Changing Your ESP? 5 Tips to Ensure a Smooth Migration Experience
Migrating your ESP can be challenging since a lot of your outreach efforts depend directly or indirectly on it. This is because all your inbound traffic generation strategies utilize email marketing at some point in the sales funnel. However, ESP migration doesn’t need to be stressful or complicated unnecessarily. You can also treat it as an opportunity to recalibrate your efforts and streamline the processes that you were struggling with earlier. Today we are going to discuss the 5 tips for ESP migration that you can apply in your action plan. Buckle up to read more on the topic:
Follow This ESP Migration Checklist
Follow this checklist to switch your ESP, and if you are yet to select one, use it to check their compatibility as a partner ecosystem.
Suppression List
It is the list of email addresses that have unsubscribed the email campaign. When a recipient clicks on the unsubscribe button, their email address automatically reflects on this list.
Google Analytics
It helps you to track the performance of email marketing. It enables you to get information such as how many subscribers have visited your page, where they are located, and how much time they have spent on your website. Remember, you need to set up the same with the new ESP.
Dedicated IP
If you are sending emails in bulk, consider buying a unique IP address to establish a brand. It builds reputation and loyalty among customers. If you haven’t purchased it yet, do consider buying it now.
IP Certification
Inform the certifier regarding the switching of ESP.
Emails And Email Templates
Before signing off from existing ESP, don’t forget to transfer all your emails and HTML email templates to the new email service provider. Migrating your conversation history is equally important, and missing on it will leave you clueless in future strategy building exercises.
Reports And Behavioral Insights
This data plays a major role in the success of email campaigns, so make sure you have exported all this data.
Sign-Up Forms And Marketing Automation Workflows
Unfortunately, you have to create new forms when you switch to a new ESP.
Integrations
It refers to the union of a data collection tool and data storage (your system). To avoid clutter, drop the unnecessary data, and set the data flow better.
Optimize Your Database For New ESP
While transiting to new ESP, the export of data is the crucial step. We suggest you not transfer all the data, instead grab this opportunity to declutter the database. Consider deleting unwanted fields and dump the email addresses with high bounce rates. A well-maintained database can fetch better analysis for forthcoming email campaigns.
Rethink Email Templates
Are you satisfied with email responses? If the answer to the question is yes, consider exporting the email templates to the new ESP. If not, you must revamp your email marketing strategy and email designs.
Look Out For Deliverability Best Practices
Your domain must be authenticated, it is possible only with an altered DNS setting, but this can lower down deliverability. To build sender reputation with the ISP, you should start campaigning with a small number of recipients and delivering useful content. This is the way to build a domain reputation.
Include Learning And Development In Migration Plan
Switching your ESP isn’t a costly process in itself, but it can improve your ROI by leaps and bounds. You will have to spend on training your staff for working on new technology and adjusting to the new operating procedures. For instance, importing a custom email template in Mailchimp would require additional coding for converting it into a Mailchimp email template. Thus, learning and development activities will form the major part of the major migration costs.
Also, make sure to ensure these four points for developing your migration plan:
- Document your migration plan against a timeline and fix the responsibilities of your staff members.
- Have a backup of the entire data in the previous ESP.
- Create a checklist for data migration and include it as a process parameter.
- Develop protocols for both technical and non-technical glitches for reaching out to customer support.
Summing Up
Apart from these aspects, your ESP should also comply with privacy laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM along with anti-abusive policies like M3AAWG for establishing a good reputation among Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) Also, don’t rush with your revamping process as ISPs tend to be cautious with new IP addresses. Take some time and warm up your IP address as per your previous standards, and if your IP reputation is poor, don’t try to fix it. Go for setting up a new one as it will produce better results. You can expect results only after your email marketing campaigns start running properly. Compare the metrics with your old ESP after you spend a considerable amount of time with it. We hope that you find this article insightful and helpful for your ESP migration.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies that specializes in professional email template creation and PSD to HTML email conversion; they are Mailchimp expert developers. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
