“Having additional paths of communication with your contacts will really create a healthy mix throughout the customer journey, and ensure that contacts are receiving your communications on the right device, in the right format.”
- Their current ESP is expensive, and they want to shop around to see if the same functions and features are available at a lower cost
- There is some level of dissatisfaction with the current ESP (beyond price)
- The current ESP has delivered as promised up to this point, but they want to grow their program, and need features, tools, automations, integrations, an enhanced UI, vendor service support, and/or other capabilities their current provider doesn’t offer (most common)
While testing capabilities are likely to be available in some capacity for all ESPs, whose are the most extensive, impressive, and actionable? Does what a given ESP offers match what your current ESP has now, or answer for a gap that you want to fill this time around? These are areas that we’re diving further into when deciding not only who ticks the most boxes overall, but how heavy those tick-marks are.
“Being able to leverage your data in a meaningful way all starts with accuracy and ensuring that you have the correct data type in place for each data point. This ensures that not only are you creating a really great customer experience, but from a tactical standpoint you can efficiently and effectively use the information that’s being shared with you.”
ESP Discovery Phase: Getting to Know You
Want to see the ESP in action before you make any decisions? Our team can help in setting up demos of all ESPs we recommend so you have a visual to tie to those takeaways, and can get all your questions answered directly from the source.
Want to see the ESP in action before you make any decisions? Our team can help in setting up demos of all ESPs we recommend so you have a visual to tie to those takeaways, and can get all your questions answered directly from the source.
Want to see the ESP in action before you make any decisions? Our team can help in setting up demos of all ESPs we recommend so you have a visual to tie to those takeaways, and can get all your questions answered directly from the source.
— Diana Mitchell, Associate Director of Technical Services at Tinuiti
Let’s look at just a few key reasons it’s crucial to work with migration experts:
For example, let’s say your team is working on a multi-channel strategy aimed at growing your total list size by 25% from Q2 to Q4. Now let’s assume that if you met that goal with your current send limits, you would be hit with overage fees for 10% of those emails. Those overage fees may end up costing more than a more robust package would have—one with much higher send limits that will cover you well beyond the projected 25% increase.
Internal Alignment on Needed Resources
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Your IP Warming May Not Go as Planned
You’ll also need to consider what you already are doing, or want to do, beyond email alone, including SMS, push notifications, and/or in-app messaging.
Tinuiti’s team of technical email marketing experts is equipped to help businesses and brands through the ESP migration process from start to finish. In this article, we’ll explore what that process looks like, considerations to make, and why it’s so important to get every stage right.
ESP migration is not a simple task. If we were to compare it to a home renovation project, this isn’t touching up the paint on the baseboards in the kitchen—this is rewiring the electric throughout the whole house.
Overall Complexity Matters
As we touched on above, the first-party data you’re capable of capturing through email programs has never been more valuable, hard to come by, and influential in how you execute across channels. The data you gather through your email program can become the pot of gold that feeds your segmentation and targeting capabilities across all channels, and throughout the full funnel, so you want to be sure that data is migrated properly.
Why It’s So Important to Get It Right
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Do you have a number of specific API-triggered messages in place, or millions of contacts that need to be ramped up? By the nature of the tasks at hand, your migration will likely take longer than if you were on a program with a cart connector and a few thousand contacts.
Each managed migration is led by a Tinuiti Technical Project Manager, who works through comprehensive ESP migration checklists with their team. Having led hundreds of ESP migrations over the years, we have refined and streamlined these pre-migration, during migration, and post-migration lists over time, breaking the process out into 5 clearly defined phases.
The decision for which ESP to move forward with is always the client’s to make, and Tinuiti’s teams are fully-equipped to aid in the actual migration process, whatever choice is made. That said, we encourage you to not only consider where you are and what you need today, but what you’ll need in the next two years, or even further out.
— Kellie Collins, Associate Director of CRM & Email at Tinuiti
Our team is composed of QA experts who know exactly where to look, when, and how often to ensure that all the data from your previous ESP is migrating to your new ESP as intended.
In short—give yourself some room to grow. Even if you don’t need a fully-loaded Ferrari of ESPs, or the lofty price tag that goes along with it, you also don’t want to box yourself into a package that just barely fits, and end up drowning in fees instead of enjoying your success.
It’s Email Marketing’s Time to Shine
There is always a certain level of risk when migrating data—often, that historical contact information is lost in the process—making it important to proceed cautiously and informedly.
“Any time that you’re doing a migration, there are so many different moving parts that you want to be sure you have a subject matter expert that knows all the different items you’ll need to move in your email program.”
From the evaluation phase through the final stage of migration, we are typically looking at a 60-90 day timeline, though there are a number of considerations that can affect that window, including:
More Data Points, More Cross-Channel Potential
Our team also evaluates what those different qualities an ESP offers actually look like.
As with most things in marketing and life, there is no one-size-fits-all “best email service provider.” In the discovery phase, our team works with clients to fully understand the primary reasons they’re looking to migrate, and what features and functions they’ll need to achieve parity with their current provider, or—more typically—increase and/or improve their capabilities.
Once a client has decided which email service provider they’ll be migrating to, and has worked through contracting with that ESP, the actual migration process itself is ready to begin.
With any new ESP, the sending address will need to go through a “warming period” to ensure that deliverability and inboxing are high. No matter how well-prepared you were heading into the migration, and how carefully rolled-out your warming period, it isn’t uncommon to run into some delays here.
