Knowledge is power & knowing what your competitors are doing is one of the best ways to stay ahead of competition as far as email marketing goes.
Next step? Going all out to learn who your competitors are, what they do with respect to email marketing, understanding their tactics and strategies, and using what you know to your advantage.
Primarily, focus on some of these broad questions:
- When it comes to email marketing (the arena), how do you identify who your competitors are?
- What email marketing platforms do they use? What integrations are they using?
- How are your competitors using email marketing (the way they do!).
- Understand how their email marketing strategies are working (and what you could do better or learn from them)
- Benchmark your e-commerce marketing results against your competition, industry averages, or beat them all.
- Find gaps in your own email marketing strategy.
Once you get a bird’s eye-view of your competitors, here’s how you dig in and get ready with a powerful email marketing competitive benchmarking strategy.
Identify Your Competitors (your competitive landscape)
As far as competitive benchmarking goes, the industry vertical or the e-commerce product category you are in isn’t the only category you’d look out for -- in terms of who your competitors are.
This is certainly where you start, though.
Learn what “all” e-commerce stores do (across categories, niches, and verticals). Here are some quick and broad ways to quickly find out the players in the arena:
- Google Search: Use the keywords your potential customers might use (from their point of view) on Google and quickly look out for Google Shopping ads, organic search results, map listings, and regular Google ads (your competitors are paying for getting found in search for the keywords critical to your business)
- Social Search: Random searches (for relevant keywords) within social networks (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc) will also reveal what your likely competitors are doing, thanks to the social search graph. Videos showing up? Video ads maybe? What does it look like on Instagram and Facebook?
Note that you still might not be able to drill down and peek behind the curtains to actually get insights on email marketing strategies (as these most likely won’t show up on search results).
This step is to find out who your competitors are generally speaking. In the next few steps, we’ll open up our tool kit and get deeper.
Identify Products & Differentiation
While you are casually looking out for competitors and their general presence on search results, social searches, and their overall digital footprint, it’s also important to look out for the following:
- Products: Product bundles, Product categories, product clusters, and product grouping: Who’s selling what, and how?
- Product pricing: You’ll take your time to find your pricing, but you’ll learn a lot on how to (or how “not to”) price your products.
- Product positioning: lots of businesses sell widgets. But how exactly are your competitors positioning these widgets? Do you see just the products being sold or do you notice product bundles, product pricing differences, and more?
- Differentiation & USP: Look out for any signs of differentiation and unique selling propositions (even if you sell exactly the same product that your competitors sell). Same products, different approaches? Do you see some deviant approaches (In general) such as adding a layer of service to products? Or maybe a subscription option for products?
Identify Acquisition Channels Competitors Rely On
Just as you’d always know and be aware of the various customer acquisition channels your business depends on to get new customers, it’d only make sense to get an idea as to what your competitors depend on for client acquisition.
Knowing this ensures that you have no blind spots and that you don’t miss out on potentially rewarding channels and pathways you might just miss.
What are the different ways your competitors use to acquire customers? Is it organic content marketing (including blogging, using content assets (a.k.a lead magnets) for new customer acquisition? Paid advertising? Social Media? Influencer marketing? Forum marketing?
You’d even want to drill down and go deep with each of the broad channels above: Within paid ads, for instance, what type of ads seem to work? Within Google Ads itself, is it banner ads? Gmail ads? YouTube Ads? Regular search ads?
See where we are going with this?
Identify Communication Positions on Marketing
With email marketing specifically, you’d want to look out for how your competitors use email marketing: broadcasts (or one-off messages they use, automations, tools they use, email design, subject lines, email frequency, and more).
Understand which audience they’re engaging with, how they segment their customers, and the specific email content deployed.
You only need one single tool to perform all of the above tasks quickly, effectively, and easily: sign up with Panoramata.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how your competitors position themselves with their products, it’s time to learn, get inspired, and execute your own email marketing campaigns.
Benchmark Performance vs That Of Your Competitors
Benchmarking intelligence is virtually impossible without competitor intelligence benchmarking tools. For broader aspects of competitive intelligence, you certainly have tools such as BuiltWith, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Semrush -- each performing various functions (often with some degree of overlap).
This is on top of many social monitoring tools, web aggregators that list and summarize your competitors for you.
For email marketing, you should use Panoramata.
You'll be able to get inspiration (across verticals and industries), benchmarking data. In addition to core email inspiration lists, brand lists, you also get a broad brush of other benefits -- such as ads, creatives, landing pages, SMS campaigns, website change snapshots, and more.
Adapt & Improve your Strategy Every Quarter
With email marketing (and in general for all marketing), there’s never a chance for “set it and forget it” mode.
Email marketing success comes not just with the “size” of the email list or the chutzpah your email campaigns have but also constant adaptation, tweaking, and testing.
Testing email campaigns, in fact, has the best ROI (return on investment) as long as you have a dependable size of samples for testing.
Email marketing competitor search and benchmarking is an ongoing job. So is creating new campaigns, testing existing campaigns, and to make your email campaigns work to further your goals.
How do you do email competitive intelligence? What tools do you use for email marketing competitor analysis?
