Subject line (Analyse the tone, length & keyword usage)
- Content quality (relevance & value offered in context of the target audience)
- Call to Action (CTA) (evaluate the clarity, urgency & uniqueness in CTA)
- Design:
- Visual elements(judge the overall aesthetic appeal of the mail).
- Branding (how consistent is the brand identity throughout the email content)
- Frequency & Timing
- Email Frequency (how often your competitors send mails – daily, weekly or monthly)
- Timing: (Analyse the timing when the mails are sent and the corelation between the timing and the engagement rate)
- Performance metrics
- Open rates and click-through-rates: (compare them with industry benchmark and your own campaign).
- Conversion rate: (Whether the conversion rate is high or low as compared to the industry benchmark and your own).
- Unsubscribe rate: (the potential reasons if the unsubscribe rate is too high or low).
Conclusion:
Among all the strategies discussed above, the strategy of using competitor analysis tools is more likely to offer higher ROI for your email marketing campaign. While underestimating other strategies may not be a sound advice, they come with inherent limitation of not providing valuable data insight. Today’s data driven age is all about making intelligent and well-informed decisions, negating the risk of making wrong and ill-informed decisions. The strategy of using competitor analysis tools come exactly with this overriding advantage, making it by far the most effective strategy.