It’s difficult to come up with a long-term email marketing plan that consistently increases revenue and yields a strong return on investment every quarter. It’s vital to test, adjust, edit, and freshen up your emails frequently to make sure your readers are still delighted.
Read More: spy on competitors emails
However, it’s quite simple to let your approach become outdated. When it comes to email marketing, the unfortunate reality is that what worked last year—or even last month—might not provide the same outcomes today.
And it can be depressing to try to maintain the same level of magic you once had with your email strategy even though you’re doing all the right things, like constantly adding new subscribers to your database, reaching out to your existing subscribers, testing subject lines, copy, and call to action, and generally trying your hardest.
Maintain Subscribers close, but rivals closer
The majority of people would argue that comparing email marketing strategy to military strategy is like comparing apples to bowling balls, save from the use of the word “strategy,” and they would be right.
But, there is some very real knowledge that can be applied to what email marketers do if you can set aside your skepticism for a little while and imagine that we’re genuinely really tough but also stoic, badass military generals:
Hold your enemies near, but your friends close.
The author of this quotation is a subject of significant discussion. Some attribute it to Sun Tzu, others to Machiavelli, and still others to Al Pacino’s portrayal of Michael Corleone in The Godfather II.
The underlying idea of this phrase, regardless of who said it, is that you can easily overcome someone if you can learn about them and comprehend their way of thinking. In a similar vein, you can outperform your rivals if you can see what steps they are taking to market to a similar audience to your own.
This aggressive approach to email marketing may really work wonders for keeping your plan innovative and enabling you to take advantage of concepts that you haven’t yet tested with your own audience.
UTILIZING THIS PLAN
In this comparison, your rivals and any other local or internet companies that sell comparable goods and/or services to yours are your “enemies.”
Here’s how to keep your rivals really close:
Select three or four rivals to “spy on.” Select rivals with businesses that are around the same size as yours. The more closely they resemble your company, the better.
Make three or four e-mail accounts. Use multiple IP addresses or web browsers if at all feasible, but always use the same email client (such as Gmail) for each.
Add every fake email address to the email lists of all of your rivals. We understand that it hurts. However, it’s an unavoidable evil if you want to sharpen your approach. Make sure to make distinct folders for every email marketing campaign that your rivals run.
Things to Look Out For
After doing this, you may begin compiling various observations from the marketing emails you get from your rivals and spot recurring patterns.
experimenting. Hopefully, at least one of your email addresses will receive an alternate version of a certain campaign, which is why you have numerous email addresses created: to monitor whether or not your rivals are A/B testing their emails. What exactly are they testing, if they are? Have you already conducted any comparable tests?
Makes offers. Keep an eye on any offers that appear to be coming from your rivals on a regular basis. These are the deals that suit them the most. They could possibly be employed by your company.
Headings and Body Text. For the subject lines and body copy of each competitor, maintain a different spreadsheet. You can definitely extrapolate language that seems to work for them in terms of conversions if you start to find any patterns.
Time, day of the week, and how often. Lastly, maintain a thorough log of the times and frequency of email marketing campaigns sent by your rivals.
This is one of the dirtiest, sneakiest, most underhanded schemes I’ve ever heard of. AND I ADORE IT.
As they say, all is fair when it comes to love and email marketing.
But really, you’re not paying attention if you don’t believe that big businesses are always investigating their rivals and even discussing one another’s ideas.
The aim is to start identifying patterns that may also be present in your own audience based on the behaviors of your rivals, which brings us to another crucial point to stress: copying ideas alone isn’t the goal here.
The fact is that copying copy or design will not benefit you in any way, even though you might be able to use some of these ideas in the framework of your brand voice.
The objective behind this technique is to become a worthy and competitive opponent with a strategy and, yes, a game plan to guarantee that their email marketing activities stay successful. It has nothing to do with cheating or malicious intent.
If you’ve noticed that your email marketing campaigns aren’t receiving as much reaction from your subscribers as you would have liked, give this a try. It’s possible that you overlooked something that your rivals saw. Furthermore, you never know when your rivals will start observing you.