The fastest way to optimizing your email campaigns is by monitoring and learning from successful competitors’ strategies. The task is an easy one; it only takes a couple of minutes to subscribe. Note the word “successful.” Monitoring each and every same-industry business’ campaign is neither necessary nor insightful. The best way to get started is by selecting a couple of industry leaders.
If you don’t know who your competitors are, remember that Google is your friend. Even a basic search will provide you with immediate insights and some advanced search will give you an accurate idea of who the best of the best are. Once you know that, research their websites and social media channels. Don’t do it superficially! Everything matters — from content to SEO optimization to Google Ads to Facebook targeting to backlinks to traffic sources.
Applying best practices used by successful competitors will shorten the path to your desired results.
Optimize Your Email Campaign through Monitoring
“Monitoring,” perhaps, isn’t the best choice of words, but it is certainly accurate. There are two basic strategies that will help you learn volumes about how successful businesses master their email campaigns: newsletters and account messages.
Newsletters
The importance of newsletters is known even to those not “in the know,” so let’s skip to the point. The purpose of newsletters is twofold: to keep customers informed about upcoming deals, sales, promotions and similar and to keep them engaged. Often overlooked, the latter is equally important as the first, if indeed not even more so.
Best newsletters manage to keep customers reading and wondering what is to come next. As a rule, they include multiple points of interest, such as motivational messages, personalized recommendations and educational content. A call to action is an unavoidable part of newsletters, and it needs to be more creative than “click here to get this or that.” Compare multiple calls to action coming from experts in the field and learn best practices.
Account Emails
Account emails comprise various notifications but also include info on upcoming deals, account updates, changes to the terms and conditions, etc. They are directed at interacting with customers and are, as such, equally important as newsletters.
Now, what happens with hesitant customers and how can email campaigns propel them to action? Successful businesses have a trick or two up their sleeve and you should certainly learn the art from them. For art it truly is.
The fastest way to gain the insights is to log in to your account, choose an article (or more than one) and then abandon your cart. See what happens next and how fast it happens. Cart reminders are usually the first emails to reach your inbox. Advanced strategies also follow up with special offers or personalized recommendations. Remember the golden rule: every customer counts! If there is any way to keep that one hesitant customer, it’s worth the effort.
Sometimes the reason why people give up a purchase have nothing to do with the deal itself. Maybe the purchase process has too many steps or payment options aren’t satisfactory. Combine competition email monitoring with other marketing tools to determine the issue.
Competitor Email Insights
Personalized Emails
Personalized emails are what sets your business apart from others. Incredulously enough, many companies fail to implement personalization to their loss. That is the first lesson to learn from experts.
Monitor Trends
The second thing to monitor is the actual trend. Trends change quite often, but some are more persistent than others. Those that are tend to evolve rather than disappear. In lieu of that, use insights from competitors’ campaigns to identify best products and deals and customize them to suit your needs. A little reminder, though: monitor product prices at all times in order to remain competitive at all times.
Drive Conversions
The next task would be to identify how competitors drive conversions. Are their calls to action unbeatable? Is there a stellar strategy for converting website visitors to subscribers? Are testimonials used to inspire new purchases? Do they offer special deals for multiple purchases? Are they using promotions? Those and many additional questions will help you come up with the best combination of offers for your business.
Content
Further out, there’s that magic word called “content.” It isn’t only web content and web copy; it also comprises killer newsletters, copywriting and compelling ads. Did we mention calls to action? The best of those are a branch in itself.
Segmentation
Finally, let us not forget segmentation. Coupled with targeting, it is the single most important strategy to make or break a business. Observe how your competitors do it and learn from them.
Last but not least, master the art of writing concise yet compelling messages following state-of-the-art subject lines. Remember that subject lines are the first thing recipients see. Based on its contents, they decide the fate of your offer. Will it be flagged as spam? Deleted? Disregarded? Opened? Opened and read? Read and clicked through? Most successful businesses have mastered the trick in attracting recipients’ attention with subject lines that address their curiosity, urgent needs and hidden desires.
As you can see, there is lots more to learn from successful competitors. Why not grab the opportunity with both hands when it is easy, fast and convenient?
This post is courtesy of Emily Simmons, creative author and guest blogger.
