9 out of 10 marketers use email to distribute content.
This only proves how much demand email marketing has. And how companies are looking for email marketers like you.
Having said that, it’s important for you to gauge your potential employer while you sit for that interview.
Because hey, an interview is not a one-way process.
You get to know as much about the company while they assess you. So how do you prepare yourself for that interview?
By going through the right set of questions, of course. And we’ve made that easy for you. Here’s our list of a few important email marketing interview questions and answers.
Check these out without any further delay.
Common Email Marketing Interview Questions and Answers
If you have decided to go for an email marketing job, then you should be able to answer these general questions that might pop up in the interview.
While technical skills hold great importance, your interpersonal and communication skills are crucial as well. Let’s see what these are.
1. Why do you want to work for our company?
To answer this question highlight the good things about the company such as your admiration for the products/services of the company, their standing in the industry, your opinion on their brand.
The answer will represent how much research you have done on their company. They are not looking forward to their own praises but you must show them how informed you are.
2. How do you maintain your work-life balance?
Tell the interviewer that you are not a workaholic. You like to give time to family and friends, you value your weekends and most importantly you value your personal space. When at your job, your focus wholly remains at your job. And to make sure it stays that way for long, you ensure to give fair time to all the facets of your life.
3. What will you do in the first week of your job as an email marketer?
Tell them that your focus will be to know the intricacies of the job, you will ask questions, learn about the office environment and the culture, get to know colleagues and superiors, and give a status update as expected by the management.
4. If you run into a conflict with a colleague, what would you do to resolve it?
Answer by saying you will remain positive even if there is disagreement and try to talk it out. You will try to get to the core of the problem in the most polite manner possible. Once you figure out the root cause of the problem, you will ensure it is not repeated in the future.
The answers to each of these questions should be based on your life events and experiences. You should always answer with honesty. But do not get too candid, as revealing something unwanted can lower your chances of selection.
Through the above questions, the interviewer will understand your nature and personality based on the answers and decide if you fit into the culture of the organization.
Interview Questions and Answers to Understand the Skills of an Email Marketer
While most organizations take full advantage of social media platforms to enhance their online presence, email marketing still has its own set of advantages.
A large chunk of these benefits has made email marketing indispensable for organizations. This has created a sizable demand for expert professionals in the field.
Consequently, most organizations value analyzing the prospective candidates deeply before final selection. This includes asking questions related to technical know-how and email marketing skills.
5. What do you understand about email deliverability and marketing?
Email deliverability refers to the rate of deliverability of emails that are successfully sent to the customer. It has a formula that calculates the rate via the number of emails delivered divided by the number of emails sent.
Email marketing helps in forging relationships with customers and clients. It is a great method of reaching out to people through direct email for lead conversions. Email is sent to individuals who are interested in the business of the organization.
6. At what time of the day should we send emails to the customers?
The interviewer knows that there is no clear answer to this. Here, they hope you will apply some logical guess as there is no exact answer.
While it might seem that early mornings and weekends are the best time to send emails, the same is not true. As per the data collected, most unsubscribes and bounces happen during this time.
Hence, trying to send emails in the middle of the week, such as Wednesday afternoons, is probably the safest bet. Depending on the target audience, the best time to send the email may vary. You may have to follow a hit-and-trial approach to find your best time.
7. What do you understand by the term “click-through rate”?
Whenever an individual clicks through the link in your email, it is considered a click. To measure the click-through rate, we calculate the percentage of recipients out of one hundred who click through at someplace in your email. So, if 40 out of 100 people clicked on your link, your CTR would be 40%
8. What strategy can you use to grow the email subscriber list?
The interviewer intends to see your reasoning and marketing expertise. The success of email marketing relies directly on the email list you prepare. Therefore, you must focus on increasing the email list. To develop an email subscriber list, you can do the following:
- Creating good quality email content
- You can re-engage an older email list by sending a campaign with some incentives
- You can make a lead-generating offer such as an eBook or whitepaper
- You can gather email addresses from unrelated occasions such as webinars or offline events
9. What do you understand about the forward rate in email marketing?
When we say forward rate in email marketing, we refer to the rate at which the users are reading the email, opening it, and then forwarding the email to people in their network. This can also be called a referral rate or shared rate.
The sharing button within the email also increases the forward rate for email marketers. It also helps users in sharing easily and right away.
10. Do you like working on email marketing campaigns?
This is one of the most asked questions in email marketing interviews. Email marketing campaigns act as a means by which people share data and hope that people will subscribe and share their email ids for further updates and emails.
There are distinct types of email marketing campaigns. Some of these are newsletters, announcements, event invitations, marketing offers, etc.
11. How do you make sure that an email is valid?
To make sure that an email is authentic, you can simply send a verification email to the particular email id through which the individual has signed to attain information about your product/service.
This can be done easily by enabling the double opt-in feature in your forms. The authentication process is very important as it helps protect data from hackers or misleading use.
12. What makes email marketing important in the world dominated by social media?
Here, the interviewer wants to see if you can justify email marketing while not downgrading social media marketing.
While social media offers its own set of advantages, we can safely say that email marketing offers benefits that can outrank social media.
- Since about 94% of the customers use email, you have better chances of people seeing your email compared to them connecting over social media.
- Emails can be customized. This gives a personal touch to the emails.
- With emails, a person has the option to opt-in and out. This means if the recipient has not authorized, the email cannot be sent, exhibiting value for privacy.
13. What is the ideal number of emails that should be sent to the customers?
Sending emails 2-3 times a month shall do the job. This frequency will make your presence felt while not irritating the customer. The potential buyer or client will latch onto the offerings of the email with this frequency.
Meanwhile, keep a check on the open rate, withdraw rate, and click-through rate to ensure your current strategy is on point.
14. Tell us the key difference between hard and soft bounce emails.
Email bounce refers to the failure in the delivery of email to a particular email address. Hard bounce typically refers to the perfect failure of delivery on a permanent basis. This could be because of an incorrect or expired email address.
Soft bounce refers to a temporary delivery failure. This could happen due to a temporary failure at the recipient’s end.
Even before anyone decides to open an email, they see 3 things: Sender name, subject line, and preheader text.
Preheader text is that small description below the subject line that provides a little more information about what the email comprises, convincing the subscriber to open the email and read what’s inside. It is a very important element to increase the open rates.
16. What key metrics would you consider to measure the success of an email marketing campaign?
The metrics that you select would depend majorly on the goals of the campaign. Some common metrics are:
- Open Rate
- Click Rate
- Subscription Rate
- Reply Rate
- Conversions
- CTR (Click through Rate)
- Increase in website traffic
- Increase in referral business
17. How can you improve the email list?
The interviewer is trying to see if you have an out of the box perspective to increase subscribers. You can follow a few steps to improve the email list.
Here, the main goal to increase subscribers can be done by incentivizing the prospects, creating great email content while also encouraging the existing subscribers and keeping them engaged. You can prompt them to forward and share the emails and promote social media.
Conclusion
With these email marketing questions and answers, you can surely crack your interview with ease.
Make sure you show the best version of yourself while being modest and honest with your responses. Your expertise should not be restricted to the technical domain, your soft skills matter equally.
While we cannot contest the importance of email marketing, we can also vouch for the importance of social media marketing.
In case you want to excel at both then SocialPilot is one such tool that you need. Manage your social media like never before with its powerful scheduling, automation and analytics. Go for its free trial to know more.
