During the process of moving or migrating your email marketing to our platform, our aim is to optimize your chances of having your emails delivered securely and to do it in as little time as possible. To help make your transition as smooth as possible, we’ve outlined some useful steps that should be taken before you begin sending.
Before you move or migrate your email marketing
Step 1: Review your subscription methods
Take a moment to review where your subscribers have come from, so you can prepare to redirect these subscription sources to your new account. Ask yourself:
- Have the contacts in your audience explicitly opted in to receive marketing messages from you?
- Can you list where your subscribers came from?
To adhere to best practices, we have certain permission requirements, so if any of your subscribers don’t meet these requirements, it’s important that you DO NOT import them into your audience; doing so could result in your account being suspended. For more information, please refer to our Permission & Privacy Policy.
Step 2: Review what’s not working
There’s always room for improvement with email marketing, and transitioning to a new email marketing service is a great opportunity to make impactful change.
- Review your metrics: Are some emails doing better than others? Can you identify why?
- Review your email templates: Are they optimized for mobile? Rest assured that our editor creates responsive, on-brand templates, whether you use a pre-built template or make your own from scratch.
Step 3: Export your contacts and reports
Knowing who not to email is just as important as knowing who to email. That’s why honoring existing opt-outs and removing inactive or invalid email addresses is fundamental to a healthy email marketing strategy.
Exporting reports containing your historic engagement metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, etc.) helps you set benchmarks for future email campaigns and make informed decisions about your email marketing strategy. All email marketing services are different, and this can be evident when comparing campaign reports. Learn more about how the app calculates performance metrics like opens and clicks, , as we may differ from your previous provider.
Before you leave your existing email marketing service, be sure to:
- Export your email subscriber lists
- Export unsubscribed and bounced email addresses
- Export previous email campaign reports
- Export subscriber engagement reports
Step 4: Review your audience for engagement
If a contact has not engaged with any of your emails or purchased something from you in the last 12 months, then you should not continue sending to them. Instead, opt them out so that they no longer receive emails from you. While this might seem counterintuitive, removing unengaged contacts actually helps protect your sending reputation and can improve your deliverability. It’s important to review and validate your audience for engaged email addresses on a regular basis.
Step 5: Plan a gradual transition
While it might be tempting to export all your data and immediately shut down your old email marketing account, we recommend keeping both accounts open for a week or two. This way you can gather any final unsubscribes and bounce reports from your old platform, and give yourself time to export any data that you might have forgotten.
Before you send your first email campaign
Following the steps below before sending your first campaign will give you the best chance at positive delivery and engagement.
1. Set up a custom domain for sending
It’s important to always send from a custom domain that’s owned by you or your organization. Free webmail addresses (Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Outloook, etc.) used as the “From” address look more suspicious than those from custom domains, which increases the chance of emails from those addresses of getting rejected. This is the case no matter which ESP you use.
If you don’t own a domain or don’t know what that means, please refer to this article.
2. Authenticate your domain
Set up authentication to reduce the likelihood of your emails being sent to spam or rejected completely. Many major inbox providers require DMARC and DKIM authentication, at minimum, so it is vital that you do not skip this step.
3. Consider your sender name
If you’ve been sending from a specific name or email address for a long time, your best bet is to stay consistent, unless you’ve had a chance to inform subscribers in advance of the change. However, if you’ve been sending from a freemail address, like those described in step 1, that is an exception to this rule; in that case, it is far better to switch to a new sender email using a domain that you own, than it is to stick with a freemail sender email that you’ve used for a long time.
4. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts
Export all of the unsubscribed email addresses from your old ESP and import them into your new account. Once the import is complete, change their status to Opt-out. Follow the same steps for error / bounced contacts in a separate import by changing their status to Error. This will help make sure that you don’t accidentally send to and contacts who have already unsubscribed or whose email addresses are invalid.
5. Active, engaged contacts
Create a new audience group and import your contacts. During this step, you will also be able to map additional contact information, such as addresses, states, countries and more to your custom contact fields.
6. Segment your audience
Create segments divide your audience into subsets based on subscriber data. Segments are dynamic and will update automatically when a contact’s information changes.
7. Customize signup forms
Create a new or update the existing default signup form. You can also customize your Subscription Center, which is what your contacts will see when they click Manage preferences in your email footer.
8. Review your send history
If it’s been a few months since your last campaign, it might be worth sending a re-engagement campaign. Instead of emailing your entire audience at once, you may want to consider smaller, targeted sends to increase your engagement rates.