What is the best way to research and analyze your email marketing audience and competitors?

1 Step 1: Define your email marketing goals and metrics

Before you start researching your audience and competitors, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your email marketing and how you will measure your success. For example, do you want to increase your open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, or revenue per email? Do you want to build trust, loyalty, or advocacy among your subscribers? Do you want to segment your list, personalize your messages, or test different variations? Depending on your goals and metrics, you will need to focus on different aspects of your audience and competitors.

2 Step 2: Identify and profile your email marketing audience

To write engaging and relevant email copy, it's essential to understand your audience. You can use various sources and methods to collect data about your subscribers, such as your email service provider, website analytics, customer relationship management system, surveys and feedback forms, and social media platforms. This data can help you create buyer personas that represent your ideal email subscribers – including details such as name, age, gender, location, occupation, income, education, goals, challenges, pain points, needs, desires, interests, hobbies, values, beliefs, attitudes, behavior, preferences, habits, expectations and media consumption. With these buyer personas in mind you can tailor your email copy to your audience's needs and interests and send targeted and personalized messages.

3 Step 3: Research and analyze your email marketing competitors

To write effective email copy, you must be aware of what your competitors are doing and how you can stand out from them. To research and analyze your email marketing competitors, consider signing up for their email lists to gain insight into the types of emails they send, their subject lines, content, calls to action, and design. You can also use email analysis tools to compare your competitors' performance metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints. Competitive intelligence tools can help you monitor your competitors' strategies, campaigns, offers, and promotions. Content analysis tools can help you evaluate your competitors' copy in terms of tone, voice, style, keywords, etc. This research will enable you to identify your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, best practices and mistakes, and gaps and niches. Ultimately, this information will help you improve your email copy and optimize performance while creating a unique value proposition for your audience.

4 Step 4: Test and refine your email marketing copy

The final step to research and analyze your email marketing audience and competitors is to test and refine your email copy based on the data and insights you have gathered. You can use A/B testing or split testing to compare different versions of your email copy elements, such as subject lines, headlines, images, buttons, etc., and see which one performs better in terms of your goals and metrics. Additionally, multivariate testing or MVT testing can help you test multiple combinations of your email copy elements at once. Heatmap analysis or eye-tracking analysis can be used to observe how subscribers view and interact with your email copy elements. Additionally, copywriting formulas or frameworks can assist in structuring and writing your email copy based on proven principles and techniques like AIDA and PAS. By using these methods and tools, you can optimize your email copy, increase engagement, and achieve your email marketing goals.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?