I recently participated in a Marketo webinar on Key Email Trends European Marketers Need to Know (that really all marketers need to know). We left some time for questions, and we received plenty of interesting questions on email marketing—from basic to advanced. It was interesting to see how similar these questions were and the common themes that arose, despite the different topics we covered.
A: Email open rates have always been potentially misleading since some email clients may block or download s by default or some users will change their preferences to automatically download them. Today, Gmail and Apple Mail on iOS tend to download s by default, so this doesn’t necessarily suggest interest in your emails, but more so that a reader has clicked on the subject line.
However, I believe that open rates are still relevant for comparing email effectiveness between recent email sends. Comparing open and click rates helps you measure the different types of email sends (outlined in the previous answer) to reveal which perform the best. Ultimately, what really matters is whether the emails you send are helping you reach your goals. For some marketers, one of the best measures of effectiveness is sales value generated per 1000 emails sent.
- Tell me about the most successful marketing automation campaign you have run (and why you consider it successful). …
- Tell me about the least successful campaign you have run (and what you have learned from it). …
- How would your manager (and your co-workers) describe you?
Email Marketing Interview Questions & Answers | Email Marketing Interview Questions | Simplilearn
How to Grow and Profile Your List
Q: What are the best ways to encourage opt-in?
A: I recommend brainstorming alternative techniques for capturing e-mail addresses. Map out all the opportunities available for capturing a buyer’s information between your different channels and audience segments (shown in the matrix below) and use this to generate new ideas. Take a look at what you and competitors are currently doing and then do a ‘gap analysis’ to select options you aren’t currently using.
Here are a few examples you could start with:
Q: Should I be using pop-ups?
A: Pop-ups are increasingly being used in many industry sectors, particularly retail, publishing, and travel. This is because, when well-defined and tested, they will almost always give you significantly more new contacts in your database. We discussed this in depth in the webinar, when I described how well they have worked for Smart Insights, increasing the conversion of visitors to leads by 35% on a site where we already use a range of prompts to encourage subscription.
Q: What about the quality of the people from pop-ups?
A: If you use pop-ups to boost your subscriber numbers, it’s inevitable that there may be some decline in quality—but from my experience, they are still very worthwhile. To maintain the quality, it’s important to be able to profile visitors efficiently. Also, follow best practices to be sensitive to the user experience and don’t display a pop-up too quickly. You can address this by adding a time delay or detecting exit intent (e.g. when movement of the mouse to the navigation bar suggests users are about to leave the page).
Q: How much do I need to profile subscribers?
A: There’s a balance between asking for too much profile information and thus reducing the number of new contacts added to your database and not asking for enough. Identify two or three ‘killer question’ profile fields to ask subscribers that are most important for enabling your business to send more relevant emails. For example, at Smart Insights, we ask about the subscriber’s role, sector, and the number of people in the marketing team and then tailor our welcome emails based on the responses.
Q: How can I target better without asking too many questions?
A: A good rule of thumb for this is to ‘watch, don’t ask’ or ‘sense and respond.’ Instead of asking interruptive questions, monitor your recipients’ clicks to better profile them and understand their needs. Then, trigger follow-up communications accordingly. Some examples include:
Over time, you should continue to add details about your buyers to gain a better picture of them by asking additional questions or tracking their behavior. For a B2B organization, I recommend defining a common customer profile (CCP), which includes all the data you could potentially collect in addition to the data you already have on a subscriber. I worked with one B2B organization that had three levels of profile and separate goals for each: level 1–basic contact information, level 2–position, market sector, and application and level 3–detailed information about standards and preferences.
marketo interview questions
To hire and retain top marketing talent, it’s important to interview for these specific skills. And, while hiring the right people is critical to your company’s growth, encouraging them to continue their education through the various types of marketing training that are available is how you keep the game-changers empowered to change the game. If they’re really a top-notch marketer, they’ll want to ABL (Always Be Learning) anyway.
Most people hiring for marketing automation experts don’t have the platform expertise to uncover a true expert from a poser. While we advocate that strengths are more important than skills, if you cannot afford (in time or money) to hire someone and teach them a platform, then we’re here to help. We’ve hired and trained hundreds of marketing automation experts. These questions will help you sniff out a junior resource from a highly-skilled expert. Just be sure you’re willing to pay them for that expertise.
Great answers will include the terms “Data Governance” and “Documentation.” This sort of documentation will include who owns data at every step of the way, specify where data originates, what adjustments to the data happen and who owns each step of the data manipulation process. It would also have explicit rules around duplicates, and managing them.
Great answers will include specifics. Proficient Marketo users should use a program, with statuses that align to stages in the company’s funnel. In SFDC, there should be a report and the person you’re talking to should specify the object to which the report runs off. A real Marketo expert should understand that Marketo’s value is ultimately about pipeline creation and influence. Without the SFDC reporting, you’d only be able to tell half the story. The visibility of marketing influence across the organization would also be, frankly, stifled.
Great answers will include a deep cataloguing of current content, including mapping it against personas and funnel stages. Bonus points should be added for identifying content gaps and filling them with smart content pieces, likely repurposed from existing assets. In fact, if you hear this and don’t hire the person, send them to apply for one of our open positions because this is one of our favorite skill sets!
What is the most intricate Marketing campaign you have worked on?
We like to ask this to see what level of understanding there is for actual marketing strategy and implementation. This question also allows for follow-up questions, which can reveal a ton of information. Some good follow-up questions that are good to ask are:
Listen for specifics and excitement. Specifics shows that they understood the big picture of what the campaign was trying to accomplish. Excitement shows that they may have played a bigger role in the project, and they are proud to own it. Listen to see if they talk about their specific contributions. People like to take credit for an entire project when, in reality, they were doing what they were told to do.
Also, look for the candidate to mention not just what went well but also what didn’t go so well. One thing that sets apart entry-level candidates from more experienced ones is an understanding of limitations.
