Since the beginning of commerce, organizations have needed and sought information about their competitors. Decades before digital marketing, competitors bought and dismantled each other’s products, collected and analyzed print and broadcast advertisements, subscribed to direct mail, shopped in stores, and surveyed their customers. was

If understanding your customers is a central principle of marketing management, understanding your competitors is also important. Within legal and ethical boundaries, this is a perfectly legitimate endeavor and essential to competitive success.

The overall point of the process is to identify competitive successes, gaps, opportunities, and potential for possible improvements or other actions.

Marketing email is fertile ground for demonstrating the need for competitive intelligence and providing its delivery vehicle. However, common methods of gathering information about competitor emails, such as signing up for newsletters or using industry-average benchmark reports, do not provide complete visibility.

Here are some of the insights we hope to glean from a robust competitive intelligence strategy.

1. Competitor’s overall email audience size

This is important as it reveals the number of potential customer impressions. It may also reveal poor performance compared to competitors of comparable size and market footprint.

Perform subscriber acquisition and list health audits to address it. Focus on audience retention and development opportunities.

2. Number, type and timing of campaigns emailed by each competitor

Such Intel provides critical knowledge of the scope, nature and timing of competing email programming and provides visibility into strategic customer journeys. It also identifies program gaps and opportunities.

Use these insights to plan your own events and campaigns. This is also useful for on-send testing and optimization strategies.

3. Audience size for each campaign

This provides key knowledge about the reach and segmentation of your competitors’ campaigns to support your targeting estimates.

Again, this should help you plan your own events and campaigns. Are you segmenting your audience enough? Are you running enough campaigns per segment, or too many?

4. How to target your email campaigns

This suggests a degree of sophistication in audience selection, and is especially meaningful for relatively large numbers of deployed campaigns against relatively small amounts of submissions.

Having this kind of information supports advanced segmentation, targeting and personalization.

Evidence that email campaigns are more sophisticated than your own Email campaigns Leveraging competitor intelligence not only inspires, but also creates a compelling argument for more resources in your email team There is a possibility.

5. How often email campaigns reach each subscriber

This reflects competing contact strategies. A number that is too high risks retention, while a number that is too low suggests an opportunity to enhance communication.

Contact frequency testing and optimization can address this. Segment your database and try different send times and frequencies for each group. For example, which emails get more engagement, once a day or three times a week?

6. Find out if your competitors have better reach and engagement than yours

Your inbox is greatly fueled by improved message relevance and subscriber engagement. It also helps document the business/financial benefits of inbox, audience, and message optimization.

This information can lead to important diagnostics/best practice audits for your campaigns, help you plan your programs and audiences, and ensure the right people get the right message.

7. Competitor subject line structure

Subject lines can affect deliverability and are the most important tactic in driving opens (opens can’t always be measured accurately). This type of information also reveals details about subject line development and practices (e.g. wording, length, use of symbols) related to inbox performance and engagement.

Test your own subject lines and offers based on these competitive insights. Don’t forget the strategic preheader text too.

8. Other senders’ audiences overlap with yours

This reveals other mailers competing for your attention and product sales in your subscribers’ inboxes. The best of them will get better engagement.It also provides an interest profile of your email subscribers.

Tailor your mailings to match (or exceed!) the quality and sophistication of competing mailers. Leverage overlap to acquire and engage new audiences and possible strategic partnerships.

These are powerful ways in which you can leverage competitive intelligence. Insights and actions supported by robust competitive intelligence have direct financial impact, including measurable increases in inbox rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and average order value. Businesses that have and use robust email competitive intelligence can increase their email revenue by as much as 3x. Think about the impact these multiples could have if you monetize your email and not use competitive information.

Interested in hearing major global brands speak directly on subjects like this? Find out more from the Digital Marketing World Forum (#DMWF) Europe, London, North America and Singapore.

tag: email, email intelligence