Email marketing is tough when you’re working in the dark. You build campaigns, write clever subject lines, schedule them out, and hope something sticks.
Is there a smarter way to do it? Absolutely. Just look at what your competitors are sending. Now, you don’t need to copy them, but observing their efforts, borrowing ideas and giving them your own twist is what you should aim for.
It’s basically market research where you don’t have to visit tons of websites and read statistics. You get everything straight to your inbox. And this small thing can turn your email strategy upside down. In a good way.
What competitor email marketing analysis means
When we talk about analyzing competitor email campaigns, we mean signing up for their emails, reading what they send, and writing down some patterns that may be valuable to your own strategy.
You look at how they write, what kind of visuals they use, when they send their campaigns, and what buyer persona they seem to be talking to.
Maybe they send sales emails on Fridays. Maybe they’re using GIFs. Or, maybe they send ugly emails with plain text and that seems to do the trick?
All these things tell you something about their strategy, and you can learn a lot just by paying attention.
Why it’s valuable to analyze competitor email campaigns
If you’re working in the same niche, you’re most likely chasing the same customers. Since you’re not the first player, you don’t have to guess anymore.
You can follow other players in the field and see how they operate. Watch how they market to your audience and you’ll find shortcuts to understanding what these people like and how to get to them.
It will help you save tons of time since doing all the experimentation by yourself won’t provide results overnight. With competitor analysis, you may notice that they push seasonal sales hard. Or maybe they rarely send anything during the week, which gives you an opening.
And sometimes, their mistakes are just as useful. If their emails feel pushy, get buried in your inbox, or go to spam, that gives you a clue on what practices to avoid.
How to analyze competitor emails
Don’t immediately rush to some paid tools or premium competitor research services. You can start simple and then, once you have the base, you can move on to a more serious approach.
1. Join their email list
Go to their website and see what options they give to sign up. Is it a popup? A landing page? Or just a simple embedded box where you can enter your email address?
Also, see what they offer in return for your email address. It could be a discount, free delivery, an ebook, and whatnot.
Find out what their lead magnet is and offer the same or better at your own website. You can also use a different email address if you want to keep your personal or professional inbox clean.
If you want to go a step further and protect your identity or avoid fingerprinting, you can route the signup through an email protection proxy service. This helps prevent companies from tracking your location or device when signing up to their lists.
2. Label and organize
If you decide against a new email address for a competitor’s content, you should label these emails so you can easily access them whenever you want, instead of just letting them pile up.
This way, it’ll be easier to find all of them once you have time. You won’t have to search for them or scroll endlessly.
3. Don’t just skim through
Analyze their subject lines, tone of voice, formatting, timing, CTAs, everything. Each element gives information. You just need to define what information is valuable to you.
Are they being casual or formal? Do they use urgency a lot? Is everything about buying, or do they offer education and tips? What about emojis?
These things allow you to shape your own strategy based on data, not on a hunch.
4. Create a spreadsheet
Yes, we know — everyone “loves” more spreadsheets. However, keeping and updating one every week will help you out with strategy.
Add columns like date, subject line, preheader, email type, main topic, and anything else that you think would be valuable.
5. Compare to your brand
If you’re already running email campaigns and automations, you can use your competitor’s emails to see where you overlap or miss opportunities.
Maybe their welcome email looks better while yours doesn’t perform. You can now make some changes. Or maybe they have browse abandonment sequences while you don’t.
6. Check segmentation logic
If you’re getting emails that assume you’re already a customer, they might not be segmenting well and losing revenue in the process. That’s a big chance for you to polish your segmentation logic and make each email feel personalized.
The best tools to analyze competitor email campaigns
If you don’t want to do all this manually and are willing to pay for competitor campaign analysis services, here are some of your top choices:
Owletter: It automatically captures all your competitor’s emails and stores it in their dashboard. You can then log in and see all these emails in a scrollable screenshot format.
SendView: You generate an email address via SendView and then get all the emails in SendView’s inbox instead of your own. From there, you can see a list of all these newsletters and view them whenever you want.
These are two most popular examples and they work quite similarly. So, to decide which one is the best for you, you’ll need to compare their dashboards, processes, and ease-of-use.
Expert tips for analyzing emails smarter
It’s easy to get lost in hundreds of newsletters if you don’t know what to look for. That’s why it’s absolutely imperative to define what data you need and what data will help you out the most.
1. Focus on competitors who work in your industry
While it may be useful to understand how other businesses in other industries behave, it’s not where you should start. Begin by analyzing your direct competitors who sell the same product you do to the same customer base.
You’ll understand how they talk, how they sell, and how they engage the audience in general. Less is more.
2. Use useful tools made for competitor research
If you don’t have extra cash hanging around, you can use free tools like Google Sheets. It will take some manual work, but if you keep the sheet simple, it’s only a matter of minutes. Or, you can hire an assistant that will keep track of these emails for you.
However, if you can afford an assistant, you can probably afford a competitor research tool that will help automate the process.
3. Nitpick signals that matter
Not every email has the insights that you need, so you’ll have to learn to ignore the noise and find actionable signals.
With time, you may start to notice when they are trying new formats, new subject line strategies, new email structures, and more. Also, it’s important to follow automated sequences and distinguish when they start and when they end.
Once you define your goals, you’ll find. If you’re starting from scratch, focus more on automations. For more advanced, personalized sequences, explore more complex setups.
Conclusion
Peeking at your competitors’ email campaigns isn’t about copying their style or stealing ideas. It helps you sharpen your own strategy by leveraging their experience.
The more you watch and learn, the better your emails become. And it’s not as easy as you think. Once you start doing it, you’ll find yourself in an ocean of information, and if you don’t know how to navigate it, you won’t get anything out of it.
That’s why, before you start doing it, we strongly recommend you define your goals clearly. It will be your compass that will help you get where you want to be instead of getting lost at every turn.
Author bio
Justas Palekas is a talented up-and-coming product development and management professional. Starting his ascent in a sister company of IPRoyal, a leading residential proxy provider, he quickly rose through the ranks, covering most aspects of marketing and product development by himself, and became the Head of Product of IPRoyal in just a few short years, all the while finishing his bachelor’s degree in Economics.
He now leads a team of marketing and product development professionals while also combining support from several agencies to devise and implement strategies that have helped IPRoyal shoot up to a top residential proxy provider in just a few short years.
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