Companies can use email marketing to make contact with their customer base, build relationships, and drive conversions. But with so many brands using email marketing, it’s difficult to make your name in a sea of email inboxes. Email marketing competitive analysis is one way to achieve this advantage. Companies can learn about the email marketing tactics of competitors and see where they are succeeding, what they are failing and where they can make changes. In this post, we are going to discuss five tips on how to utilize email marketing competitive analysis.
1. Identify Key Competitors
Figuring out your key competitors is a cornerstone of any competitive analysis. It’s not only the direct competitors that provide products or services that you have, but the indirect competitors that are possibly targeting the same market but providing different solutions. List everything you can, adding five to 10 competitors targeting the same market segment.
Softwares such as SEMrush and SimilarWeb will assist you here. They reveal the brands that appear in your vertical and they introduce you to them and show you how they look and their marketing work. Once you know them, you’re ready to go the extra mile and ask about how they email and what they’re using it for.
2. Subscribe and Analyze
Once you identify your competitors, sign up for their lists. You get a chance to experience the latter directly, and from that you can make inferences: frequency of their emails, subject lines, names of senders, other common communications will give you a starting point.
Don’t forget to check their email layout, design, and layout: a well-designed email increases opens and conversions by a long shot. Look around at what is appealing and what is not; this will help you work on your email marketing layout and message.
3. Evaluate Content Strategy
You could try reverse engineering the email of your competitors to understand what works in a target-based system. When evaluating their email campaigns, make sure to notice what types of content they send: ads, training content, maybe user generated?
Also, be very mindful of the voice, language, and CTA used in their letters.
It will enable you to really see why it works for them in terms of themes and strategies, which you can use in making your own. By tailoring your emails to what your target audience expects, you will have an excellent chance of getting more clicks and conversions.
4. Leverage Industry Benchmarks
You need to take industry standard into account when you measure how successful your email marketing campaign is. Check out competitors’ top metrics, including open rate, click-through and conversion rates. This would be a base point where you’ll know how to excel in something you’re lacking.
You can sign up for a few industry reports or just look for something else to give you a more holistic picture of the email marketing industry. Tracking your results against benchmarks will tell you where you should focus your effort to continuously improve.
5. Assess Automation and Personalization
Automation and customization are the cornerstones of the high-tech email marketing community. They not only boost the campaigns but also drive user engagement tenfold. Start by profiling your competitors using these powerful tools. Are their emails designed to satisfy the quirky interests and habits of the recipient? Consider, for instance, whether segment-based messages are optimal for certain audiences.
Check whether they have automated sequences of actions-e.g., onboarding emails for new subscribers, or re-engagement efforts that reset lost accounts. With software, such as customer relationship management systems, marketing professionals can efficiently send emails according to a scheduled pattern of activities from a customer behavior profile. That will inspire you to go out and tweak your own automation systems. For example, if a competitor is having success with personalized recommendations, you can start serving product recommendations based on specific users behavior on your website.
6. Monitor Performance Over Time
Competitive research is never a one-time task. It requires regular, periodic check-ins. To stay on top of what your competitors are up to with their best email marketing strategies, create a weekly, monthly, or quarterly review period. As they record changes in their content strategy, design aesthetics, promotions, and subscriber engagement over time, good trends will start to emerge.
Watch how they adapt to new challenges or shifts in customer preference. You might have noticed some of your competitors opting for a more responsive email design. So maybe that’s only a symptom of some kind of more widespread consumer behaviour shift. You’ll not only be getting the most recent information but will also develop a flexible mindset towards your approach that will keep you on top in an ever-evolving marketplace.
7. Learn from A/B Testing Strategies
A/B testing remains one of the strongest email marketing campaign optimization tools. It allows marketers to continuously experiment with various aspects and tweak on the fly based on performance. Watch what A/B testing your competitors are doing, it may turn out to be gold. So what exactly are they attempting to test? Subject lines, email design, images, and CTAs all play big roles in how your audience experiences your message.
For example, if your competitor had an urgency-inducing subject line that was effective, replicate it in your campaigns and don’t forget to incorporate your brand voice. Figure out what works for them: does the same content consistently generate higher open rates? You’ll see how you can optimise your A/B testing to discover what works best with your subscribers through these interactions.
8. Use Email Marketing Tools
Tools to help you conduct competitive analysis abound. Sites such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SendGrid all provide the ability to view email campaigns, analytics, and subscriber lists. Utilize these tools to augment your email campaigns and implement the results of competitive research effectively.
Conclusion:
Email marketing competitor analysis is one of the powerful tools that companies use when trying to optimize their email marketing campaigns. By finding competitors, analysing frequency and timing, subject lines and preview text, content and design, engagement and conversion, brands will know the strengths, weaknesses, and ways to tweak their own campaigns. Businesses can take advantage of email marketing competitive analysis and remain in the lead with these five tips.
