Insights: 12 tips to speed up ESP Migration

Migrating an email programme from one service provider to another can be challenging and time-consuming. Establishing your Sender Reputation on the new IP and From Domain can often take a number of weeks, as can the process to “ramp-up” sending volumes to your normal sending pattern.

There are many factors that determine how long this process will take:

1. Your daily and monthly sending volumes
2. Your data quality – are new contacts validated, and older and invalid contacts removed
3. Your recipient engagement – what % of contacts are recently active, what % used to be active, and what % have never been active
4. Your existing brand, domain and email sender reputation
5. Whether you will be using dedicated or shared IP addresses
6. Whether you are certified with an email certification provider
7. Whether you have a regular, smooth and predictable sending pattern; or whether your daily volumes are unpredictable and “spiky”
8. How many times per week you send email campaigns
9. The countries you send to
10. The “domain split” – which domains make up most of your list

How to speed up email migration

Some of these factors are in your control, so let’s see how you can speed up your email migration.

Prepare your data

1. Ensure invalid and suppressed contacts are correctly flagged or extracted. Only upload valid and subscribed contacts into the new platform
2. Add a column to your contact list with the last engagement date, or a simple ID showing most-to-least engaged. This column will help make segmentation in the new platform easy
3. You can speed up your migration by leaving-out your longer-term inactive contacts. Leave full list sends and your re-engagement campaigns until you have successfully migrated your primary marketing campaigns and automations.

Reputation and sending plan

1. Make your new sender/From domain a subdomain of your ecommerce or corporate domain. This will inherit trust and reputation from your brand.
2. When sending plan to use your most active data first (this is why the engagement column is useful!)
3. Plan to send every day, or even multiple times per day, increasing volumes each send – even if you normally only send 1-3 campaigns a week, split your campaigns so you can send more frequently
4. Can you make your subject line more compelling?
   • What new offers can you send?
   • Content should be designed, tested and optimised specifically to deliver high engagement
   • Can you optimise your email CTAs for maximum engagement
5. Automations and transactional emails deliver very high engagement.
   After a few marketing sends have demonstrated that emails are hitting the inbox, start your automated sends from your new platform

If you need dedicated IP addresses

Dedicated IP addresses will take longer to establish than shared IPs. But there are ways to speed up migration when using dedicated IPs

1. Pre-warmed IP addresses may be available. These are shared IP addresses that become dedicated to you after you start sending. These provide some of the benefits of shared IP addresses.
2. If you want or need dedicated IP, but are under very challenging timescales, talk to your new provider about migrating to shared Ips to hit your deadline, then afterwards migrate to your dedicated Ips without the time constraints
3. Microsoft sending can be eased with a “Pre-emptive Mitigation” support request, explaining exactly what volumes you intend to send to MS domains https://olcsupport.office.com/