Your company can use these competitors as role models for your email marketing. Ten Thousand, as an example, sends a 10-percent-off coupon code with the first message in its welcome series. For example, what percentage of subject lines includes a discount offer? Don’t copy subject lines directly, but adapt the ideas to your business. Then test those subject lines for the best open rate. Subject lines will get your audience to open an email, but it is the copy in the body that will convert them. The first words in the Ten Thousand welcome email focus on differentiating the gear: “We do training gear differently. The company now uses that offer regularly. Some successful online retailers send five or more email marketing messages every week. As with everything on this list, adapt these trends and patterns to your own email marketing.
Email marketing provides a strong return on investment, requires very little money, and helps even fledgling companies drive sales.
The question, then, for most businesses is not whether they should use email marketing, but how. One strategy is to monitor successful competitors.
Finding Competitors
An online fitness-clothing retailer, as an example, should be able to find successful competitors. A few that come to mind are Nike, Under Armour, Rogue, Gymshark, and Ten Thousand.
Similarly, there are probably five or six high-performing businesses in your industry. Your company can use these competitors as role models for your email marketing.
The competitors may have spent thousands of dollars on email marketing agencies and consumer research. While you cannot read their survey results and study data, you can see how they use email marketing, emulating them when it makes sense.
Subscribe
Make a list of the competitors you want to monitor. Here, again, is a possible list for an online fitness-clothing retailer.
- Nike
- Under Armour
- Rogue
- Gymshark
- Ten Thousand
Next, create three email addresses. You might even associate these addresses with different shopper personas. Using different computers, IP addresses, or at least different web browsers, subscribe to each competitor’s mailing list with each of your three email addresses.
If possible, consolidate all of the incoming email marketing messages into a single email client, and filter each competitor’s emails into a separate folder.
The point of three email accounts is that some of these competitors may be using A/B or multivariate testing. While having multiple accounts does not guarantee that you will see each version of an email campaign, it increases your chances of discovering what is being tested.
What follows are five things we can learn from competitors about email marketing.
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