How to analyze competitor email marketing strategies effectively? To effectively analyze competitor email marketing strategies, monitor their email content, subject lines, and engagement metrics using tools like MailCharts or Owletter. Focus on identifying successful tactics, gaps, and opportunities to innovate your own campaigns, enhance targeting, and improve performance.
Key Takeaways:
Utilize tools like MailCharts for automated competitor email tracking.
Analyze subject lines, CTAs, and design for actionable insights.
Apply findings to optimize your own email marketing strategy.
Regularly review and integrate competitor tactics to boost engagement and revenue.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Studies show that email drives 10 times more revenue than social media. With email delivering $36 in revenue for every $1 spent, it is no surprise why 89% of marketers rate it as an effective channel.
However, with such high competition, standing out requires constant innovation and learning from what works. This is where analyzing competitors’ email marketing strategies becomes invaluable.
Monitoring how your competitors use email allows you to:
- Learn what engages their audience
- Discover smart email marketing tactics
- Identify their strengths and weaknesses
- Improve your own email marketing campaigns
This guide will teach you how to set up competitor email tracking and extract powerful insights you can leverage. With some effort, you’ll be on your way to boosting
email engagement and revenue.
Table of Contents
Understanding Competitor Email Marketing Analysis
Competitor email marketing analysis involves systematically evaluating your competitors’ email campaigns to inform your own strategy.
The goals of competitor email analysis include:
- Gaining intelligence on competitor messaging, offers, and engagement levels
- Identifying successful email marketing tactics to test and potentially replicate
- Pinpointing weak points or gaps in competitors’ email marketing to capitalize on
- Tracking changes and new developments from leading competitors over time
Benefits of monitoring competitors’ email marketing include:
Benefit | Description |
Faster innovation cycles | By constantly evaluating what works for competitors, you speed up testing and optimization of your own emails. |
Increased open & click-through rates | Learn what subject lines, content, and designs appeal most to your shared audience. |
Higher conversion rates | See what calls-to-action (CTAs) and landing pages convert best after email clicks. |
Improved email segmentation & targeting | Identify gaps in how competitors segment and personalize emails. |
Now let’s explore how to tap into the power of competitor email tracking.
Setting Up for Competitor Email Analysis
When starting competitor analysis, first identify your 3-5 main email marketing competitors. These could be:
- Direct competitors – Businesses offering similar products or services
- Industry leaders – Innovators with very engaged email subscriber bases
- Secondary competitors – Indirect competitors targeting your customers
Next, subscribe to competitor emails across these brands using dedicated addresses, such as:
- competitor1@domain.com
- competitor2@domain.com
This keeps your personal inbox separate.
💡Pro Tip: Use a domain relating to your business to easily filter emails when monitoring multiple competitor addresses.
You can set up automatic forwarding from your competitor addresses to aggregate into one master inbox. This lets you view all competitor emails seamlessly in one place.
💡Pro Tip: Use organizational flags, labels, or categories on forwarded emails to track individual competitors.
Email organization is key for effective competitor analysis. Sort incoming emails by:
- Competitor name – For easy identification
- Email category – Such as promotions, newsletters, automated
- Date – To assess email frequency over time
Now let’s look at tools to further enhance monitoring competitor email marketing at scale.
Tools and Resources for Email Monitoring
While manually subscribing to competitor emails works, it does not scale well. Fortunately, purpose-built software automates the process – saving you time while centralizing insights.
Here are the most popular tools for competitor email analysis:
- Tracks emails from unlimited competitors – Automatically aggregates all campaigns
- Centralized dashboard – Compares open, click-through & conversion rates
- Alerts for new campaigns – Don’t miss any new competitor emails
- Email previews – See email content without opening emails
- Starts at $15/month – Affordable for individuals and teams
- Alerts and reports on competitors – Daily/weekly email digests
- Real-time monitoring – View competitor emails as they are sent
- Email previews – Quickly scan emails without opening them
- Email templates detection – Identifies ESPs and templates used
- 14-day free trial – Test Owletter risk-free
These tools eliminate manual checking of competitor inboxes. After connecting your competitor tracking addresses, they provide centralized dashboards revealing:
- Number of emails sent by each competitor
- Open, click-through & conversion rates
- Topic analysis – most used keywords
- New campaign alerts
This allows you to track the performance of all competitor emails from one place.
Now let’s do a deeper dive into extracting insights from competitor email marketing content.
Key Aspects to Analyze in Competitor Emails
When reviewing competitor emails, you want to balance speed with depth during analysis.
Quickly scan for highlights first:
- Subject line
- Sender name
- Design look and feel
- Length
- Main CTA
This gives you the gist before conducting more in-depth comparative analysis.
Critical aspects to analyze across competitor email marketing include:
Email Subject Lines
This drives open rates, so see what resonates best with readers.
- Analyze emotional sentiment – are they shocking, helpful, urgent?
- Assess curiosity triggers – numbers, how-tos, or questions?
- Evaluate length – shorter may beat longer subject lines
- Check personalization – name, location, past purchase inclusion
Email Content
Go beyond subject lines to evaluate the full content:
- Review copy length – what is the word count range?
- Analyze paragraph size – are they short and scannable?
- Assess personalization – dynamic content vs. static copy
- Check multimedia use – photos, videos, gifs, etc. improve engagement
Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
These solicit clicks and conversions:
- Identify types – email signups, purchases, content downloads?
- Evaluate designs – contrasting buttons?
- Analyze wording – action-focused verbs like “Get”, “Join”, “Download”?
- Assess relevance – contextual or generic CTAs?
Email Design
Well-designed emails drive more clicks and sales.
- Compare templates – simple vs. complex layouts
- Check branding – logo visibility, color scheme
- Assess readability – section headers, enough white space?
- Identify engagement drivers – quizzes, calculators, etc
Engagement Tracking
Ultimately you want to inspire action:
- Evaluate open & click-through rates
- Check conversion rates on key CTAs
- Analyze unsubscribe rates – are their lists clean?
- Identify response rates to questions – good engagement metric
Digging into these aspects across the emails from your main competitors gives you benchmarks to beat.
Now let’s take competitor analysis to the next level.
Advanced Analysis Techniques
So far we have focused on monitoring the observable data in competitor email campaigns. However, you can extract even deeper intelligence through advanced competitive analysis methods.
SWOT Analysis
Conduct an objective strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis across all competitor email marketing:
Category | Description |
Strengths | Successful tactics to replicate like high performing CTAs. |
Weaknesses | Gaps like low open rates or high unsubscribe rates. |
Opportunities | Potential areas you could outperform competitors. |
Threats | Looming changes on the horizon that could disrupt. |
This structured approach reveals strategic insights for our own email marketing.
Comparative Analysis
Diving deeper, benchmark competitor email metrics against your own across areas like:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Bounce rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- Conversion rates
Support qualitative observations with hard data.
Objectively assessing strengths and weaknesses guides testing and optimization.
Apply Artificial Intelligence
Modern AI now powers sophisticated email analysis functionality through enterprise marketing platforms.
For example, Drift applies AI to:
- Profile ideal customer personas
- Map subscriber personas to customized journeys
- Continuously segment subscribers based on behaviors
- Test subject lines optimized for higher open rates
- Generate real-time alerts to engage subscribers
This eliminates guesswork while optimizing the timing, content, and targeting of email campaigns.
The same AI tools used by leading brands are now accessible to businesses of all sizes thanks to SaaS innovation.
Learning from Competitor Strategies
The most crucial part of competitor analysis comes next – applying insights to improve your marketing.
A strategic mindset is essential. Avoid just copying competitor tactics. Instead, let their strategies guide testing and innovation relevant to your business.
Adapt Successful Tactics
For example, if a competitor has higher click-through rates from action-oriented subject lines, try drafting some for your next campaign.
See an engaging quiz or calculator a competitor uses? Test including one in your next newsletter.
Build on what engages your shared audience.
Innovate from Insights
Use insights to spark new ideas. Spot a market or audience segment not targeted effectively by competitors? Craft a tailored campaign to seize that opportunity.
Identify common email design flaws? Develop a more readable, scannable template.
Let competitor analysis fuel experimentation and creativity while informing your testing.
Consider Ethics
As you monitor competitors, occasionally revisit ethics. Email marketing highly values subscriber trust. Never directly copy full competitor emails or lists.
Analyze what resonates with readers while ensuring your messaging remains authentic. Ethics and innovation can thrive together.
Now let’s shift from learning to action by integrating competitor insights into your strategy.
Integrating Insights into Your Email Marketing Strategy
Competitor analysis is a means rather than an end. Regularly dedicate time to absorb insights learned and identify ways to raise the bar in your own email marketing.
Enhance Campaign Creative
Develop a streamlined process for reviewing top-performing competitor emails before you design new campaigns.
Highlight effective subject lines, layouts, content formats or offers to inspire your own creative direction. Maintain an organized swipe file.
Improve Targeting
Pay attention to the sender name, imagery, offer details and language used across top competitor emails.
These creative cues suggest which segments they target most. Use this intelligence to better personalize messaging to your own audience segments where needed.
Expand Testing
Turn competitor analysis into fuel for robust A/B testing.
Any assumption or hypothesis formed during review can be validated by designing variants for upcoming campaigns.
Test alternate subject lines, content formats, designs, offers and sending times against your standard approach. Apply competitor insights to expand your testing horizons.
Automate Monitoring
Manually reviewing competitor emails allows deep analysis. However, combining this with automated monitoring is powerful.
Email tracking tools instantly alert you to new campaigns, surges in engagement, or changes in strategies.
Automated reporting also helps efficiently monitor key metrics over time. Set up dashboards aligned to your analysis frameworks.
Regular competitor review, integrated with disciplined testing, accelerates learnings that lift the performance of your email program.
Now let’s see examples of businesses achieving results with competitor analysis.
Wrapping Up Competitor Email Marketing Analysis
Email marketing is only getting more competitive. Standing still means falling behind. Monitoring your competitors’ email strategies accelerates innovation and results.
This guide provided actionable tactics to:
- Set up competitor email tracking
- Leverage tools to automate monitoring
- Analyze engagement levels and tactics
- Apply insights to enhance your own email marketing
With competitor intelligence powering constant optimization, your email marketing will keep winning more fans and driving revenue.
The first step is signing up to start tracking competitor emails using a tool like MailCharts.
Then dedicate time each week to review key insights and convert learnings into improved campaigns. With a strategic process in place, your email marketing will consistently outpace competitors.
What competitor email analysis tactics are you eager to test first? Which tools seem most valuable? I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments below!