Competitive email analytics is a critical practice for optimizing your email marketing strategy by benchmarking your performance against industry peers and identifying opportunities for improvement. By analyzing competitors' email tactics, frequency, content, and engagement metrics, you can gain valuable insights to refine your own email campaigns and boost subscriber engagement, conversions, and overall ROI. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key methods, tools, and best practices for conducting effective competitive email analysis.
Why Competitive Email Analytics Matters
In today's crowded inbox environment, standing out from the competition is more important than ever. Understanding how your email program compares to others in your industry allows you to:
- Identify gaps and opportunities in your email strategy
- Stay on top of industry trends and best practices
- Optimize email frequency, timing, and cadence
- Improve email design, content, and calls-to-action
- Boost subscriber engagement and conversion rates
Key Metrics to Benchmark Against Competitors
To effectively analyze competitor email performance, focus on tracking these core email metrics:
Engagement Metrics
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Click-to-open rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- Spam complaint rates
Campaign Metrics
- Email frequency
- Send volume
- A/B testing tactics
- List segmentation strategies
- Email content and design
By comparing your performance to industry benchmarks across these key metrics, you can quickly identify areas where you're excelling or falling behind.
The following diagram illustrates the core email metrics to benchmark and analyze in competitive intelligence:
How to Gather Competitive Email Data
Collecting data on competitors' email programs may seem daunting, but there are several effective methods and tools to streamline the process:
1. Subscribe to Competitor Emails
The simplest way to track competitor emails is to subscribe to their lists yourself. Create a separate email account and sign up for their newsletters, promotions, and any automated email sequences. This allows you to directly monitor their email content, frequency, and overall strategies.
Tips for subscribing to competitor emails:
- Sign up for emails on their main website, as well as any specific product, event, or blog subscription forms.
- Note any welcome series, onboarding, or lead nurturing sequences you receive.
- Track email frequency over time to identify patterns in their email cadence.
- Tag and categorize emails by type (newsletter, promotion, transactional, etc.) for easier analysis.
2. Use Competitive Intelligence Tools
While manual tracking is a good starting point, investing in email competitive intelligence tools can provide more robust data and insights. Some popular options include:
| Tool | Key Features | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Owletter |
|
Plans start at $19/month |
| MailCharts |
|
Plans start at $99/month |
| Mailboxinsights |
|
Contact for pricing |
Investing in a competitive intelligence tool streamlines the data collection process and provides more actionable insights than manual tracking alone.
The following diagram shows how competitive intelligence tools aggregate email data from multiple competitor sources for centralized analysis:
Analyzing Competitor Email Content and Design
Analyzing the content and design of competitor emails provides valuable insights into their overall email strategy and helps spark ideas for your own campaigns. Key elements to evaluate include:
Subject Lines and Preheaders
- What tone and messaging do they use to entice opens?
- How do they balance clarity and curiosity?
- Do they personalize with recipient names or localization?
- What preheader text do they pair with subject lines?
Email Design and Layout
- How do they structure email content? (single column, multi-column, etc.)
- What colors, fonts, and visual branding do they use?
- How do they balance text and images?
- Are emails mobile responsive?
Messaging and Calls-to-Action
- What is the primary goal of each email? (drive traffic, convert a sale, build engagement, etc.)
- How do they use personalization and segmentation?
- What incentives or offers do they use?
- How prominent and frequent are CTAs?
Putting Content Analysis Into Action
Once you've analyzed competitor email content, identify opportunities to improve your own campaigns:
If competitors are using personalization, emojis, or power words you're not, run an A/B test to see if those tactics boost your open rates as well.
Do your email templates look outdated compared to competitors? Work with designers to give your templates a facelift inspired by cutting-edge designs.
If competitors are sending highly targeted emails based on subscriber data, evaluate how you can collect and use more data for personalization.
Evaluating Competitor Email Frequency and Timing
How often your competitors send emails and when they send them can have a big impact on subscriber engagement. Tactics to analyze include:
Email Frequency
- What is their average email cadence? (daily, 2-3x/week, weekly, etc.)
- Do they adjust frequency based on engagement levels?
- How do they ramp up campaigns around key events or promotions?
Send Day and Time
- On which days of the week do they most frequently send?
- What times of day do their emails hit the inbox?
- Do they use time zone segmentation?
Automated Email Triggers
- What actions or subscriber behaviors trigger automated emails?
- How quickly are triggered emails sent after an action?
- What types of automated campaigns do they use? (cart abandonment, post-purchase, re-engagement, etc.)
Case Study: Optimizing Email Frequency at NaturalWay Foods
NaturalWay Foods, an organic meal delivery service, was experiencing declining open and click-through rates on their email campaigns. By analyzing competitor email frequency, they discovered:
- Top competitors sent emails 2-3 times per week on average, compared to NaturalWay's 4-5 weekly emails.
- Competitors had higher engagement for emails sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- Targeted campaigns around holidays and seasonal promotions generated the highest open and conversion rates.
Based on these insights, NaturalWay made the following optimizations:
| Change | Results |
|---|---|
| Reduced email frequency from 5x/week to 3x/week | 23% increase in unique open rates |
| Concentrated promotions around key seasonal events | 18% increase in conversion rates during promotions |
| Moved primary campaign send day to Tuesdays | 14% increase in click-through rates |
By aligning their email frequency and timing to industry benchmarks, NaturalWay was able to significantly improve subscriber engagement and conversions.
The following diagram illustrates how to use competitive insights to optimize your email frequency and timing:
Tracking Competitor Email Metrics Over Time
Competitive email analysis is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process. Regularly monitoring changes in your competitors' tactics and performance allows you to proactively adapt your own email strategy.
Benchmark Historical Performance
Before tracking ongoing metrics, collect historical data to establish performance benchmarks:
- Gather 3-6 months of past email data from your competitive intelligence tool
- Calculate average metrics like send frequency, open rate, and click rate over that time period
- Identify any major outliers or performance spikes related to key events or promotions
- Compare your own metrics to competitor benchmarks to gauge relative performance
Monitor Changes Over Time
Once you've established historical benchmarks, implement a system for tracking changes on a monthly or quarterly basis. This allows you to:
- Identify upward or downward trends in competitor engagement rates
- Correlate changes in metrics to changes in email tactics
- Stay on top of new email designs, personalization strategies, automation sequences, etc.
- Proactively implement new best practices or run A/B tests based on competitor learnings
Example Metrics Dashboard
Use data visualization tools like Tableau or Google Data Studio to create a centralized dashboard comparing your metrics to competitors over time:
This visualization makes it easy to spot areas where you're excelling or falling behind so you can dig deeper into the "why" behind metric changes.
The following diagram outlines the process of benchmarking, tracking, and acting on changes in competitor email metrics over time:
Conclusion and Next Steps
Competitive email analysis is