In the cutthroat world of digital marketing, knowing your rivals’ strategies can be the key to success. Email marketing remains an effective method of engaging with consumers, increasing conversions, and building brand loyalty. If you want to improve your own email marketing strategies, acquire more opens, and maximise your ROI, you need to learn how to eavesdrop on your rivals. This article will give you a leg up in 2025 by providing a thorough and ethical method for evaluating the SEO-optimized email marketing methods of your rivals.
Why Spy on Your Competitors’ Email Marketing Strategy?
In order to keep tabs on your rivals’ email marketing campaign, it is not immoral to hack or steal data. To the contrary, it implies doing a legally and morally sound analysis of their publicly accessible email marketing to determine its efficacy. You may compare your results, find fresh ideas, and avoid their blunders by learning about their strategies—subject lines, content style, and email frequency. You may benefit from this procedure:
Maximise the number of people who open and click on your emails.
Locate content or designs that are popular.
Optimise the timing and frequency of your email communications.
Let others know when your approach falls short.
Gathering ethical, useful data to bolster your marketing can be possible with the correct tools and approaches. By following these seven practical methods, you can keep tabs on how your rivals are using email marketing.
Step 1: Identify Your Key Competitors
Before you can examine their email marketing, you need to identify your competitors. Focus on companies that are a good match for your sector, who want to reach a similar demographic, or who provide comparable goods and services.
How to Find Competitors:
Try searching Google for terms like “[your industry] email marketing” to find companies that already provide this service.
Investigate competitor websites for subscription forms.
On X and similar social media platforms, look for businesses that are actively interacting with your demographic.
Optimising your search exposure with similar keywords such as “competitor email marketing analysis” might be helpful.
To narrow your target, jot down three or five of your immediate rivals who are actively engaging in email marketing.
Step 2: Subscribe to Their Email Lists
Getting on your rivals’ mailing lists is the quickest method to keep tabs on their email marketing tactics. As a result, you may immediately begin receiving their automated sequences, newsletters, and promotional emails.
Best Practices:
Maintain a clutter-free primary inbox by creating a secondary email account.
Sign up for their newsletters by using the registration forms found on websites that compete with them.
Lead magnets may be webinars, eBooks, etc., and can be used to launch automated email campaigns.
What to Look For:
Of the email extending a warm welcome to you.
Your email frequency (daily, weekly, etc.).
A deluge of emails of promotional, instructional, and commercial character.
Subscribing would provide you access to further information on their email marketing strategies, such as CTAs and subject lines.
Step 3: Analyze Subject Lines and Open Rates
Reading the subject lines of competing emails may give you a good idea of what people find interesting, as subject lines have a significant impact on open rates. You may still benefit from their style and consistency even if you don’t have direct access to their open rate data.
How to Analyze:
Keep an eye on subject lines over time to see trends like personalisation, emoji use, and urgency.
Keep an eye out for instances when they use keywords, figures, or phrases to emphasise benefits (such as “Save 20% Today” instead of “Exclusive Offer for You”).
Evaluate your own open rates with the help of Yesware or Mailtrack.
To narrow your search, try using terms like “competitor email subject line analysis” into the query.
Try using personalised subject lines in your ads to see if they increase engagement, such “Hi [Name], Unlock Your Discount,” if your competitor does it.
Step 4: Study Email Content and Design
If you want to know how your rivals communicate, just look at the emails you get from them. This is the first step in learning how to successfully eavesdrop on your rivals’ email marketing approach.
Content Elements to Examine:
Does it sound businesslike, casual, or salesy?
Is there a way to get their newsletter, case studies, or info about new products?
Do compelling and clear calls to action (such as “Shop Now” vs. “Learning More”) exist?
Design Elements:
Comparing layouts with one column to those with several.
Visuals: pictures, movies, or GIFs.
Make sure your emails are responsive on mobile devices by using mobile optimization.
To make sure your campaigns are using best practices, you may use Litmus or Email on Acid to evaluate how rival emails appear on different devices.
Step 5: Monitor Email Frequency and Timing
Your own sending schedule may be improved if you are aware of when and how often your rivals send emails. Either sending too many emails could irritate clients or sending too few might decrease engagement.
How to Track:
Jot down the times and dates when your rivals contact you.
Weekly newsletters or promotional mailings for the holidays are examples of note patterns.
To reread emails at a later time, use Gmail’s “Snooze” option.
Key Questions:
Is there a certain time of day, like two or eight in the morning, when they go out by email?
Do you see seasonal upticks in Black Friday ads?
How do they divide up emails that are both informative and promotional?
Avoid overwhelming subscribers and increase engagement by switching to a more typical email schedule or adjusting your frequency to match industry standards.
Step 6: Leverage Email Marketing Intelligence Tools
You can find a lot of resources online that may help you monitor your rivals’ email marketing campaigns and identify their weak spots. Either publicly accessible data or performance indicators are tracked by these programs.
Top Tools for Competitor Analysis:
Email subject lines, frequency, and content trends are tracked by MailCharts.
Owletter: Keep tabs on our opponents’ letters so we can take note of them.
While SpyFu is most often used for search engine optimisation, it has the ability to expose the digital marketing tactics of rivals, such as the keywords they employ in their email campaigns.
How to Use
Find out how your rivals are promoting themselves via email by entering their domains.
Compare and contrast their plans with the standards set by their industry.
Find successful advertisements that you can mimic.
Without having to manually dig through mountains of data, these tools make it easy to find ways to keep tabs on your rivals’ email marketing techniques.
Step 7: Benchmark and Test Your Findings
Apply what you’ve learnt to your own email marketing performance evaluation and try out a variety of approaches. For instance, you may A/B test comparable phrases in your advertising if you see that a rival is using urgency-driven subject lines, such “Last Chance to Save!”, and it appears to be working.
Benchmarking Tips:
Compare your percentages of opens, clicks, and conversions against those of similar campaigns.
You can monitor the efficacy of your emails with the help of HubSpot or MailChimp.
Testing Ideas:
Evaluate several email designs influenced by your rivals’.
You may learn more about your audience’s interests by conducting tests of your calls to action or content types.
Evaluate how often your rivals send emails and adjust accordingly.
To stay competitive, test your email marketing often to make sure it adjusts to actual facts.
Ethical Considerations
If you want to know how to eavesdrop on your rivals’ email marketing campaign, here are some ethical guidelines to follow:
Do:
Peruse open-access articles and sign up for public mailing lists.
Utilise dependable tools made for analysing competitors.
Don’t:
Investigate rival companies’ networks in an effort to gain sensitive information.
Their material could be protected by copyright laws if copied word for word.
Tell them a fib when you sign up for their email list.
Doing research in accordance with established ethical standards safeguards both your company’s credibility and the law.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
You shouldn’t be influenced to copy their techniques if you rely too much on them. Make the results fit your brand and target audience again.
Ignoring Your Target Market: Your members may not be interested in the strategies used by your rivals.
It is important to adhere to regulations such as GDPR or CAN-SPAM while collecting or using email addresses to avoid violating data privacy.
Conclusion
In 2025, one way to get an advantage over your competition is to learn how to eavesdrop on their email marketing methods. You may improve your email marketing strategy by familiarising yourself with your top rivals’ email lists, examining their subject lines, researching their content and design, tracking frequency, using intelligence tools, and evaluating your results. You can acquire practical insight without breaking the law or moral norms when you combine these procedures with moral behaviour.
Get a leg up on the competition and make your emails more effective by using these strategies immediately. To get new ideas for digital marketing tactics, check out x.ai.
Digital marketing forums, Owletter, MailCharts, and industry blogs are some of the sources.