We'll talk about a lot of ways we all try to track their competitors, but email is a perfect place to start because we all do it in some form.
For example, it's almost guaranteed that you've subscribed to all of your competition’s newsletters. And, if you have, you probably have an inbox full of their emails and not a lot to show for it. You save them to a folder, only to feel overwhelmed by them later, and you haven’t looked at any of them anyway. all it did was make it harder to get to inbox zero. Heck, it's why we built SendView and why so many marketers and teams love it, but we'll talk more about that later (don't worry, we'll share lots of other tools and tips too).
You’ve analyzed your email marketing strategy more than once, but you’re stumped. You still feel like you’re not doing it right, but you’re not sure why. There’s a better way.
Here’s the thing, you’ve started tracking your competitors, but you didn’t make a plan. Using a regular email inbox and folders to monitor competitor’s emails might be the most time-consuming way to approach it. To effectively use competitor tracking in email marketing, you need to know which data to look at, how to organize it, and–most importantly–how to use it to make smart email marketing decisions.
Ready to change the way you gain competitive intelligence? Read on to learn more about monitor competitor’s emails, how to get actionable competitor data, and which software to use.
What is competitor tracking?
Competitor tracking is the process of monitoring the activities and strategies of your competitors in the industry. It’s a crucial part of any successful business strategy. Typically, this includes things like:
- Competitor news or updates
- Marketing campaigns
- Strategic efforts, hires, or pivots
- Pricing strategies and changes
With competitor tracking, you can identify opportunities and create strategies to help you get ahead of the competition. You can use it to inform how your business can approach marketing, sales, and target audience competitively. With the right data, you can stay ahead of your competitors' efforts. Without it, you have no insight into where you are relative to your market whether that's ahead, behind, or middle of the pack.
Why You Should Be Tracking Your Competitors’ Email Marketing
No matter what industry you’re in, you should be tracking your competitors. Direct competitors are your most immediate threat as well as opportunity. Among other channels, you can use the competitor data you gather from monitoring their email marketing to find opportunities to improve your digital marketing efforts.
When you track your competitors’ email marketing tactics, you can monitor these factors to inform your content strategy.
- Solidify your value proposition
- Find essential benchmarks
- Get a bird’s eye view of the competitive landscape
- See the best days and times to send
- The most effective templates and designs
- Where your competition is missing the mark
- Subject lines and preview text
- Track which tools your competitors are using
How To Track Your Competitors’ Email Marketing
If you have dozens of emails from your competitors flooding your inbox every day. Let me introduce you to competitor email monitoring tools.
Our favorite is SendView, of course. You just add the companies you want to track to the tool. Then, use their auto-generated email address to sign up for their emails.
Once you’ve signed up, you can view your competitor’s emails in real-time. SendView’s built-in dashboard with KPIs, source code, DKIM/SPF, and more allows you to see actionable data all in one place. You can even create collections, tags, and filters to organize.
5 Strategies for Competitor Tracking in Email Marketing
Generally, the most effective competitive analyses are executed using the SWOT method. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Read our complete guide to competitor analysis to learn more.
There are four parts of your competitor’s emails that you can monitor to gain insights into both you and your competitor’s SWOTs. Read on to find out which ones you should focus on.
1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are a great place to start identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s easy to spot because they’re quantitatively measured. In SendView, you can view these on the company’s dashboard.
In email marketing, key performance indicators include data points like open rates, click-through rates, and revenue attributed to emails. You likely know this for your own emails, but there's no way to see this for your competitors without doing illegal things. So in the context of competitor tracking, the KPIs you may want to track are.
- Send Volume / Frequency: how often is each competitor sending email campaigns to their database and lists?
- Timing: what is their cadence around emails? Do they send on predictable days, hours, or even minutes?
- Spam Score & Authentication: This is tracking things like their Spam Score and whether they have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records set up for their domain.
All of these are available for each email you receive from your competitors in SendView.
2. Copy and Content
The copy and content of your emails may determine how persuasive they are and how enticing they are to open. The writing in your competitor’s emails can help you differentiate your voice, keep up with market trends, and what value they’re adding. You can also get a sense for their brand messaging and target audience.
Competitor’s content and copy includes the…
- body text
- images or graphics
- logos
- subject line text
- preview text
- emoji use
- calls to action (CTAs)
- image links vs text links
- number of images
3. Templates & Source Code
Believe it or not, design affects the effectiveness of your email marketing. With SendView, you can view the source code and templates that your competitors are using. You can also preview your competitors emails on mobile and send them to a service like Parcel for more advanced editing. Like what you see? Save time and alter the code they’ve already created! Or see where their weaknesses are.
These fun facts will make you think twice about skimping on email design.
- The human brain can recognize and absorb information from images in just 13 seconds.
- Over 61% of emails are opened on mobile devices. But desktops are still used 39% of the time. So, responsive design is essential to cater to your whole audience.
- Good email design encourages higher click-through rates. Learn about the Serial Position Effect to improve your email’s functionality.
- 93% of consumers are influenced by color and appearance when making a buying decision.
4. Split Test
One of the best things about SendView is that you can see more than just your competitor’s regular marketing emails. You can create multiple addresses for one company to view their abandoned cart, win back, and segmented email marketing. Each of these flows can be accessed separately from one another to see exactly how each competitor in your set handles automation sequences depending on where an email enters their database.
If you’re not already segmenting your audience or making efforts to have regularly scheduled, automated abandoned cart and win back emails, your competitor’s examples can be a great place to get ideas. Or, if you’re finding yours aren’t as successful as you want, take inspiration from others!
5. Scorecard Comparison
What is a competitor scorecard? It’s a synopsis of a business’s direct competitor used to analyze and compare marketing practices. It typically includes a detailed analysis of competitors’ products and services, pricing, market share, and customer base.
The scorecard also tracks the competitor's marketing strategies, such as advertising, email tactics, KPIs, pricing, and competitors’ product distribution. A competitor scorecard allows a business to identify areas of strength and weakness among its competitors at a glance.
An easy, side-by-side way to check out your competitor’s email marketing strategy is a quick scorecard analysis. You can find your competitors’ scorecards in the SendView competitor dashboard.
The Top 5 Competitor Tracking Tools
Competitor monitoring isn’t just for email. You can use competitor analysis tools in any aspect of your business’ digital marketing plan to maintain a competitive advantage. These are the best apps you can use to track your competitors.
1. Email Competitor Monitoring: SendView
With SendView, you can subscribe to your competitors emails without bloatign your own inbox. You'll get dashboards full of insights, trends, and opportunities. Streamline and simplify the way you monitor competitors for email marketing.
2. SEO Competitor Tracking: Ahrefs
Not only can you find a complete guide to improving your search engine optimization in Ahrefs, you can also, analyze your competitor’s keywords and backlinks. Plus, you can analyze competitor websites for keywords and domain rankings. They offer a powerful toolset for content marketing that’ll have you mastering SEO.
3. Social Media Competitor Analysis: Sociality
Want an automated social media competitor analysis report? Sociality can do that. Get hashtags, follower counts, best posting times, and more. Stop cluttering your social media feeds with competitors and use a separate app to gain actionable, data-based insights.
4. Influencer Marketing Tracker: Refersion
If you’re adding influencer, ambassador, or affiliate marketing to your stack of tactics, you’ll need a way to track those metrics. Refersion works with almost every e-commerce platform you could need.
5. Content Marketing Tool: Buzzsumo
If you’re in the market for an all-in-one tool, Buzzsumo might be right for you. It offers content monitoring, influencer collobaroation tools, and market research tools for content marketers.
6. General News & Updates: Google Alerts
This service is not only easy to use, it's also free. When Google crawls a new page that includes the text you specify - like the name of your competitors - it will let you know using their Alerts tool.
7. Visual Ping
One of the easiest ways to keep tabs on website design changes and updates, Visual Ping actually compares how their website (or specific pages on their website) look and then let you know when specific elements on your competitors' websites have been altered.
Start Tracking Your Competitors Now
Competitor tracking is something that every business needs to do. Yes, there are tools like SendView and the ones we mentioned above that help you do it faster or easier, but even if you do it manually it's something you should start doing ASAP.
I think about competitor monitoring like playing basketball. If you know that the team you're about to play loves to run a zone defence or set up a full court press, you can practice plays to overcome those tactics and have a better chance of winning the game. Likewise, if you study your competition you'll have a better chance or understanding their strengths and weaknesses and be able to built a strategy that counters those efforts and positions you well for success whether it's choosing the right price, making sure you're competing for visibility on key marketing channels, or updating your product to reflect market expectations influenced by your competitors.
Start simple - maybe it's nothing more than a quarterly check of each competitor's emails and website strategy - and build from there. The next time you have to make a strategic decisions, you'll have even more insight to guide those tactics.