If you still need convincing, email marketing is recognized as one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your customers. But with more competition, it’s getting harder and harder to create email campaigns that stand out in overcrowded inboxes. Studying your competitors’ strategies, as well as getting insights from competitor tools, is one way to gain an edge, and improve your email marketing strategy. Using competitor analysis tools you are able to keep track of competitors’ email content, design, timing and engagement metrics so as to have a go at better plan.
For instance, competitive analysis can be used to get a bird’s eye view of how your competitors did with email marketing, what rings true with target audiences, and where you missed an opportunity. For example, Similarweb offers incredibly vast competitive insights into how competing marketers have relied on keywords, audience demographics and referral sources. Using these insights to guide your email marketing could help you to maximize campaigns, tailor the content to your target audience and enhance engagement.
How to use competitor tools to improve your email marketing campaigns is explained here.
- Email Design Analysis and Competitor Analysis
The analysis of content and design strategies of your competitors is one of the best ways to make your email marketing campaigns more enhanced. Structurally, linguistically speaking, and visually, you can read how you can attract designs and the sentences in their email to attract your email to your audience. Competitor analysis tools can help identify the following:
Content Themes: These tools can help you learn whether competitors are pushing aspects of product highlights, educational content and special offers. You can figure out which content themes within your industry and have your audience respond the best, thereby pointing you in the direction of what type of content is most important.
Tone and Language: Notice the voice remark tone your competitors use (casual, friendly, or formal). The same tone you use with the same target audience will make your emails sound more familiar but a different tone will distinguish you from everyone else.
Visual Elements: Examine how the competition utilizes the visuals, like pictures, visuals and color plans. The direction their designs take makes me believe this approach encourages the audience well.
Using Similarweb tools, you can see which types of content are working for your competitors to refine your efforts and bring them in line with industry trends, or be revolutionary and try something new.
- Getting Higher Open Rates Through Tracking Subject Line Trends
As important as the subject line is to an email; the email subject line is the thing that prompts people to open a message. The use of competitor analysis tools allows you to see just what kinds of subject lines work best within your industry. Key factors to observe include:
Language and Tone: What are the competitors using in the subject lines; urgency? Humor? Or personalization? If your open rates with these tactics are high, then try your hand at similar tones in your own campaigns.
Length and Format: Revealing how shorter or longer subject lines perform vis a vis competition can also be revealed by competitor tools. You may also discover that some formats, for instance, like questions or lists, work better.
Emoji Usage: Some industries use emojis in the subject lines and some don’t. You can watch how competitors use emojis to determine if it’s a good balance for your audience.
These insights will help create subject lines that have a higher chance of snagging your audience in and boosting your open rates.
- Understand and Study Email Timing and Frequency
The key is to find that right balance when it comes to sending emails – how often and when. Using a tool to track competitors email timing and frequency can help you decide what timing and frequency works best for your campaigns.
Timing: Instead of focusing so much on when to send your email, competitor analysis tools can show you when competitors are sending their emails; early morning, midday, or evening. This makes it possible that you might find that the times when you send the emails work well with your audience’s rhythms (e.g., sending emails during lunch breaks or during off-work hours).
Frequency: Consider how much they send out the promotional vs. informational. If you have competitors send out multiple emails a week, you might want to up your game and increase your frequency so that you remain top of mind, or decrease your frequency if your audience is more comfortable receiving less frequent communication.
These insights will help you smooth out the timing of your emails not only to maximize the chances of reach, but also get better engagement rates and stronger case sentiment.
- CTA Performance Monitoring
Email marketing campaigns cannot do without CTAs. You can look into competitors’ CTAs and see what works and what needs to be improved by using them in your campaigns. Competitor tools can help you analyze:
CTA Placement: If competitors are placing CTAs at the top of their emails, at the middle of their emails, or at the end of their emails, where are they placing their CTAs? In terms of conversion rates, the same can be said as well for strategic placement: you can affect conversion rates by strategically placing your text and by testing various locations to see what works best.
CTA Language: The wording used in CTAs matters. So do competitors use action oriented phrases like ‘Shop now’, ‘Get started’ or ‘Learn more’? You could experiment with similar wording to see better engagement.
Visual Design: CTAs that really stand out, with colored CTAs or huge bolded CTAs usually do better. Look at how competitors are showing their CTAs visually and try to replicate those elements to improve your click through rates.
- Study Competitors’ Personalization
Personalization really enhances engagement in email marketing. Competitor analysis tools help you view how competitors are personalizing their emails to connect with subscribers at a more personal level. Look out for:
Personalized Subject Lines and Greetings: In order to be more personal, competitors can use the recipient’s name in the subject line or greetings. To get better engagement, try using the same kind of personalization techniques.
Behavioral Triggers: What are competitors doing with data driven tactics like abandoned cart emails or follow up emails after looking at specific products? By observing these strategies, you can apply them to your own automated emails to get conversions.
Final Thoughts
Competitor tools can help boost engagement and help them stay competitive by using them to refine your email marketing campaigns. Marketers can learn about competitors’ strategies or industry trends and what they do with email content, design, timing and personalization using platforms like Similarweb. If you don’t stay informed of what your competitors are doing, how are you supposed to craft email campaigns that will resonate with your audience, become good at building relationships, and ultimately convert?
