Businesses operating in competitive industries always aim to gain an advantage over their peers. One of the most efficient ways to achieve this is by researching the marketing emails that your competitors send out. This research can help you gain a better understanding of your competitors in the market and improve your own email marketing strategies and content.
This blog post will discuss the advantages of competitive research in email marketing, provide best practices for conducting it, highlight what to look for, and suggest ways to improve your processes.
Benefits of Competitive Research
Staying Up-to-Date on Competitor Content and Promotions
Staying up-to-date on competitor content and marketing promotions is one of the most significant benefits of conducting competitive research. This information can help you in developing your own marketing content and campaigns, as well as in creating competing promotions to draw customers away from your competition.
It is a crucial aspect of any business to keep a close eye on its competitors to stay ahead in the market.
Knowing the Latest Email Trends
Email marketing can be a great platform to test new marketing strategies/trends and ideas to see if they garner attention and click-throughs. Staying up-to-date with the latest marketing trends is crucial, as they can come and go very quickly.
A valuable way to remain informed is by examining your competitor's emails to see how they are trying to attract new customers.
This will help you build your emails more effectively by taking note of visual objects such as images, GIFs, button colors, and more, as well as written content.
Many times, implementing these findings can be very beneficial to open rates, click-through rates, and overall email success. Conducting A/B tests to determine if they are practical marketing tactics is a good practice to determine if these new strategies should be used more prominently in future emails.
Discover New Email Affiliate Partners
Often, it can be advantageous to determine which email affiliate your competitor is collaborating with. This is especially important if you aim to utilize an affiliate to assist with your email marketing campaigns in the future or are looking to bring in new partners to supplement who you are currently working with.
The email affiliate(s) your competition is working with should be a good starting point when you are creating a list of new potential partners for your organization. Most likely, the partners your competitors are using have experience in your industry and a contact list that correlates well with the product that you are trying to promote.
Uncover Key Email Metrics
Digging into competitor email metrics will help uncover insights into the deliverability, effectiveness, and success of your competition’s marketing efforts compared to others. Important things to consider are:
- Email Volume: Tracking your competitors' email volume over time can help you plan the timing and strategy of your email campaigns. For instance, if a competitor sends less volume during a particular period, you can capitalize on this opportunity by upping your emailing frequency.
- Inboxing Percentage: Monitoring the percentage of competitor emails that make it to the inbox versus those caught in spam filters can help you identify subject lines, email layouts, formats, and content email providers flag as spam. By avoiding crafting your emails that way, you can increase the chances of your content making it to the inbox.
Competitive Research Best Practices
Subscribe to Competitor Emails
It may seem obvious, but one of the most effective ways to research your competitors' email marketing strategies is to subscribe to their promotional emails and newsletters. By doing so, you can obtain direct access to the content they are sending out to potential customers.
It can also be beneficial to subscribe using multiple email addresses, as this can help you identify if they are conducting A/B tests. In some cases, email elements like the subject line, sender name, images, and more could differ between each email.
Analyze Everything
Once subscribed to their emails, an effective way to gain insight into your competitors' marketing strategies is by analyzing their email marketing tactics. This involves examining various email elements like subject lines, email personalization, length of content, “friendly from” names, and more. By viewing their emails, clicking on links, viewing landing pages, and filling out forms, you can get new ideas for your campaigns, blog, email topics, or potential promotions to run.
Analyzing your competitors' email marketing can also help you measure the effectiveness of your content compared to theirs, especially if you are targeting the same audience. By comparing your messaging to theirs, you can determine which email is more likely to elicit a response and measure the standard of content you are competing against for mindshare.
Check Email Redirects
Although it may involve some technical know-how, examining the redirects associated with links in emails can help identify the affiliate partners that a competitor is collaborating with. By reviewing the information linked to the URL, you should be able to locate some identifying information that can reveal the affiliate partner.
Use An Email Discovery Tool
Researching competitors' email content, deliverability, and volume with an email discovery platform like LashBack can save time and money while providing a competitive edge.
LashBack has a vast database of hundreds of millions of emails, allowing users to easily search for their direct competitors or other companies in their industry. Users can view the email content through a user-friendly platform, check the re-directs for affiliate information, and access the deliverability metrics in one place.
If you want to learn how LashBack can assist in your competitive research initiatives, request a personalized demo today by clicking here!
