If you ever wondered “How do I find my competitor's emails and ads?”, you're in the right place.
The fastest way to beat your competition -- as far as ecommerce marketing goes -- is to learn how to track and learn from your competitors. The good news is that there’s a wealth of information available for you if you have the right sources.
Here’s how to find competitor emails, ads, and much more and what you need to do with this information:
- Who should you track?
- Get an edge: track your competitors
- Set up alerts & track them automatically
- Track strategic marketing shifts
Who should you track? (competitors or not)
It’s important to whittle down the noise to get exactly what you want from competitor tracking. Before you learn how to find competitor emails and ads, it makes sense to zero down on the exact set of companies or brands you want to track (and zone in on why you follow these brands)
- Some large or well known ecommerce businesses can provide you with overall inspiration for organic content strategy, email marketing automation, and advertising (including display ads).
- Specific competitors might be excellent at “making people return to the shop” with effective automated retargeting ads and retargeting email campaigns. Track them for their retention strategies and look at their email marketing/automations flows.
- A few of your competitors might be known for spending more on ads and being aggressive on their acquisition channels. Check their ads, their landing pages and how they setup their whole funnel, including their Welcome email automation flow.
Note: specifically these recent months, we've seen huge benefits in tracking your competitors funnels: this can unlock growth opportunities quite quickly for you.
How does that work?
Well, the goal would be to track their whole funnel, rather than emails, ads or their website individually. You can do this by identify their most popular ads, the landing pages they're using as a destination page for these ads, and then their checkout/purchase flow.
You'll notice something right away: the most powerful brands have developed over the months very specific funnels for targeted niches inside their audiences, with specific ads, emails and landing pages. This way, you'll understand the opportunities they're betting on right now to grow.
This is when it’s a no-brainer to use effective tools such as Panoramata to help you get a sense of a brand marketing strategy, and then create specific themed lists or tagged smart lists for your own inspiration.
Get an edge: track your competitors.
Competitor tracking -- also called competitor research or competitor analysis -- is a detailed study of what your competitors are doing.
When it comes to eCommerce marketing, how your competitor brands are perceived by customers, how they sell, and how they position products directly affect your own marketing. Because this is what your audience is seeing as well.
Tracking competition -- and learning from them -- helps you have an edge over them. Making competitor tracking a part of your overall marketing strategy pays off in the long run, helps you get creative ideas without trying too hard, and allows you to find angles you might have missed.
On Panoramata, you'll have a whole platform designed to help you track all your competitors seamlessly in a single place. Here's how it works:
Set up alerts & track snapshots for time-sensitive periods
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays are all big days for ecommerce brands.
On top of these, there could be several reasons why any of your competitors can deploy changes to their email marketing campaigns, marketing journeys, sales funnels, and ads.
They might make changes to their landing pages, websites, and more.
Thing is: they will.
But during Black Friday, you probably have something else to do than checking which specific changes they've made on their ads or their website.
Panoramata can do it all for you automatically: almost instantly, you can get a feel for these changes. Set up alerts as to when these changes happen. Make use of our helpful features to quickly visualize the changes made by any brand that you follow.
Track strategic marketing shifts
Learning and getting a sneak peek into what--and how--your competing ecommerce brands are doing during these crucial periods is essential for you to benchmark your own branding, marketing efforts, and more.
- When exactly do your competing brands start campaigns before the holiday season begins?
- When there’s no seasonal push (or when it’s not the season), what kind of email campaigns and ads are rolled out?
- How are holiday-specific campaigns different from regular marketing campaigns?
- Are the ads and email campaigns treated differently -- with new offers, angles, or ideas -- compared to regular campaigns?
- What are the primary traffic sources for ad campaigns that your competition uses? What email services does your competition use?
Apart from learning overall marketing from your competitors, you can do more: track your competitors' websites for changes (if any).
Keep a tab on any major strategic shifts, marketing changes, ad campaign reversals, new campaigns rolled out, new angles for old campaigns, and more.
Track more brands than you can keep up with by using Panoramata. Get your finger on the pulse, stay alert, and always be in the know as to actual email marketing campaigns being sent, subject lines used, ads rolled out, landing pages created, and any changes to websites.
Plus create marketing inspiration lists, “follow and learn” lists, and “competitor smarts” lists -- by yourself or with your entire marketing team.
On top of emails, monitor your competitors’ SMS and email flows
Don’t stop with just individual emails and ads. SMS and email flows or sequences should be monitored too as they’re pieces in a well-rounded omnichannel marketing strategy.
Check what emails they send in their welcome flow when someone subscribes to their newsletter. Take a look at how your competitor uses SMS to engage their audience.
These two data sets alone will give you a lot of insights and inspiration to consistently improve your own business.
Check their social and SEA ads and their related landing pages
Aside from SMS and email flows, don’t forget to see what social media and search engine ads your competitors have. This will help you improve your keywords and ad performance.
Check the corresponding landing pages for the ads your competitors are running and see how they structure these pages and what they use to persuade visitors to buy -- get an overview of their whole funnels, including with YouTube, Google Display, Pinterest, Meta and Tiktok Ads.
Familiarizing yourself with these will enhance your marketing efforts massively.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I sneak a peek at what my competitors are sending out in their emails?
We're all curious about what the competition's up to, right? While we can't go hacking into their email accounts (that's a no-no!), you can sign up for their newsletters using a personal or generic email address. Keep an eye on their social media too – they might be dropping hints there. Just remember, it's all about getting inspired, not straight-up copying.
What are some easy ways to keep an eye on my competitor's ads?
Want to keep tabs on what the other guys are promoting? Check out tools like Panoramata, SEMrush, SpyFu, or Ahrefs for some digital sleuthing. They'll help you scope out your competition's online ads and keywords.
Don't forget about social media – tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social can clue you in on their social ads and what's buzzing in their feeds. Just keep it casual and use the info to fuel your own creative fire!
