Competition Email Marketing Strategy: Crack It for Your eCommerce

Competition emails are a criminally underrated strategy to drive massive engagement with your audience. In this article, I’ll show you some amazing examples to whip up a frenzy of fervent brand advocates that skyrocket sales, generate UGC, and bolster deliverability.

Competition Emails will revolutionise your Retention Marketing Strategy

When most people hear the words “competition” and “email marketing”, their immediate thoughts are wasteful sweepstakes.

But that’s not why you read this blog or follow Magnet Monster. You’ll know that we’ve got a wildly innovative trick up our sleeves that’s getting our clients superb results.

Below you’ll see a range of effective competition emails we’ve deployed with our clients to achieve the following objectives:

Blow up customer engagement
Exponentially grow user-generated content
Strengthen deliverability
Drive PROFITABLE revenue without cutting into margins

These emails have been some of the most wildly successful we’ve ever sent out for some of the brands we work with and for good reason: it’s a two-way conversation that’s a win-win for brand and customer.

What I also love about these emails is that you throw customers a curveball that grabs their attention.

And while all the competition is peppering your audience with incessant sales emails, you can stand out from the crowd and get people to pause, consume your content, and build brand awareness in the process.

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Strategy 1: Share Your Transformation

If you’re selling a consumable product that customers get physical or mental benefits from, these emails are an amazing way to generate a huge amount of UGC and build mental availability.

Check out this quick example that Duradry used to quickly generate some motivational customer success stories:

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Competition Email Marketing Strategy: Crack It for Your eCommerce | Magnet Monster

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We then scheduled subsequent follow-up emails to highlight customer success stories:

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We also ran an amazingly successful “World Smile Day” campaign for Spotlight Oral Care that also leveraged this technique:

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Check out the results in the follow-up email!

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Strategy 2: Social Media Competition

You can harmonise cross-channel efforts by incorporating platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook to generate more creative UGC.

What I love about this technique is that it builds a strong omnichannel presence that unifies channels together.

Check out this stellar example from Big Blanket below:

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Bonus tip on this: re-purpose the creatives you generate on each platform and try using them in your acquisition strategy for authentic UGC!

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Strategy 3: Fortifying Social Proof with a Conversational Approach

This approach seems like the least creative at all, but there are a few advantageous things at play with this strategy.

The friction is low: you’re only asking the customer to respond to the email which takes little to no effort, as opposed to uploading a picture
The qualitative insights are invaluable: never underestimate the feedback your community can give you on your products
You bolster deliverability by encouraging customers to reply: as a result, your sender reputation and inbox placement will improve using this technique from time-to-time

Here’s a very simple example of how it works:

Here’s the follow-up campaign (you choose how much social proof you want to include):

This strategy can be a good kick-off campaign with brands who don’t have a lot of social proof when taking over the management of their campaign strategy, and also to start harvesting genuine customer feedback when you’re in the investigative phase of onboarding.

I recommend running this technique at least once every two months if you’re short on ideas for campaigns and even having it within flows to generate qualitative insights on autopilot.

DON'T MISS: Competition emails that generate insane engagement

Conclusion: Get more creative with your retention marketing strategy

There are many more ways to get people to purchase again than by sending the same old recycled discounts again and again. Start thinking outside the box with your email marketing strategy and crucially, how it can interact with other channels to support the wider business goals.

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