The Email Marketing Client Intake Questionnaire, Field by Field

A new client signs. You send them your intake form. It asks for their logo, their brand colors, three competitors, and their goals. Two weeks later the first campaign still has not gone out, because the form never asked for Klaviyo access, never checked whether the sending domain passed DMARC, and never found out the list was bought at a trade show in 2024.

That gap is the whole problem. An email marketing client intake questionnaire is not a marketing intake form with the word email bolted on. It collects four things a generic form ignores: where the list came from and who owns it, whether the account and sending domain are ready to send, how the brand actually sounds in an inbox, and which compliance rules bind this specific sender. Get those on day one and the first send happens fast. Miss them and you lose the two weeks when a client is deciding whether hiring you was smart.

Why generic intake forms fail email programs

Most agency intake forms were built for a web project or a retainer that spans five services. They ask broad questions because they have to serve social, paid, SEO, and design in one document. Email pays for that breadth with the details that matter.

Look at what tops the search results for this exact query. Template farms offering 8 to 37 questions on business background, target audience, and “what are your goals.” Useful for a discovery call. Useless for getting an email out the door.

Here is the underlying cause. Email has a physical layer the other channels do not, the plumbing that our explainer on how white-label email actually works walks through in detail. You cannot send until you have a seat inside Klaviyo or Omnisend, the sending domain is authenticated, and the list is one you are legally allowed to mail. A generic form treats email like a design deliverable, so it asks for fonts and skips the DNS records. I have watched onboarding stall for eleven days over a single unverified DMARC policy while the form sat there asking about brand tone.

The fix is not a longer form. It is a form that knows email has a plumbing layer, a voice layer, and a legal layer, and asks about each on purpose. That is the difference between the questionnaire below and the one you probably have now.

The 34 questions, grouped into six sections

Keep it to six short sections. A client will finish six labeled groups. They will abandon a wall of forty ungrouped fields. Onboarding research keeps landing on the same point: the first two weeks set whether a client renews, and a form that respects their time is the first proof you are organized.

Business and list reality

1. What is the business, and who is the one person who signs off on a send?
2. Which email platform are you on today, and what plan tier? (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, or something else.)
3. How large is your active list, and when was it last cleaned?
4. Where did the list come from? (Checkout, popup, a lead magnet, a purchased file, an import from an old tool.)
5. What are your current 30-day open rate, click rate, and spam-complaint rate?
6. Do you own the list export and the suppression file, or does a former agency still hold them?

Question 6 is the one nobody asks and everybody regrets skipping. If the last agency holds the suppression file, you can email someone who already complained, and the platform will notice.

Access and authentication

7. Can you add us as a user on the platform, and at what permission level?
8. Is your sending domain authenticated with DKIM, SPF, and a DMARC policy?
9. What exact from-name and from-address do subscribers see today?
10. Who controls the DNS records for the sending domain?
11. Are there active flows or automations we must not pause?
12. What feeds the platform? (Shopify, a CRM, a helpdesk.)

This section is where launches die. Klaviyo’s own branded sending domain guide treats DKIM and DMARC as prerequisites, not nice-to-haves, and getting a DNS record changed can take a client’s IT person a week. Ask on day one, not the night before send.

Brand voice for email

13. Paste three past emails you were proud of, and three you disliked.
14. What words or phrases must never appear in your emails?
15. Is there a brand guide, and does it cover email specifically or only the website?
16. On a scale of one to five, how formal or casual should the writing feel?
17. Who is the sender persona? (The founder, a team, a mascot, no persona at all.)
18. Are there claims, guarantees, or regulated terms legal has flagged before?

Question 13 does more than any brand-voice document a client will ever write for you. Six real emails, three loved and three hated, teach voice faster than a forty-field style survey.

Audience and segments

19. Describe your best customer in one paragraph, in your own words.
20. What segments already exist in the account, and which ones actually get used?
21. What is the average order value and the repeat-purchase window?
22. Which products or services should we push, and which are off-limits?
23. What does a subscriber usually do right before they buy?

Offers, calendar, and compliance

24. What is the promotional calendar for the next quarter?
25. What discount floor can you never go below?
26. How often do you want to email, and where is the line that feels like too much?
27. What is your unsubscribe and preference-center setup today?
28. Which past campaigns worked, and do you still have the numbers?
29. What compliance rules apply to you? (The FTC’s CAN-SPAM rules at minimum, plus GDPR or any industry-specific rule.)

Logistics and success

30. Who approves copy, and what turnaround can they commit to?
31. Where do we communicate day to day? (Slack, email, a project tool.)
32. What does success look like in 90 days, stated as a number?
33. What has a past email agency or freelancer gotten wrong for you?
34. What single thing would make you end the engagement?

Questions 33 and 34 feel blunt on a form. They are the two answers you would trade the other thirty-two for. A client who tells you the last freelancer sent a campaign with the wrong brand in the header has just handed you your top priority. Answer 34 also tells you where the exit is before you need it, which is the same clarity you want when you are the one deciding whether to end an engagement.

Six questions to never ask

The best intake form is judged as much by what it drops as by what it keeps. Every field costs a client goodwill. Spend it on email, not on curiosity. Cut these six.

Cut “what are your goals?” It is too open to answer well, and it signals you brought no framework. Replace it with question 32: success in 90 days, as a number.

Cut “what is your budget?” on the form. You set price on a call, not through a text field. Asking here reads like you are fishing, and it invites an anchor you will spend the call unwinding. If you are still working out how you price the work, our white-label pricing breakdown covers why the number belongs in a proposal.

Cut “who are your competitors?” It matters for positioning strategy. It does not help you send Tuesday’s campaign. Keep discovery questions in discovery, not in an execution intake.

Cut “please send your logo and brand colors” as a headline question. You need them, so put them in a quiet upload field. Leading with design trivia tells the client you think email is a design job, which is exactly the impression that loses the retention argument.

Cut “how did you hear about us?” That is your attribution curiosity, and onboarding is the wrong moment to charge the client for it. Ask it in a survey later, if at all.

Cut “can you write us a brand voice document?” You are offloading your job onto the client. Voice is captured by example, through question 13, not by assigning homework to the person who just paid you to remove work.

Fair point that a few of these live in some real intake forms and the world keeps turning. True. But every one you cut is a field the client finishes faster, and a signal that you know the difference between running email and running a generic agency checklist.

How to capture brand voice without a 40-field form

Voice is where most intake forms overreach. They ask a client to rate their brand on twelve personality axes, and they get back twelve guesses. A busy founder does not know if their brand is a four or a five on “playful.” They know which emails they would have been embarrassed to send.

So anchor voice in artifacts, not adjectives. The three-loved-three-hated ask in question 13 gives you the client’s real taste in their own past work. Then question 14, the never-use words, fences the obvious landmines. That is enough to draft in the client’s voice by the second campaign.

Platforms are catching up to this. Klaviyo now lets you upload brand guidelines to train its Brand Voice AI, which only works if you feed it real examples rather than a survey. Same principle either way. Show the machine, or the writer, what good looks like. Do not ask the client to define it in the abstract.

One boundary. This example-first method works when the client has a back catalog to paste. A brand-new store with zero sends needs the opposite move: you propose a voice, send two campaigns, and let their reactions calibrate it. The intake form should have a checkbox for “we have never sent email before,” because it routes that client down a different path entirely.

Get platform access the right way

In four years running email programs on Klaviyo and Omnisend, I have found the single most common reason a first send slips is access. The client grants the wrong permission level, or grants it to the wrong email, or the account has two-factor tied to a phone nobody on the team carries anymore.

Make it concrete on the form. Question 7 asks for a specific permission level, and you should tell them which one. On Klaviyo and Omnisend, an agency needs manager or admin rights to build flows and edit sending settings, not a viewer seat. Name the seat you need so the client grants it once.

Then handle authentication as its own step, not a footnote. If question 8 comes back “I do not know,” that is your answer: the domain is probably unauthenticated, and you have a DNS task on your hands before anything sends. This is also where vetting cuts both ways. The same rigor you use to screen a partner, covered in our guide on how to vet a white-label email partner, is what a sharp client will run on you. A form that already knows to ask about DMARC tells them you have done this before.

Build it in a Google Form or a Typeform

The queue for this article promised paste-ready templates, so here is how to ship one in twenty minutes.

For a Google Form, create six sections that match the six groups above, one section per page. Use short-answer fields for the specific asks (list size, from-address, average order value), paragraph fields for the open ones (best customer, what a past agency got wrong), and a single file-upload field, tucked into the last section, for the logo and brand guide. Turn on “collect email addresses” so a response ties to a person. That is the entire build.

For a Typeform, the same 34 questions work better as one-per-screen, because the format rewards short questions and the client never sees the full length at once. Add logic jumps in two places: the “we have never sent email before” checkbox skips the past-performance questions, and the platform question can branch the access instructions to Klaviyo or Omnisend wording. Keep it under those two branches. Every extra jump is a place the form breaks.

Whichever tool you pick, the rule is the same one from the top of this page. Collect intake through a structured form, not through a thread of emails and Slack messages that scatters the answers across three tools. A form finished in one sitting is the difference between a first campaign that goes out on day two and one that is still waiting on a DNS record in week three.

That is the whole case for treating the intake questionnaire as a real deliverable. It is the first thing a new client experiences, and the answers it collects, turnaround, approval owner, cadence ceiling, feed straight into the service agreement you sign next. It decides whether the relationship starts as transformational or transactional. The campaign that was stuck in the opening scene? With this form, it ships while the client still remembers signing.

Common questions about email marketing client intake

How many questions should an email marketing intake questionnaire have?

Around 30 to 35, grouped into five or six labeled sections. Generic advice says keep intake forms to 8 to 12 questions, and that is right for a single-service form. Email needs more because it has a plumbing layer (access, authentication, list custody) that other channels do not. The grouping is what keeps a longer form from feeling long.

What is the difference between an intake form and an onboarding questionnaire?

In practice, none worth arguing over. Both are the form you send a new client to collect what you need before work starts. If you draw a line, “intake” often means the first light form at the proposal stage, and “onboarding” means the full version after signing. The 34 questions here are the onboarding version, the one that unlocks a first send.

Should the intake form ask about budget or pricing?

No. Price belongs in a proposal or a call, not a form field. Asking for budget on an intake form invites an anchor number you then spend the call unwinding, and it reads like fishing. Collect what the work requires, and handle the number in a conversation.

What email-specific questions do most agencies forget?

Four: who owns the list export and suppression file, whether the sending domain passes DMARC, where the list originally came from, and the current spam-complaint rate. These decide whether you can legally and safely send, and a generic marketing form asks about none of them.

Do we need a separate intake form for each client type?

One core form with two branches usually covers it. Use a logic jump for clients who have never sent email, since their path skips past-performance questions, and branch the access instructions by platform. Beyond those two forks, a single questionnaire serves ecommerce and service clients alike.

Running email for other people’s clients is its own operating discipline, from the intake form on day one to the handoff checklist on the day an engagement ends. If you would rather hand the execution to a partner and keep the client relationship, book a free strategy call and we will show you how the invisible version works.