Moving to a new email marketing platform is an exciting transition that promises better growth and conversions. However, the process of migration may be a daunting task for marketers as they will have to acclimatize to the UI, features, and functioning of the new marketing platform.

We need to understand that migration is not starting to send email campaigns from a new marketing platform. Instead, it precedes that and is the process of setting up the email infrastructure of your business using the services provided by the marketing platform. Migrating to a new email marketing platform may ideally take a minimum of 30 days. During this transition, marketers might face bottleneck issues, and questions like "How long will it take to migrate?", "Should I import all of my contacts?", and "Are there any prerequisites for migration?" may arise in their minds.

Don't worry—we won't leave you hanging. Let's learn a few practices that will help you perform a quick and hassle-free migration. It's always ideal to start preparing for migration a few months in advance. This will give you some time to build a strategy and organize what you'll be carrying with you to your new marketing platform. We urge marketers to kickstart the preparation by focusing on mailing lists first.

It is not advisable to carry your entire contact base to your new marketing platform. This is because your mailing lists may contain inactive contacts, invalid email addresses, and sometimes even spam traps. If they contain these, your campaigns won't perform well.

You can start pruning by using a list cleaning service. This will help you remove invalid email addresses and spam traps from your mailing lists. Next you need to focus on cherry-picking the contacts that you will be retaining.

Role (hr@, manager@, etc), group addresses (admin@ and support@), and Postmaster (postmaster@example.com) email addresses are deliverable addresses, but they are email addresses that may be shared by many people in a team/group. When you send emails to role/group addresses, the recipients may mark your emails as spam, and when you send emails to postmaster email addresses, your sender domain might be blacklisted. We recommend you remove these addresses from your mailing lists.

Active contacts are those who regularly purchase your product/service, engage with your emails, and look forward to hearing from you again. They unanimously get entry into the mailing list you'll take with you to the new marketing platform.

Sometimes a few active contacts might have recently become dormant for some reason. If you wish to give a fair chance to those contacts, you can try to win them back by sending a re-engagement emails. While crafting a re-engagement campaign, make sure it's irresistible. In the email, you can list the benefits of staying on your mailing list, offer a discount on their next purchase as a goodwill gesture, and also request the recipient's feedback to understand why they lost interest in your emails.

We strongly urge you to craft compelling subject lines like "We missed you", "We haven't seen you in a while", etc and a supportive pre-header to grab the recipient's attention. Also, in the email, you can provide the option to unsubscribe. When you send re-engagement emails, some contacts might opt to stay on your mailing list and some might unsubscribe. You can let go of contacts who unsubscribe and who don't reply. You can pick contacts who show interest in staying on your mailing list. You can then create a new mailing list and add active contacts and those who showed interest in staying on your mailing list and take it with you to the new marketing platform.

Alternatively, you can create a mailing list full of active contacts and import it into the new platform and start sending low volumes of emails to the mailing list for a few weeks. This will ensure that all the emails you send will be read and your sender domain earns a positive reputation from mailbox providers and anti-spam services.  After a few weeks, you can slowly take potential contacts and those who opted to stay on your mailing list to the new marketing platform and start sending emails to them.

Click here to learn more about sending re-engagement emails.

If you've assigned merge tags to contacts, we recommend you remove the merge tags. This is because the tags may not function in the new marketing platform.

After preparing the mailing list that you will be carrying, you need to export it as a .CSV or .XLS file. Next, you can focus on reports. You'll need the reports of your sent campaigns to analyze and formulate strategies. You can select the reports that you need and export the reports in .XLS format.

We know that marketers create a lot of email templates and use them to send various campaigns. When you migrate, it will be a tedious process to recreate all those templates in the new marketing platform. So we recommend you export the templates you need as HTML files and import them once you migrate to the new marketing platform.

Sometimes marketers may worry about their deliverability taking a hit while migrating to a new marketing platform, but don't worry—your deliverability won't be affected. When you migrate to Zoho Marketing Automation, you will be using one of our IPs that has sufficient positive reputation. You can either use your current sender domain or opt for a new one. We suggest you retain your current sender domain to maintain consistency. However, we are not against opting for a new sender domain.

When you decide to use your current sender domain, we recommend you verify it with blacklists just to be sure that you are in the good books of mailbox providers and anti-spam services. We urge you to identify the reasons for spam markings and unsubscribes your previous campaigns received so that you can correct them and achieve better deliverability for emails that you will be sending from the new marketing platform.

If you're opting to use a new sender domain, we recommend you warm it up first before sending a huge volume of emails. It's always advisable to send only a few emails first and slowly increase the email volume based on the response the sent emails receive. We suggest you send emails only to active contacts first. This will ensure that all the emails you send are read and will help you earn a positive reputation for your sender domain. Once your sender domain has earned sufficient positive reputation, you can start sending emails to all your contacts.

After setting up your sender domain, we urge you to authenticate it first. Domain authentication is the process of implementing security mechanisms like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to safeguard your domain from phishing and spoofing activities. Domain authentication not only protects your emails from getting tampered with during transit but also earns a positive reputation from mailbox providers and anti-spam services.

Mailbox providers consider emails from unauthenticated sender domains to be suspicious and may flag them as spam. If you send emails without authenticating your sender domain, mailbox providers may deny inbox placement, and your emails may land in the spam folder.

Click here to learn more about domain authentication.

Every marketing platform will have its own set of automation tools like workflows. When moving from the current platform to the new one, you need to note the lifecycle messages, triggers, and event-based sequence so that they can recreate them using the automation tools present in the new marketing platform. This will help you consistently deliver efficient and powerful campaigns.

Letting contacts know about the change in the email service provider is entirely up to the business. If you decide to inform your contacts, you can send an exclusive email or use the email footers to display the information.