How to Check Competitors Email Marketing Campaigns: 6-Step Framework

Introduction

Competitive analysis is a powerful tool in email marketing, allowing you to evaluate what your competitors are doing well and where they might be missing the mark. By tracking and analyzing your competitors’ email campaigns, you can extract ideas, avoid common pitfalls, and understand what strategies resonates with your shared target audience. This, in turn, helps you craft best practices that stand out in an increasingly crowded inbox.

Why Competitor Email Analysis is Crucial

Analyzing your competitors’ email campaigns is a critical component of any marketing strategy. Here’s why:

Identify Industry Trends: By observing your competitors' email tactics, you can spot emerging trends, whether it's new design trends, content formats, or subject line strategies. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your email campaigns remain relevant.

Uncover Gaps in Your Own Strategy: Comparing your emails with those of your competitors will quickly highlight areas for improvement. Perhaps you’re not leveraging personalization enough, or your subject lines lack urgency—these insights help you make meaningful changes.

Discover New Audience Segments: By analyzing your competitors' segmentation strategies, you might identify new customer segments that you hadn’t considered before. Whether it’s a specific geographic area, demographic, or behavioral trait, understanding how others segment their lists can inspire your next campaign.

Benchmark Your Performance: Tracking and comparing your email metrics (like open rates and click-through rates) against your competitors' campaigns provides valuable benchmarking data. It helps you assess where you stand and set realistic goals for improvement.

Step 1: Identifying Key Competitors to Track

The first step in competitor email analysis is selecting which companies to track. Focus on competitors that closely match your business, target a similar audience, or operate in the same industry. Here are some tips for identifying the right competitors:

Industry Leaders: These are companies that dominate your market and set the standard. Their strategies can provide valuable insights into what works on a larger scale.

Top Performers in Retargeting: Some competitors excel at keeping potential customers engaged through retargeting ads and email campaigns. These are worth tracking, as they might have highly effective customer retention strategies.

High-Spenders in Paid Acquisition: Competitors that allocate significant budgets to email campaigns tend to have highly optimized email funnels. By tracking these, you can observe advanced tactics like automation, segmentation, and A/B testing in action.

Step 2: Finding Your Competitors' Email Campaigns

Once you’ve identified the competitors you want to track, you need to find their email campaigns. Here are two primary ways to do this:

Manual Methods

Sign Up for Newsletters: The most straightforward way to track a competitor's email campaigns is by subscribing to their newsletters. You can do this by visiting their website and entering your email. However, this can quickly get overwhelming if you're tracking multiple competitors.

Automated Tools

Mailcharts: An email intelligence platform that tracks competitors' campaigns across industries, providing insights into email design, content, and performance.

Owletter: This tool automatically captures and organizes competitors’ emails, offering features like email frequency tracking, subject line analysis, and engagement metrics.

SendView: A tool specifically for marketers to monitor competitors' email campaigns, analyze strategies, and track changes over time, with collaboration features for team sharing.

Mailgenius: A user-friendly tool that captures competitors’ emails and offers subject line analysis, email content tracking, and performance metrics.

Step 3: Analyzing Your Competitors' Email Content

Once you have access to your competitors' email campaigns, it’s time to dive into the analysis. Here are key aspects to examine:

Subject Lines: Look at how your competitors craft their subject lines—are they using urgency, curiosity, or personalization? How long are they, and do they include emojis or specific calls to action?

Email Design and Layout: Take note of how the emails are structured. Are they clean and minimalistic, or do they include lots of visuals like images and GIFs? How is the text laid out, and where are the call-to-action (CTA) buttons placed?

Calls to Action (CTA): What actions do the competitors want recipients to take? Is it clear? Are the CTAs compelling and action-oriented? Take notes on how the CTAs are framed and where they appear in the email.

Offers and Promotions: Are they promoting discounts, special offers, or events? What is the value proposition, and how do they highlight urgency or exclusivity?

Personalization and Segmentation: Are the emails tailored to specific customer segments, such as location, past purchases, or browsing behavior? This can give you ideas on how to personalize your own emails for better engagement.

Step 4: Understanding the Engagement Strategies

Effective email marketing isn’t just about content—it’s also about how well you understand and engage with your audience. By monitoring your competitors, you can learn valuable engagement tactics:

Engagement Techniques: Competitors may use psychological triggers like scarcity, social proof, and exclusivity to prompt action. Additionally, interactive content such as polls, quizzes, or surveys can increase engagement and foster a deeper connection with subscribers.

Timing and Frequency: Competitors may send emails at optimal times, such as mid-morning or early evening, and adjust frequency based on seasonal trends. Understanding these patterns can help you optimize your own campaigns.

Targeting: Competitors often target those more valuable leads whose needs align with their brand identity, increasing connection and response rates.

Step 5: Comparing Your Email Marketing with Competitors

Once you have collected data from your competitors' email campaigns, the next step is to compare your performance:

Open rates: Competitors with higher open rates might be using subject lines that evoke urgency or curiosity, or ones that are personalized to resonate with the recipient. The subject line length also plays a role, as shorter lines often stand out in crowded inboxes. Additionally, emails sent at the right time—when the target audience is most likely to engage—can significantly boost open rates.

Conversion rates: Competitors who have higher conversion rates may be offering more attractive deals, such as time-sensitive discounts or exclusive promotions that create urgency. The clarity of the CTA also matters, as well-structured, action-oriented language and prominent placement can make it easier for recipients to take the desired action.

Click-through rates (CTR) : Competitors with higher CTRs likely have clean, easy-to-read emails that effectively guide the reader towards the CTA. Including visuals like images, GIFs, or videos can make the email more engaging, while a clear visual hierarchy ensures the recipient’s attention is directed towards the CTA, making it more likely they will click through.

Step 6: Changing After Competitor Email Monitoring

After a thorough survey of competitors email marketing campaigns, it's time for you to optimize your own strategies. With pursuing the promotion, mailgo is always there to help you:

Content Optimization: Mailgo’s AI writer helps you create high-quality, personalized email content quickly. It automates the creation of subject lines and body copy, ensuring emails are more engaging and relevant to your audience.

Timing and Scheduling: With mailgo’s smart scheduling, you can send emails at the optimal times based on audience behavior, improving open rates and engagement by reaching subscribers when they’re most likely to act.

List Management and Lead Generation: mailgo's AI agent finds qualified leads, helping you target the right audience. It also offers email verification and email guess features to maintain a clean and accurate list, reducing bounce rates and improving deliverability.

Deliverability: The email warm-up feature boosts your sender reputation, ensuring high deliverability and preventing emails from landing in spam folders, especially for cold emailing and new leads.

Conclusion

By monitoring and learning from your competitors’ email campaigns, you can uncover best practices, spot trends, and discover opportunities to optimize your own emails. Then use tools like mailgo to turn those valuable insights into your own implementation. With the right approach, you’ll be able to refine your campaigns, increase engagement, and stay ahead in a competitive marketplace.