How to migrate from one email marketing tool to another

Everything you need to know BEFORE doing it.

Right, you are considering migrating your email tool because…

• You have heard terrible things about yours.
• You have heard great things about another one.
• There is a cheaper one.
• There is another one with more features.
• There is another one with more features you actually need.
• Your current tool's deliverability could be better.
• You read on LinkedIn that a successful ecommerce has to use Shopify with Klaviyo.
• …

Well, in my opinion, only deliverability and the need for certain features justify changing email marketing tools on their own.

And now I will explain why:

On video:

And, in more detail, below in writing.

Why (not) change tools

If you do any serious email marketing, changing tools is no small matter.

It involves a series of steps and resources that may not have occurred to you at first. And you should know about them before making a decision.

Especially if we are talking about an email marketing tool for ecommerce, because the features required in these cases are considerably broader than those needed by a service business or someone building a personal brand and sending a daily or weekly email to their list.

So, although the change may initially seem beneficial, once you understand everything involved, you may see it differently: perhaps you decide to stay as you are. Or perhaps you find a way to make your current tool do what you need.

That said, deliverability is something you cannot work around. Some tools really are better than others here. Apart from good and bad practices on your side, of course.

That is why this article lays out the steps you will need to take if you decide to make the switch. From there, the decision is yours.

By the way, if you are just getting started with email marketing, my recommendation is to think very carefully about where you are now and where you want to be in a year. If you are serious about this channel—and you should be—it is better to pay from the start for something that lets you scale later than to begin with a free tool and have to migrate afterwards.

You have been warned.

By the way, if you are at this early stage, it may be worth taking a look at this guide, as it can point you in the right direction and give you ideas on how to approach the channel if you run an ecommerce.

What my opinion is based on: a little history

Before getting into the process itself, I want to explain why I think I am in a position to advise you on this.

If you already know me, you can skip this section. If you are new here, I can tell you that I have been sending emails since I started in marketing in 2008.

And since then, I have had time to work with many different tools:

1. I started with desktop Outlook, copying emails from Excel databases and pasting them into BCC. That was how I was taught at the company, and that was what I did. Spoiler: do not even think about doing this today.
2. At the next company, we worked with another desktop tool specialised in bulk mailings. I cannot remember its name, but I do remember that you had to account for the number of emails per hour included in your hosting plan, because if you exceeded it, the host would suspend your account. Again, completely obsolete today.
3. The next tool I used, already at TiendAnimal, was PHPList. It was open-source online software that you configured on your own server and used to send campaigns. The change was substantial, with lists synchronised with the CMS and concerns about the server's reputation.
4. A couple of years later, when it became too limited for us in terms of features, we migrated to Return On Mail. The tool was software from a startup owned by one of the advisors who had audited the business ahead of its sale. Although the idea and approach were good, it was very, very immature and, after a “complex” setup—to put it mildly—it became clear that it was not suitable for us, so…
5. We migrated to Splio. The process happened while I was leaving the company, so beyond gathering the technical and business requirements for the integration—we were already talking about serious platforms with millions of daily sends—I handed them to my team's tech lead and was not very involved, to be honest. I do not know exactly how it went, although I suspect it went well because the platform remained in place for several years.
6. Meanwhile, at Yo pongo el hielo we started with MailRelay, which worked quite well for us. Until they closed our account overnight, and did it in a particularly unpleasant way.
7. We were forced to migrate quickly to another tool. The one we chose in this case was Sendy, software installed on your own server that sends emails through Amazon S3 at a ridiculously low cost.
8. Alongside those bulk-mailing tools, we also tried CartsGuru, for cart recovery and then Connectif for all the marketing automation. The latter worked better than the former, but eventually…
9. We built our own in-house system for automation, drawing directly from the CMS database and sending through the Amazon servers where we had configured Sendy. We still use this system today.
10. As for my personal business, I started with MailRelay because at the time we were happy with it at Yo pongo el hielo and I was familiar with how it worked, so sticking with it seemed logical. That said, I barely sent any emails back then, so deliverability was high.
11. However, over the last two years, as I have sent more emails, deliverability has fallen. A lot. So I have no choice but to migrate. And the platform I chose is Acumbamail.
12. The reason is that, in my consulting work, I have been able to see the figures of very large businesses that send huge numbers of emails and smaller ones that also send a fair few. Companies using Brevo, , Probance, Hubspot, , SalesManago… and Acumbamail. The last of these had the best deliverability. And since I am currently in the middle of the migration, I thought an article on the subject might be useful to you.
13. By the way, I have also used a couple of other platforms. The ones I can remember right now are: MailChimp both at Lowi and for a few clients. I have never felt entirely comfortable with it and I do not think it is cheap, so I rarely recommend it.
14. I have also used MailerLite at Círculo Copy and configured it for a few other clients. I like this one considerably more.

As you can see, I was not joking when I said I had used many tools and had “enjoyed” migrating between them.

That is why I know the necessary steps very well, and now I am finally going to explain them.

Steps for migrating your email platform

I want you to understand that I am going to explain this at a “high level”. In other words, I will not go into detailed configurations or specific cases.

No, because this is not a detailed tutorial. Mainly because there are countless migration scenarios —between two specific tools, from several tools to one, from one all-purpose platform to several…—and the process varies slightly in each case.

This article is more of an orientation guide, with two objectives:

1. To help you understand everything a migration involves.
2. To make sure that, if you decide to tackle it, you know which steps to take and in what order.

I will also repeat what I said above: the email marketing tool required by an ecommerce selling physical or digital products has almost nothing in common with the one needed by a service business or personal website.

The features required in each case are completely different.

That said, they share many process steps, while others are exclusive to certain types of business. I will flag that in the step title.

I also think it is useful to divide these steps into three groups:

1. The steps you must take before starting the migration.
2. The steps related to the migration itself.
3. The steps you must take after the migration.

And this matters because you absolutely must complete the first group, as those steps act like a traffic light giving you the green light to continue.

If you forget them, you may regret starting down this path sooner rather than later.

Steps to take before starting the migration

Right, once you decide that a platform change is necessary, you will need to:

#1. Calculate volumes and costs

This first step is obvious: calculate the volume of sends you currently handle—or want to handle—so you can compare the cost of your current tool with the new one.

That puts us firmly in the realm of costs.

I am not telling you to estimate the increase in revenue because you are nowhere near being able to know it: you do not know how the migration will go, how many people you will lose in the process or how much deliverability will improve in your specific case.

#2. Check the variables (essential for ecommerce)

For a personal newsletter or service business, an email address and a name—sometimes not even the name—will be more than enough, and any email tool will cover that.

With an ecommerce, however, you may have many more variables:

• Number of purchases made.
• Value of purchases.
• Purchase dates.
• Products purchased.
• Preferred product or service category.
• Dates of website visits.
• Customer type.
• Demographic variables (sex, age).

If you want to migrate and use these variables on your current platform, make sure you can continue using them on the next one.

#3. Review the features

For a personal newsletter, I would mainly tell you to look at the automations—for example, whether a subscriber is added to the “daily email” group after completing the corresponding funnel.

Not every tool does this automatically, which may mean manual work or creating automations with third-party tools.

For ecommerce, this is far more important, as you may well have automated flows for abandoned carts, first purchases, second purchases, dormant customers and so on.

Here it is essential to make sure those flows can be replicated and to assess how difficult that will be.

Depending on what you have built, this may be a MAJOR reason not to migrate. Or a reason to consider the labour cost of the change. Or to plan to use both tools in parallel while integrating and gradually moving features from one to the other.

#4. Ask about the integration process

Again, for personal newsletters or service businesses, it will not amount to much: changing a few forms on the website so they point to the new tool.

But for online stores, integration may be complex because of the number of variables involved. Or it may not.

Sometimes it is simply a module added to the CMS. Or a CSV import.

In other cases, you will need development work so the new tool can collect the required information.

Make sure you know who is responsible for the integration work: you or the email platform's team.

Steps for migrating an email marketing platform

Once you have analysed everything above, if you are convinced that you need to change, this is what you have to do.

#5. Subscribe to the new tool

Again, an obvious one.

At this point, you need to find the best option: cost per number of sends, fixed monthly plan, annual plan, lifetime plan with or without the option to scale…

Depending on the project, these tools can be expensive (Splio's one-year licence at TiendAnimal was €35k, if memory serves).

It also depends on your cash flow: you will have to pay an annual plan upfront, while a monthly plan, despite being more expensive, can be paid month by month.

These are decisions you will need to make now.

I can tell you that I am a big fan of lifetime plans because they save a lot of money, but in return you run the risk that the platform may stop operating at some point and, depending on when you bought it, it may not turn out to be the most cost-effective option.

#6. Integration (ecommerce only)

What I mentioned earlier: you need to see how the email tool extracts the required customer data. It may use a CMS module, file imports through endpoints or FTP, an API for the ERP…

There are many methods, some simpler than others.

#7. Configure DNS records and anti-spam verification

In every case, you will need to:

1. Register your domain in the email tool.
2. Verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC. This is done with DNS records on your server or CDN, such as Cloudflare.
3. Finally, we will check that they have been entered correctly and that the main ESPs (Gmail, Amazon, Outlook, Yahoo…) validate them.

This step is essential for passing their anti-spam filters.

#8. Replicate the automations

As I mentioned above, this may or may not be a very long step, depending on what you currently have set up.

The goal is to make the new tool do exactly what the old one did.

If the old tool did very little, this step will be short. If it did a lot, this will probably be the longest step of all.

#9. Replicate the email design

Start with the subscription confirmation email—the double opt-in.

Then you will need to choose a template and add a footer containing the legal text and unsubscribe link.

These two points always apply.

With an ecommerce you will need to do something else: make sure the new tool can collect and display all the data that the old one displayed:

• Product name.
• Image.
• Original price.
• Sale price.
• Badge.
• Free shipping or other product promotions.

This step is usually so automatic that we take it for granted, but it is not always guaranteed. So it is worth checking carefully before making the switch.

In the worst case, you can simply take the old template and replace its variables with the new ones to reproduce the design.

#10. Change the website forms

First, identify every form that needs to be changed.

Next, create the new forms in the tool for simple implementations, or modify the existing forms so they point to the new platform for more complex implementations.

Again, the time required will depend on how many forms your website has. If it is a personal site like Isra Bravo's, it will be quick because there is only one.

If it is an ecommerce, you will probably have more:

• Popup.
• Footer banner.
• Customer area.
• Checkout.
• …

In any case, how forms are created and everything they involve varies considerably between tools: successful submission messages, the double opt-in email and confirmation pages will all be configured differently in each one.

In fact, details such as whether a tool lets you add HTML or only plain text to certain fields or emails can completely change the flow you had set up.

If you have several forms, replicating everything in the new tool will take time.

Finally, once you have changed them, it is time to check in production that every funnel works, signing up with a different email address in each one and checking the emails you receive. You can use this trick to do so.

#11. Migrate subscribers

This step must be carried out at the same time as the previous one so that the old and new tool databases remain as closely synchronised as possible.

To do this, you will need to have considered and defined issues such as:

• What should I do with unsubscribed users? Should I put them on the suppression list? Does my new tool have a list or group for unsubscribes?
• What should I do with users who never completed the double opt-in? I mean people who subscribed but did not confirm by clicking the link—perhaps because it went to spam. Should I import them as confirmed? Send them a confirmation email? Send one explaining the situation with an unsubscribe link? Or not import them at all?
• What should I do with lists/groups? Does it make sense to keep the same ones? How do I import users into each one: during the initial import, or can I do it later with CSV files?

Steps after the migration

Once the migration itself is complete, your work is not over. There are still a few outstanding tasks.

#12. Update the legal texts

Under the GDPR, your privacy policy must state that you will share personal data with the new email platform.

And if new cookies are added, you must also mention them in the cookie policy.

#13. Handle unsubscribes

There are a couple of details to bear in mind:

First, after the migration, unsubscribes will continue arriving in the old tool because users will click links in old emails, so define a procedure —automated or manual—for applying post-migration unsubscribes from the old tool to the new platform.

Second, if your system uses several email-sending tools—as is common in ecommerce, where one may handle bulk campaigns and another marketing automation—you will need to design and create a system to synchronise unsubscribes, so that users who unsubscribe from any one of them are automatically unsubscribed from all of them.

#14. Start sending

Depending on the tool and the number of subscribers you have, you may be able to send to your entire list the next day if you want, or you may instead need to warm up the server.

Email servers have a reputation. The higher it is, the more the major ESPs will trust them and the more likely they are to place your emails in the inbox or promotions tab rather than spam.

The point is that a server cannot go from sending nothing one day to sending 200,000 emails the next. Because that is what spammers. And ESPs block those servers.

What you need to do is gradually increase the number of sends each day, for example:

1. 3,000.
2. 6,000.
3. 10,000.
4. 15,000.
5. 23,000.
6. 35,000.
7. 50,000.
8. 70,000.
9. 100,000.
10. 140,000.
11. 200,000.
12. …

You get the idea, right?

In addition, the first emails should go to your most engaged subscribers: those who open every email and click the links.

This gradually legitimises our sending in the eyes of ESPs and helps our server build authority.

#15. Measure deliverability

Again, something very obvious: one of the key points when migrating is checking that this rate improves.

During the first few days, we will review it daily. Later, depending on the number of emails sent and the importance of the channel in our marketing, we can relax and check it weekly.

At that point, if the rate remains stable and is higher than before, we can consider the migration complete.

Time required for the migration

To discuss this point, I will use three real cases so you can get a more accurate idea of what it might look like for you.

I will start with the simplest one.

Time required to migrate a platform for a non-ecommerce business

Business: my personal business (consulting and training).

Tools: I moved from MailRelay to Acumbamail.

Type of use: unsegmented daily bulk email and several funnels based on the lead magnet.

Reason for migrating: deliverability was poor, especially for the subscription confirmation email, which meant I was losing 30% of subscribers. After speaking to support, there was no solution, so I switched.

Steps: mainly those directly involved in the migration itself (group 2 above).

Number of subscribers: fewer than one thousand.

User groups: three, which I kept.

Website forms created and changed: eleven, across 39 different pages.

Funnels replicated: three.

Time commitment: two full working days, already knowing the outcome of the preliminary steps (group 1).

Time required to migrate a platform for an ecommerce without automation or advanced segmentation

Business: Yo pongo el hielo.

Tools: we moved from MailRelay to Sendy.

Type of use: weekly newsletter with product offers in three languages.

Reason for migrating: they closed our account overnight, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Steps: preliminary analysis and the migration itself (groups 1 and 2).

Number of subscribers: 25,000.

User groups: three, one per language—Spanish, English and French—which I kept.

Website forms created and changed: three.

Funnels replicated: none; we did not use them with this tool.

Time commitment: two days from a developer for the technical work and one day from me for configuration and user import.

Time required to migrate a platform for an ecommerce with automation and advanced segmentation

Business: TiendAnimal.

Tools: we moved from Return on Mail to Splio.

Type of use: daily bulk campaigns segmented according to user behaviour and purchases by category.

Reason for migrating: we needed more features.

Steps: the entire process: initial analysis, tool comparison, volumes, prices, marketing and technology requirements, and implementation.

Number of subscribers: 400,000.

User groups: there were no groups as such; they were generated by querying a copy of the user database exported daily.

Website forms created and changed: four.

Funnels replicated: several; I cannot remember exactly how many.

Time commitment: more than a month from the start of the analysis through evaluating solutions, negotiating budgets, integrating the tool, checking everything and beginning the sends. Several people were involved, mainly one from marketing, one from product, a developer and a couple of people overseeing the whole process.

As you can see, the scope and time required were completely different in each case.

Tips for a successful migration

My first recommendation is to plan it properly, so you do not end up stuck halfway through one of the steps.

Several tasks can be prepared gradually, such as replicating funnels, configuring DNS records or reproducing email templates.

However, the migration, the website form changes and unsubscribe management must happen as close to simultaneously as possible, so agree on a date with everyone involved and start first thing in the morning.

You should also have a rollback plan—a way to undo every change—because however likely everything is to work as intended, there is always a chance that it will not. Knowing exactly what to do in that situation gives us greater peace of mind, especially if email sends put tens or hundreds of thousands of euros in daily revenue at stake.

Beyond the process itself, and taking what happened when MailRelay closed our account at Yo pongo el hielo as an example, I would advise you to export the data from your email platform —customers, groups and unsubscribes—at least once a month if your list is small, or weekly if you receive many leads every day.

This will prevent you from losing many users in situations like the one I described.

I also recommend that you test everything thoroughly: every subscription form and every funnel, using accounts from different providers to see whether any provider sends the emails to spam or displays them differently. It will save you headaches.

My final piece of advice is to be extremely careful with unsubscribes. Manage them properly to save yourself more possible—and probable—problems. Do not leave this point for a “phase 2” of the migration.

Conclusions

After reading the whole article, I think it will be clear that when email marketing matters to a project, a migration is no small undertaking.

If you have few subscribers and the channel is not highly developed, it is fairly straightforward. But if your project is large and sells many products or services by email, it becomes considerably more complicated.

So there is no alternative but to analyse the pros and cons carefully and, if you give it the green light, plan properly and complete every step one after another.

Finally, if you are starting a digital project and want to use this channel, consider from day one choosing a tool that genuinely does what you have in mind, even if it is paid.

Email marketing platforms are generally inexpensive at low volumes, and choosing a good one from the start can spare us a future migration—which, always, always, always, even in the simplest cases, is a pain in the arse.

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