How to Check Competitors’ Email Marketing Campaigns (Key Tips)

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.

In one month, one of our customers collected hundreds of emails from five rival SaaS brands, uncovered a 32% subject‑line length gap, matched their Tuesday‑morning cadence, and watched the reply rate jump from 5.8% to 11.9% after plugging the findings into Mailgo. 

Below you’ll get three proven tactics on how to check your competitors email marketing campaigns and turn them into revenue.

By the time you reach the bottom of this guide, you’ll have five things in hand:

• Why spying on competitor email marketing campaigns is 100% legal and wildly effective
• How to set up a simple “inbox trap” to capture every email your competitors send
• Which tools help you dig into their sequences, subject lines, and send times
• How to analyze patterns in cadence, copy, and CTA strategy using AI and spreadsheet tagging
• How to plug those insights directly into Mailgo’s AI workflows, including lead generation, smart sequencing, and personalized email writing.

Why Competitor Email Intel Matters

Every email your competitor sends is a glimpse into their playbook. Not the polished version on their website. But the real-time, boots-on-the-ground version, where they’re targeting, what they’re pushing, how they’re positioning, and how aggressively they’re selling.

And the best part is that they’re handing you that intel for free if you know how to listen.

Email is a signal stream

Most marketers treat email as a tool they send out. But the smartest teams also treat it as a feed they can watch. Because when you pay attention to what’s showing up in your prospects’ inboxes from your competitors, you start spotting patterns that will help you to start making moves.

Real inboxes. Real campaigns. Real advantage.

Let’s say you sell to mid-market SaaS teams like your top three competitors do too. If you’re not tracking their email flows, here’s what you’re missing:

• Timing: Are they always sending on Tuesdays at 9 a.m.? Are weekends off-limits
• Cadence: Are they hitting once or running 5-step sequences
• Style: Are they using humor? Personalization? Straight-laced case study drops
• Content mix: Are they leading with product? Pain? Social proof?

Email Reveals the Real Funnel

Email shows the whole lifecycle: onboarding, nurture, activation, upsell, and churn recovery. By studying a competitor’s emails over a few weeks, you can often map their exact funnel:

• When they educate vs. when they pitch
• Where they ask for the call
• What incentives they offer
• How long they follow up
• When they give up

When you see that, you can either level up your own program or take advantage of the holes they’ve left open.

And Mailgo makes it easy to execute that difference. It provides you with tools that help with messaging that’s faster, smarter, and built for real results.

Strategy 1 – Build an Inbox Listening Post

We noticed that before we could compete with our rivals’ email campaigns, we needed to see them. Not just the occasional newsletter or launch announcement, but the full sequence, including the welcome flow, follow-ups, promos, and re-engagement emails. All of it.

That’s exactly what this strategy helped us capture. And we’ll show you how to do it.

Spin up a Burner Inbox

Begin by creating a clutter-free inbox. Instead of using your own email address, try an alias like [email protected] or sign up for ProtonMail.

This keeps your primary inbox clean and protects your domain reputation if you choose to interact with any of the emails. It also gives you one focused place to monitor the activity.

Subscribe to Everything

Then start subscribing. Sign up for every newsletter, gated eBook, webinar, or product trial your competitors offer. Go through their funnels like a real lead. 

That’s what triggers the good stuff: onboarding flows, drip campaigns, feature announcements, churn recovery messages. Use the same inbox for all your signups so the sequences stay together and readable in context.

Auto‑tag and Label

Once emails start rolling in, organize them. Set up filters or rules in Gmail to tag and label each competitor’s emails as they arrive. 

Keep it simple: use labels like “Onboarding,” “Promo,” “Webinar,” or “Win-back.” The goal is to make it easy to scroll through and see what each company is doing at each stage.

Track the Basics in Sheets

Each week, take a few minutes to export what you’ve gathered. Subject lines, send dates, timing. Drop them into a Google Sheet, and let the patterns emerge. 

Which days are they sending? Are subject lines long or short? Is there a rhythm to the follow-ups? You’ll start seeing the shape of their campaigns, and more importantly, the gaps.

Quick Win

From there, you can act fast. Take the strongest subject line styles you’ve seen and plug them into Mailgo’s AI Email Writer. 

Give it a prompt like: “Rewrite this for {{Company}}, seven words max, start with a strong action verb.” You’ll get instant drafts that match the tone but stay unique to your brand. Just that one tweak could lift your open rates before you ever build a full sequence.

Strategy 2 – Archive Deep‑Dive

Once our inbox listening post was running, the next step was to go backward, into archived emails. While live tracking shows you what's happening now, historical archives show you patterns: when your competitors run promotions, how often they follow up, and how their messaging has shifted over time.

Here’s how to do it right.

Capture Historical Email Data

To build a proper archive, you need the right tools. Three stand out: MailCharts, Panoramata, and Owletter inside SEMRush. Each lets you track and review competitor email campaigns without having to manually collect them for months.

Here’s the detail of what these tools offer. 

Clean and Tag the Dataset

It is necessary to clean the data in order to make it useable after collecting the email exports, which are typically in CSV format.

• The date, subject line, email type (blast, onboarding, promo), call-to-action (CTA), and destination URL should be standardised first.
• After that, label each email with its appropriate funnel stage: onboarding, nurturing, re-engagement, promotion, or product update. Tags such as "first touch," "reminder," and "final call" are also available.
• Put the whole dataset into a formula-filled spreadsheet to get deep understanding. 

What to Look For

It becomes worthwhile at this point. Now that you have your archive sorted and categorized, you can begin to analyze:

• Cadence: After the first email, how many further follow-ups are expected? How long has it been since they began?
• Subject style: Are emojis being used? Urgency? Is it lengthy and precise or brief and to the point?
• Timing clusters: Do most campaigns launch at 9:00 a.m. on weekdays? Are weekends avoided? Do re-engagement emails hit in the evenings?
• CTA framing: Do they use "Book a demo," "Watch a case study," or "Claim your discount" for the lead? Their language reveals their intentions and the factors they believe influence their behavior.

Learn your competitors' habits and use that information to your advantage by creating ads that mimic or purposefully deviate from their routines.

Strategy 3 – AI Pattern Mining + Mailgo Activation

You have now collected the email addresses of your competitors, sorted them by type, cleaned up the data, and are beginning to see trends. Subject lines, send times, calls to action, and cadence are all familiar to you. It is now time to put that intel to work for you.

This is where Mailgo turns observation into output.

Instead of copying what your competitors send, you’re using their patterns as a launchpad for smarter campaigns. Everything from subject line phrasing to follow-up timing can be replicated, adjusted, and deployed through Mailgo’s built-in features.

Here’s how to translate what you’ve learned into action:

Why This Works

Because Mailgo automatically handles domain warm-up, time zone optimization, and reply management, you’re free to focus on strategy instead of setup.

You don’t need to rewrite everything from scratch or spend hours manually tweaking sequences. You simply feed what you’ve learned; subject formats, cadences, timing, into Mailgo’s workflow, and the platform takes care of execution at scale.

This makes it possible to:

• Launch campaigns that feel fresh, not formulaic,
  
• Match competitor timing without guessing,
  
• Scale personalized outreach while maintaining structure, and
  
• Improve deliverability without slowing down your pipeline.

Putting It All Together in Mailgo (Five‑Step Mini‑Tutorial)

We have mentioned some of the features of Mailgo that you can activate your strategy. But now, we’’ll show you how to actually put everything into motion inside Mailgo in just five steps.

Define your Ideal Customer

Start with AI Lead Finder.

In plain language, describe who you want to reach. Something like:
“B2B SaaS companies, 50–200 employees, growth-stage, based in the EU.”

Mailgo pulls from sources like Google search, Gemini, LinkedIn, Apollo, and ZoomInfo, in such a way that delivers a clean, verified list of decision-makers who match your criteria. 

Warm the Domain

Before you send anything live, activate Mailgo’s Built-in Warm-Up. Over the next 14 days, Mailgo will gradually ramp up sending volume and simulate real inbox engagement, making sure your sender reputation is clean.

When your real campaign goes out, your messages will land in inboxes, not spam folders.

Import the New Sequence

Take the email sequence you refined using competitor data, maybe it’s three steps, maybe more, and paste it directly into Smart Sequencing.

You can set rules for each step based on user behavior. No reply? Trigger the next follow-up. Got a click or a response? Pause the sequence automatically.

Everything adjusts as your prospects engage.

Smart Schedule

Use Smart Scheduling to control when your emails go out.

Instead of blasting all contacts at once, Mailgo sends each message at the optimal local time, so if your data shows Monday at 9:00 a.m. works best, that’s exactly when it lands.

Monitor Real-Time Analytics

Once live, keep an eye on Mailgo’s analytics dashboard. You’ll see opens, clicks, replies, and bounces in real time.

If a subject line underperforms, you can change it mid-campaign. If step two is too soon, you can shift the delay without stopping the sequence. It’s built for fast feedback and faster adjustments.

Better Leads, Faster Results

The AI-powered way to find new leads and start conversations that convert.

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Pitfalls, Legal Notes, and Deliverability Hygiene

Gathering competitor email intel is smart, effective, and entirely above board, as long as you know where the line is. This section is your quick reality check. What’s allowed, what’s risky, and what you need to do behind the scenes to keep your campaigns deliverable and compliant.

1. Respect the Legal Boundaries

Tools like MailCharts, Panoramata, and Owletter gather emails sent to public subscribers. Signing up for your competitor’s newsletter or product updates is legal. You're consenting to receive that content just like any customer would.

What’s not okay is scraping private inboxes, bypassing consent, or lifting personal data without permission.

That’s where regulations like CAN-SPAM (in the US) come into play. To stay compliant:

• Don’t republish or reuse anyone’s email content verbatim.
  
• Never bypass unsubscribe links or send emails to scraped lists.
  
• Keep your analysis focused on structure, tone, cadence, and tactics, not personal data.

2. Keep Your Domain Reputation Clean

If you’re planning to send at scale, like 100+ emails a day or more, don’t do it from your main domain.

Create a subdomain like [email protected] or [email protected]. This isolates your cold outreach from your core domain so one bad bounce doesn’t hurt your main brand.

3. Don’t Copy, Translate

It’s tempting to just lift a competitor’s email and make a few edits. But that’s lazy, risky, and usually less effective. Instead, extract context, not copy.

Look at what their subject line does, not just what it says. Is it curiosity-driven? Urgent? Benefit-led?

See what kind of CTA structure they’re using. Then let Mailgo’s AI Email Writer help you reframe it in your own voice, with better timing, stronger relevance, and fresher angles.

Competitor campaigns should guide your strategy, not define your message.

Ready to Out‑Inbox Your Rivals?

There’s a big difference between sending emails and outperforming everyone else in the inbox. Stop guessing and use the clear, proven strategies we have shown you. Track exactly what your competitors are sending, and decode their patterns and campaign structure using smart tools. 

Then, activate those insights with AI, inside a platform like Mailgo that handles writing, scheduling, warm-up, and real-time tracking for you.

Start your free trial on Mailgo now!