Competitor Email Marketing Analysis: A Complete Guide

If you’ve ever watched a sports movie, you’ll probably remember the team sitting down to analyze their opponent before a big game. The coaches spend hours watching tape from previous games to find their weaknesses which, in turn, become their opportunities.

This is how they strategize to win. In email marketing, we call this competitor analysis. The definition of competitor analysis is the practice of gaining insight from competitors’ efforts. In this case, we’re talking about their email campaigns. This has historically been a hard nut to crack because most email tools like Gmail or Outlook are designed for reading emails, not analyzing them. While we've spent the last decade building a powerful solution to competitor email monitoring called SendView, you also need to understand the hows and whys to see the value of doing these analyses.

Simply put, no matter what stage your business is in, conducting a competitive analysis can help you gain a marketing edge over your competition. In this complete guide to email marketing competitor analysis, you’ll identify your competitors, understand their email marketing tactics, and map out your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.

What is a competitor email marketing analysis? 

A competitor email marketing analysis is the process of analyzing your competitors' email strategy, comparing it to your own and industry best practices, and looking for opportunities. Again, if you spot a weakness in something they are doing and you're competing for the same audience in the same market, this could mean an opportunity for you.

There are primarily eight key areas you'll want to analyze when looking at your competitors' email behavior.

1. Email frequency

Look at the number of emails sent per week or month Are competitors sending campaigns more or less frequently now than they were before? Are they ramping up or down at certain times of year? How about around Black Friday? Or seasonal shifts in your industry?

2. Send timing

Next, look at the days and times emails arrive. Are there patterns in when campaigns are sent? Do they always send emails at the same time of day or day of week? Or both? When are they not sending emails when you might have an opportunity to have the market's attention all to yourself?

3. Subject lines

Length, language, personalization, emojis, and how they pair those subject lines with preview text are all things you'll want to look at. What wording, promotions, angles, and concepts are your competitors using to get attention in the inbox?

4. Email content

Are your competitors primarily sending promotions? Educational content? Announcements? Newsletters? What is the mix between these buckets? What topics and offers dominate their messaging? What topics are they not hitting?

5. Design

Spend some time studying their templates, imagery, layout, and branding. Are there common design approaches or opportunities to stand out? Are their emails accessible? Are they optimized for dark mode? Do they break on mobile?

6. Calls to action

Now take a look at CTA language, where they place their CTAs, and the links associated with each. This is where you'll want to go outside of the inbox to study the full flow from email to final destination. What actions are competitors trying to encourage and how do those compare to yours?

7. Technology

Dig a little deeper and figure out which ESP they're using, how many different sending domains emails are coming from, and email authentication like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. What platforms and infrastructure are they using beyond the ESP for additional tracking?

8. Deliverability

Speaking of domain signing, check their emails' spam scores and sending practices Are there technical differences worth investigating that may give you the opportunity to reach the inbox while they are more likely to land in spam?

9. Campaign strategy

How about how those tactics change during the year. Are they running seasonal email campaigns, product launches, automated emails? Sign up for their emails a few different ways and see whether their automations are segmented by entry point. What larger marketing priorities and cycles throughout the year can you identify?

What should you do with the things you discover during your competitor email analysis?

This is where the rubber meets the road. Let's share 5 quick examples of things you might discover and how you might capitalize on each opportunity.

1. No Emails Sent on Weekends

Let's say you've done a day-of-week analysis on your competitors' email behavior and noticed that they never send a single email between Friday and Sunday. If you're competing for the attention of largely the same people in the same market, this is a perfect opportunity to have the market's attention all to yourself. Weekends may mean different things to different audiences, so find creative ways to both deliver value to the subscriber as well as your company by designing campaigns build for these quieter days.

2. Creative Promotional Tactic

Perhaps you're digging into your competitors' emails and you notice that they've come up with a really clever way to package their offers. There is no such thing as a marketing team that will come up with every idea possible, so don't feel back about tipping your hat to your competitors and borrowing some of their ideas for your own campaign. If it works for them, it will probably work for you. Don't just copy/paste, try to tease out the principles and concepts behind the scenes and apply them to your own brand and upcoming brainstorming sessions.

3. Poorly Rendering Emails on Mobile

What if you're previewing some of their emails on mobile when you notice that, yikes, they break very easily or, even worse, aren't even responsive. This is a perfect opportunity to take a little extra time to ensure your emails look fantastic on mobile and everything is easy to read and click. Given the number of emails that are opened on phones these days, having a campaign from you and a campaign from your competitor in their inbox around the same time will leave them with a stronger impression of your brand and a higher likelihood they'll act on yours.

4. Emails at the Same Time, Same Day

Speaking of which, maybe the pattern you spot is that they send a promotional email at the same time and same day every week or month. If you have largely overlapping audiences, this is a perfect chance to get into the inbox ahead of them. This may be especially important for online retail where there are only so many discretionary dollars to go around. If you can get them to open your wallet simply by being first in their inbox, there may be nothing left in that wallet for your competitors.

5. Visual Inspiration

If nothing else, watching your competitors emails can fill your teams brain with lots of great ideas for your own campaigns. Maybe it's a clever GIF that caught your eye or a design style that didn't. Pay attention to the things that stand out to you and, maybe, you'll identify things that will stand out to your customers. Layouts, use of colors, responsive elements, interactions, landing pages, and header/footer styles are all things that can always use a little bit of fresh thinking.

Which competitors' emails should you track?

This seems like an obvious question to answer, but think about this in two ways because there are great opportunities and lessons you can learn from both.

Direct Competitors

You probably have 3-5 key, direct competitors.A direct competitor is someone who provides roughly same product or service as yours. This would be brands like Hoka and Altra who both sell trail running shoes or Ford and Chevy who both sell pickup trucks. It goes without saying that you want to ensure you're tracking all of your direct competitors.

Indirect Competitors

But there's another group to consider: indirect competitors. An indirect competitor offers a product or service similar to yours but maybe doesn't solve the same problem for the same audience. From this group, you may want to focus on tracking the top performers for a source of inspiration. The audience they're talking to may be slightly different, but because it's in the same ballpark as your efforts any lessons, tools, or tactics you spot will be very likely to transfer to your own.

How many competitors should I track?

Between those two competitor types, most brands will end up tracking 7-10 different competitors as part of a thorough, insightful competitor analysis. Some will have more (I once worked for a company in the time clock software space with nearly 15 competitors) and some will have fewer than that (my first job out of collect was for a company with just 2 competitors). You know your company best so make a list of who you feel makes the most sense. 

How to do an email marketing competitor analysis

Here are five basic steps you can take today to start analyzing your competitors’ email marketing and create a marketing strategy based on what you learn.

Step 1: Make a list of competitors

As we mentioned in the last section, take a second to make a quick list of competitors. This is something that AI can be very helpful with in case there are some up-and-coming brands that aren't on your radar yet. Almost every time we help someone with a competitor analysis we spot a new name. These are ideal to watch because they'll often be the more aggressive in the market and creative as they work to grab market share.

Step 2: Use SendView to sign up for their newsletters

SendView is a tool that helps you answers all of the questions we've talked about in this guide automatically. Think of it like an email inbox designed for analyzing competitor emails instead of just reading those emails. Here are the basic steps to get started:

1. Sign up for SendView (every account comes with a free trial)
2. Add the companies you want to track to your account.
3. SendView will generate a special tracking email address for each one. 
4. Then use that address (instead of your own) to sign up for their emails.
5. Monitor the dashboards full of insights, trends, and opportunities.

Step 3: Analyze Key Elements

Once you’ve set up your SendView inbox, you can analyze the key elements of your competitor’s email strategy. Since companies send emails at regular cadences, you may have to conduct your analysis over time or wait until you have a full inbox if you’d rather do it all at once. 

You can use a marketing tool like SendView to look at the emails your competitors are sending. Here are the key elements you should analyze in your competitors’ emails. 

• Email design: Are they using email templates or creating custom designs?
• Email content: Check out their images, copywriting, etc. 
• Calls-to-action (CTAs): How compelling are their calls to action? 
• Subject lines: Are their subject lines effective? 
• Mobile friendly: Is the email designed to be responsive? 62% of users open their emails on mobile.
• Cadence: How frequently are your competitors sending emails?
• Landing pages: Are their CTAs sending subscribers to landing pages?  

You can also use SendView to monitor competitors’ emails and get in-depth analyses that can help you strategize more than just your email’s content. Check out these technical insights too.

• Email Service Provider (ESP)
• Spam Score
• Links
• Source Code
• Word Clouds
• Content Calendar
• Send times and days
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and ​​Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

You can even experiment with SendView to see cart abandonment emails, receive both versions of their A/B testing, and get insights into how their tactics, timing, and content varies between those entry points. As you analyze your competitors' emails side-by-side, may even notice that they use one ESP for normal emails and a different ESP or tool for abandoned cart, promotions, or confirmations.

Step 4: Strategize

Now that you have a lay of the land, it’s time to strategize. Let’s create some goals and marketing tactics to effectively reach those goals. 

As you track the key factors above, notice… 

• Which designs and templates will suit your brand
• If there may be a better time or day to send your emails
• How you might speak to your target audience
• If there may be a better ESP for your efforts

• How you could structure your content calendar to better compete
• Which CTAs, subject lines, copy, and other content caught your eye
• How you might be able to optimize your efforts like mobile optimization

Then, create a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Using your list of your competitors and their emails, ask yourself the following questions. 

• What are my competitors’ strengths? What are they doing right? 
• What are my competitors’ weaknesses, and where could they improve?
• How can I use this knowledge to improve my own efforts? 
• Are my efforts in jeopardy in any way? 

From these answers, you can begin to formulate a plan. To create a new strategy, you’ll need to define the following.

1. New goals and key metrics for this strategy
2. Aspects of your email strategy that you want to change to reach those goals
3. Marketing tactics you’ll use to accomplish those changes and goals

Step 5: Test

Competitor analysis is all about finding out what everyone else is doing. But it’s essential that you remember: what works for your competitors might not work for your brand. 

You can analyze and strategize as much as you want. The only way to truly optimize your email marketing efforts is through testing. A/B testing in email marketing campaigns is simply splitting a segment in half. When you’re testing, you’ll send one version of your email to one half and a different version to the other half. Then, analyze the metrics when they roll in.  

A shocking 39% of brands don’t test their broadcast or segmented emails. You could have a distinct advantage over 39% of your competitors if you test. Testing reveals what works and what doesn’t so you can cater to your audience. So, once you implement your strategy, test it out! A/B testing is simple and effective with most ESPs. 

Don’t underestimate it; small changes can make a difference. You can use your competitor analysis as inspiration for the changes you might want to test. 

Try A/B testing these email marketing campaign attributes.

• Subject Lines
• CTAs
• Design elements like spacing or button positioning
• Content like images, gifs, and copy
• Send times and cadences
• Sender email
• Segmenting your email lists

Email marketing competitor analysis from start to finish

That’s the full guide! It's not hard too improve your email marketing strategy with the help of insights from your competitors, but you've gotta start now.

Here it is one more time from start to finish. 

1. Determine your competitors 
2. Use SendView to see their emails
3. Analyze their emails and marketing tactics
4. Create a strategy
5. Test your strategy

What's important to keep in mind about any competitor analysis project, but especially when analyzing your competitors' emails, is that you have to have a way to not just read their emails, but explore those emails. You need an interface that's designed to tease out the tactics and trends that simply aren't visible within inboxes like Gmail or Outlook.

In other words, subscribing to your competitors' emails isn't enough. Almost all marketers at some point have subscriber to other companies' emails with the hope of keeping an eye on them. The problem is that inboxes aren't designed to let you analyze the contents. They're only designed to help you read them.

So if you want to do a true, full email marketing competitor analysis effort for your company? You need a tool like SendView.