When and How to Migrate Email Service Providers
“I saw our competitor that seems to be doing amazing things with Klaviyo –
should we move over?”
“I heard about someone moving to Omnisend and saving a ton on fees. Are we overspending?”
“Mailchimp got acquired by Intuit; should we move?”
The inkling to switch Email Service Providers (ESPs) can present itself any time. But take it from an agency that’s supported dozens of ESP setups and migrations, it’s never an easy project.
Sometimes, businesses migrate because they have a specific pain point they think will be resolved elsewhere. Sometimes they migrate on more of a whim without researching and testing properly. What’s for sure is that migrations will be more successful when carefully thought through: When the pros outweigh the cons, when they’re designed to mitigate risk, and when the overarching impact is a better fit for your business.
Let me explain the approach we use to help our clients think through ESP migration projects, and ultimately make the right decision.
1) Ask Yourself: Why Change?
There are some common signs of not being in the right fit Email Service Provider for your business.
Before you get started, take a look at your current situation (or speak with those working in the day-to-day operations) and make some notes about what’s not working currently. Here are some common pain points to explore:
Price Increases: This one is really common, but it can mean not seeing strong enough ROI. Especially with larger lists and some ESPs raising prices often, the price tag can increase quickly.
Team & Usability Issues: It takes a lot to get a send out. If the team working on email/SMS is struggling with producing content or developing campaigns, it can lead to inefficient time-spend.
Deliverability Issues: If your email marketing is experiencing deliverability issues, it’s worth digging into why. Some ESPs don’t offer as many capabilities to diagnose and troubleshoot as others.
Limitations in Reporting: If you’re not able to get the information you need to draw insights from your email marketing, then the tool may be holding you back.
Service & Relationship with ESP: Every ESP will have the occasional bug; no one is perfect. But how you’re informed about issues and channels available to you to get support can vary.
Market Changes, Business Changes: Whether your business has changed significantly since you started, or an ESP has rebranded/repositioned since you came on board with them, it’s worth examining if you have a good-fit tool for where you need to grow.
Don’t skimp on this part of the process. Take some time to discuss and explore with your team, give people time to reflect and research. What you want is to come out with a clear picture of the pain points and opportunities that will help you direct your evaluation. It will be your North Star, and without it you will not only waste resources by making the project unnecessarily complex and stressful, but you might even end up missing the mark completely (it happens more than you think!).
2) Assess the Impact of the Change.
Once you have your “northstar list” of why to change, you need to find a way to measure the impact. It’s not always easy to figure out what those metrics would be, but if you can find a way to quantify the impact, it will help you get buy-in and ultimately make you able to measure the success of migrating to a new ESP.
Here are some guiding questions:
- What would the pricing changes be?
- What would migrating cost?
- Would moving allow you to do new things?
- Would being in a better fit system free up resources?
- Would not having specific pain points add revenue to your business?
Also, don’t forget these:
- What would it cost to not make a change? Sometimes there is a cost to maintaining the status quo or risk of being subject to future pricing changes. Think of missed opportunities or cost of inefficiency changes that may lay ahead.
Now, not everything breaks down into a number, but you’ll be surprised because many do.
Here’s some examples:
- There’s a risk that our license fees will increase significantly in 6 months by $100k/year.
- Moving to a different ESP could potentially save us 10hrs/week or $26K/year in development costs.
At this stage, most of the time it attaches an importance and gives a perspective to the problem. As a business owner, it will help you decide at this stage if the migration is worth undertaking seriously. It will also help you see there might be one or two larger problems that you could solve by other means. For example, you want to do SMS but your current provider doesn’t offer that. Should you switch to a provider that does Email & SMS or add in an SMS only partner?
No one can predict the future and sales materials will always tend to paint a rose-colored picture of their product/service. That’s why it’s important to frame an evaluation from your business perspective, not relying on others’ claims that may or may not apply to your specific industry, business or team.
3) Develop Your Evaluation Criteria.
At this stage, you’re knee deep in the topic of migration. Taking some time to define your evaluation criteria will not be hard, but it can still get overlooked. Now that you’ve explored the topic and see areas of risk and potential impact clearly, we’re going to assess alternatives and our evaluation criteria is the scorecard.
Here’s how we tend to structure the evaluations we perform for clients.
Maintaining Performance: In this part of the evaluation, we look at integrations, automations, settings, reporting, email development, reporting features, deliverability tools and more. Basically we look at the businesses email marketing requirements and ask: Will the new ESP be able to maintain the email marketing performance? No one wants to take a step backwards. If there are missing features, or features that are different, we list and explain them.
Pricing Implications: In this part of the evaluation, we look at what the cost of the new ESP will be. We take into account differences in billing systems (ex: per contact vs. per send), we look at list growth trends, and we look at list hygiene tools. We try to paint a picture of what the end of the day cost implications will be.
Example: The price will be 30% less, but we’ll need to perform list hygiene monthly for $250.
New Opportunities: In this part of the evaluation, we pool together any new opportunities that we come across with the new ESP and assess if there is any potential gain in them. Does it open new doors? Does it make available new (and larger) talent pools? There may be things you can do with a new ESP that you simply have not been able to even entertain with your current provider.
Migration Process: In this part of the evaluation, we ask: What would migration look like? How much time and resources will it take to move things over? Will there be additional costs involved? Is there downtime expected? What kind of migration support can we expect from the provider? What’s a realistic date to start and complete migration?
Now that you have your scorecard, it’s time to perform the evaluation.
4) Narrow Down Your Shortlist.
During the first few parts of this, you will have many email service providers in mind. Now it’s time to narrow that down to 2 or 3 ESPs.
Each industry will be a little different, but here are a few the ESPs you’ll see on shortlists for small- to medium-sized businesses.
5) Evaluate Your Shortlist.
Now the fun part! It’s time to get to know the product.
-Take the product demo.
-Schedule calls.
-Sign up for their newsletters, follow them online.
-Set up a test account & invite your team to take a look.
What you’re doing is poking around the product and capturing the feedback in your Evaluation Criteria format. In our team, we usually have the whole team participate in this step. We have a working Google Document and everyone is asking questions, poking around, sharing screenshots.
After a few hours, there are usually 5-10 comments or questions that we couldn’t figure out on our own, either because it’s hard to see some things without a “real” account, or sometimes because features are only available on a particular plan. This is the right time to reach out to their sales team, share your questions, and try to hop on a more in-depth product demo with them. Note, it’s much more efficient to have a product demo after you’ve explored on your own.
Repeat this process for the other(s) on the shortlist.
Then review and as best you can, grade the candidates against your scorecard. At this point, you should have a strong feeling about what would be a good fit for your business and it’s time to present it and start planning out your migration project.
Empowering Small Businesses to Make the Right Choice
Migrating ESPs is never easy for any business, but we also believe it can be a good exercise to explore and ultimately it’s important to be in a tool that will help you reach your goals.
Don’t forget, you as the business owner are in control here. It’s your business; it’s your ESP; it’s your data. You have every right to look for better options. You also have every right to decide the change is not worth it, or it’s not the right time for your business and you’d rather undertake it next year.
By taking a strategic and systematic approach, you absolutely can make the right decision for the growth of your business and never look back. We are rooting for you!
Reach out if you need an extra hand assessing ESPs for your business. If you’re a small business, chances are we have experience performing these evaluations and may be able to help you get unstuck quickly.
About Centric Squared
Centric Squared is a growing email marketing agency driving significant revenue for our clients through Email and SMS Marketing. With a focus on CRM-driven marketing, our team of global marketing experts has generated $3 million in revenue for our clients last year alone. Are you looking for a strategic partner to support your CRM-growth or needing help migrating to a new email service provider? We’re committed to transforming businesses with data-driven strategies that enhance customer engagement and foster resilient growth. Let’s talk.