What should you ask an email marketing agency before hiring one?

Eighteen questions, grouped by stage, with the red flag for each.

Why ask in stages instead of all at once?

A first call is a sales conversation. The agency is trying to win you, and you are trying to find out if they can do the work. Different questions fit different moments. Some can be answered from a website before you book anything. Some only make sense once the agency has seen your list. And some only get a real answer after the contract is signed and the work has started.

This checklist has eighteen questions in four stages. Each one has the answer to listen for and the red flag. You will not need all eighteen for every agency. Use the five in the table near the end as the minimum. If you are still deciding between an agency, a freelancer and a hire, the agency vs freelancer vs in-house comparison comes first.

What should you check before the first call?

These four can be answered from the agency's site, a short email, or public records. They filter out agencies that are not a fit before anyone spends an hour on a call.

1. Who are your typical clients, and what did you do for them?
   Listen for: named work you can read, with the scope stated plainly. Red flag: a logo wall with no description of what was done, or results with no context.
2. Which email platforms do you work in?
   Listen for: the platform you already use, or a clear reason to change. Red flag: they only work in a tool they own or resell, which ties your list to them.
3. Do you do strategy and writing, or just sending?
   Listen for: a clear line between what they decide, what they write and what they operate. Red flag: "we do everything" with no detail on who does which part.
4. How do you price, and what is included?
   Listen for: a monthly scope you can compare with others. Red flag: price only after a discovery call, or fees tied to list size with no cap. Our guide to email marketing agency pricing explains the common models.

What should you ask on the first call?

Now ask about how they work. These six questions are about process and competence. An agency that does this well will have answered them many times and will not need to think hard.

5. Who owns the subscriber list and the sending domain?
   Listen for: "you do, always, and we are a user in your account." Red flag: the account is in the agency's name, or they cannot say how you would get the list out.
6. How will you grow the list, and where do new contacts come from?
   Listen for: lead magnets, signup pages, LinkedIn, partnerships, and consent collected at signup. Red flag: bought lists, scraped contacts, or "we have a database." The UK regulator is clear that the soft opt-in exception does not cover bought-in lists, and that marketing email to individuals needs consent.
7. What do you check before the first send from our domain?
   Listen for: SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication, a working one-click unsubscribe, and a plan to warm up a new domain slowly. Red flag: a blank look at these three acronyms. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are records on your domain that let mailbox providers confirm an email really came from you.
8. What spam rate do you watch, and what happens if it rises?
   Listen for: Google Postmaster Tools, a target under 0.10%, and a pause-and-investigate rule before 0.30%. Red flag: they do not monitor complaints, or they treat deliverability as the platform's job.
9. Who writes the emails, and who approves them?
   Listen for: a named writer, a review step, and your approval before anything goes to the full list. Red flag: a rotating pool of unnamed writers, or sends that go out without your sign-off.
10. How do you use AI, and what does a person still decide?
    Listen for: AI for research, first drafts, repurposing and testing; a person for strategy, audience, voice and the final message. Red flag: either "we never use it" (likely untrue) or "it writes everything" (nobody is accountable for what your list receives).

What should you confirm before signing?

The contract stage is about exits, responsibility and measurement. These five questions are the ones people skip because the relationship feels good. Ask them anyway.

11. What happens to the list, templates and reports if we leave?
    Listen for: everything stays in your account, and they document what they built. Red flag: an exit fee for your own data, or a notice period longer than the initial term. Note that a platform export may not include everything. Mailchimp says contact exports do not include report data like open and click rates, so ask for reports to be saved separately.
12. What user level will you hold in our account?
    Listen for: the lowest level that lets them do the work, with you as Owner. Red flag: they ask to be the Owner. In Mailchimp, the Owner can edit billing and close the account, and only Owners and Admins can export audiences. Other platforms have similar tiers.
13. Who is responsible if a campaign breaks the law?
    Listen for: "you are, so we follow the rules carefully," plus the rules they follow. Red flag: "that is handled by the platform." The FTC says a company that hires another company to run its email marketing cannot contract away its legal responsibility.
14. How will you report, and on what?
    Listen for: replies, clicks, meetings, unsubscribes and complaint rate, reported against a goal you set together. Red flag: open rate as the headline number, or no report until the end of the quarter.
15. When should we expect to judge whether this is working?
    Listen for: a timeline with a setup phase and a first review date. Red flag: "results in the first week," or no date at all. See how long B2B email marketing takes to show results for a realistic timeline.

What should you ask in the first month?

Once the work starts, the questions change from "can you?" to "did you?" These three check that what was promised on the call is what is happening in your account.

16. Can you show me authentication passing and the unsubscribe link working?
    Listen for: a test email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC shown as passing, and a one-click unsubscribe that removes the contact promptly. Red flag: "it is set up" with nothing to show. Yahoo asks bulk senders to honor unsubscribes within 2 days, and the FTC gives 10 business days under CAN-SPAM.
17. What did you learn about our audience that you did not know on the call?
    Listen for: specific things from your replies, your CRM or your best customers. Red flag: the plan is identical to the pitch deck, which means nobody looked.
18. What is the first thing you want to change, and why?
    Listen for: one concrete change with a reason and a way to check it. Red flag: a long list of changes with no priority, or no changes at all.

Which five answers matter most?

If you only have twenty minutes, ask these five. Each one has an answer that is hard to fake and a red flag that is hard to explain away.

How does Sawa answer these questions?

We get asked most of these on our own first calls, so here is how we answer three of them. On ownership: we work inside the email platform, CRM and content tools you already have, as a user in your account, so the list and the domain never leave your name. On AI: it helps us with research, first drafts, repurposing and testing, and a person on our team decides the strategy, the audience, the voice and every message that goes out. Ziad Hassan, Sawa's co-founder, wrote on LinkedIn in July 2026 that the team spends a disproportionate amount of time defining what good looks like before building any AI system, and that the custom agents speed up the work while the differentiator is having people on every client call.

On timing: we aim to be fully running within four weeks, which is the setup phase question 15 asks about. On offboarding, question 11: when an engagement ends, every asset is handed over inside the client's own accounts and a shared folder, with a recorded walkthrough of each automation, the response sheets for any form or assessment, and nothing left hosted by Sawa. That is how the most recent project closed. If you want to see how that fits the campaign side of the work, see how Sawa handles turning an audience into meetings.

Want to ask us these questions? See how Sawa handles campaigns and nurture, or book an intro call.