50 Email Marketing Interview Questions to Ask in 2024

Common Email Marketing Interview Questions for Cultural and Behavioral Assessment

An email marketer directly impacts the CRM and integrated marketing initiative and thus is required to communicate across teams.

In such a setting, you can’t risk hiring someone who doesn’t have the necessary interpersonal skills to realize client goals and maintain smooth interaction with sales, creative, and analytics teams.

So before you jump on to asking technical email marketing questions, make sure to evaluate your candidate’s cultural and behavioral skills.

Here are the interview questions to understand your email marketing candidates’ thought processes, work ethics, team skills, values, motivations, and self-awareness.

1. Why did you choose to pursue a career in email marketing?
2. What are your 3 top core values?
3. What’s your favorite email marketing strategy, and why?
4. What areas would you say are your strong front in email marketing?
5. How do you invest in yourself–personally and professionally?
6. Why do you want to work for our company?
7. How do you know you will add value to our company?
8. What is the difference between a good place to work and a bad one?
9. What was the last email marketing book you read, and when was it?
10. Which email marketing gurus inspire you the most? Why?
11. What will you do in your first months on the job as an email marketing specialist?
12. What would you expect to happen if you underperform?
13. What would the definition of the “world-class employee” mean to you? Would you say you match this definition?
14. In what capacity was your team better with you being a part of it?
15. How do you approach juggling multiple shifting priorities?
16. What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?
17. If you could build a team, what qualities and skills would you look for in candidates?
18. Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker or team member. What happened?

Experience and Skill-based Email Marketing Interview Questions

In order to build robust email campaigns, an email marketer should have the necessary experience and skills to understand the concepts of customer segments, engagement, journey, and automation.

As well as operate technical aspects of email sending such as email protocols, email sender authentication, deliverability, and many more.

As we know, email nurtures existing and potential clients and dramatically impacts the overall sales of your clients. So, you can’t give away the medium in unskilled hands.

So, once you are done assessing if the candidate is in sync with the company values and work ethics, it’s time to find how well the candidate knows the tricks of the trade.

“I try to look for candidates who are knowledgeable of the elements that influence deliverability and demonstrate how they have resolved deliverability issues in the past. Also, familiarity with email marketing tools and tactics and having collaborative skills to interact with other departments makes my checklist.”

Nikita Agarwal, Head of Growth, Milestone Localization

1. How do you ensure email deliverability? What are the variables that affect the deliverability of emails?
2. How will you work with the sales team? What support do you need from them?
3. What is your favorite email marketing tool, and why?
4. Have you used A/B testing in your campaigns? If so, how did they affect your email marketing results?
5. How would you expand the database of clients subscribed to our content?
6. Take a look at this email (show an email) and tell me what elements you would change in it, and why?

“In the hiring process, I craft my question to check the knowledge and experience of the candidate with the nitty-gritty of email marketing. Apart from the main questions, I like to ask them their opinions regarding marketing trends and technologies. This shows how up-to-date the candidate is about the email marketing world and whether or not they can have a critical way of thinking about it.”

Taylor Ryan, CEO, KlintMarketing.com

1. Take me through your email campaign checklist.
2. How many emails should I send to my customers?
3. What is the best time and day to send out emails?
4. What are the pros and cons of email marketing?
5. What was the last campaign you launched? What results did you achieve?
6. What outreach software are you familiar with?

“I seek to see if the candidates know the difference between triggered, transactional, and promotional emails and how to use each in the context of the customer journey. The candidate should describe how they developed a plan that moves a new client from onboarding through tenured status to a win-back position where they’ve ceased making purchases or canceled their account.”

Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO, Digital Web Solutions

1. Tell me about a time when you employed various types of emails as part of a client lifecycle strategy?
2. How would you plan account-based marketing campaigns?
3. Do you think email is an effective way to attract clients and help companies raise brand awareness? If so, how and why?
4. What steps do you take to avoid being flagged as spam, and how successful Is your deliverability?

“A good candidate should be able to demonstrate that they understand the importance of building a tone, knowing the audience, and the positive and negative qualities of email marketing.”

Mark Daoust, CEO, Quiet Light

1. What’s the best email campaign you’ve created? What was the subject line, the tone, and the intended audience for the email?
2. What steps do you take to create the brand voice for every email campaign you set up?
3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you rate your copywriting skills?
4. What are the disadvantages of email marketing?
5. Define different email marketing metrics that are important to gauge the success of every campaign.
6. What’s one way you’d improve our current email marketing?

“I look for a person who has good creativity, writing skills, and hands-on experience to see through an email marketing campaign. You may also ask the candidate to give you samples/ideas of a campaign on the spot to understand their vision and strategies.”

Tristan Harris, Marketing Manager, Thrive

1. Do you have email marketing experience? How do you handle the email campaigns?
2. What was your biggest challenge when writing the campaign? How did you overcome it?
3. What was your lowest-performing email campaign written? How did you recover from it?
4. How do you plan, strategize, and execute your mail campaign?
5. According to you, what are the main reasons for unsubscribes and opt-outs? How would you tackle such a situation for our clients?

“I want to know if the candidate is aware and inspired enough to be proactive as my email marketing specialist. It’s best to talk about the email marketing campaigns they adore to dive into their thought process. It also allows you to establish a baseline for the interviewee’s industry knowledge. I really admire if the candidate has taken the pain to research us and understand our audience. This shows their dedication and willingness to take the job.”

Nathan Hughes, Marketing Director, Diggity Marketing

1. Which companies, according to you, currently do email marketing well? Why?
2. How do you develop the voice for your email campaigns?
3. How do you judge the success of your email campaigns?
4. How will you position the products and services offered by (X client) via email?
5. What do you know about the email compliance laws, such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR?