Seamless migration to your new marketing automation platform

The decision has been made: your company is migrating to a new marketing automation platform.  Congrats!  This will be a great move for the business.  The best marketing automation platforms create efficiencies for your team, enables you to collect invaluable data on customer behaviour, and delivers stronger ROI from your marketing activity. 

Exciting times and significant growth lay ahead.  However, there’s the hurdle of migrating to the new platform.  Whether your team is switching from old to new, or setting one up for the very first time, the process will take more effort, time, and be more complex than you expect.  All vendors have a plan for migration, but you’ll still need a team and processes on your side to make it a success. 

Don’t let this deter you, though.  With a rock-solid plan, appropriate resources and a dedicated delivery team in place, you can make it as pain-free as possible and reduce risk to the business.  

We’ve helped a number of Australia and New Zealand go through this process, so we know a thing or two about successful transitions.  Here’s everything you and your marketing team need to consider before any marketing automation migration.

GET THE FOUNDATIONS RIGHT

Every successful project starts with getting the foundations right, and marketing automation is no exception.  Get these in place to set you and your team up for success.

Establish ways of working

Your migration project needs several important documents to guide the team:

• A clear project plan and RACI (responsibility assignment matrix), with tasks allocated and sequenced 

• Realistic timeframes within the project plan.  These should be regularly reviewed as you get into the process

• A clear decision-making hierarchy.  There will be more small decisions to be made along the way that will have varying degrees of impact.  Ensure you have a core team with a key decision maker

Finally, there needs to be clear and regular communication with the migration team – we recommend you set up a dedicated communication channel. 

create a dedicated team with sufficient capacity

Adding a migration to your existing team’s workload without adjustment is setting up the project for failure.  So, you will need a dedicated team. Dedicated resources and skilled hands amplify success and significantly reduce risk to the company.

From previous migrations, we see that companies that have been the most successful have a team comprising of:

• Dedicated resource to assist with the new data flows

• A project manager

• A lead from your existing team (someone to have overview, make decisions and deal with any issues that pop up)

• Someone to do the heavy lifting of your current campaign calendar, as well as migration, build, testing and delivery

Much of the success of the migration hinges on the project team understanding the new platform, too.  Yes, this does mean that some time will need to be invested in learning and investigations – ideally from the get-go, not later down the track when the platform is live!  They’ll also need to decide on the right shape of the data, the right build of automations, details and messaging.  It sounds like a lot, but we want your team to hit the ground running and start delivering ROI.

Prepare the data

Data feeds your marketing automation system.  Without clean, quality data, the new platform that you’ve invested so heavily in could be rendered useless (or do more harm than good).  It’s essential to prepare it beforehand. 

Data review

The first step is to review the data you have, what you use, and what you no longer need.  If you need fresh data, an implementation project is often the best way to get new data sources or even change your approach, especially if you’re aligning your offline data with Web and App feeds.

If your data is in disarray or of poor quality, we can help with a data clean.  Organised and usable data is essential to maximising the output of your marketing automation platform.

Prepare and optimise

Here are a few critical actions that’ll need to be taken to get the most out of your freshly cleaned and organised data.  And don’t worry – if you’re not sure where to start how to execute these, our marketing automation experts are here to help.

• Define the right speed of your data.  We recommend a ‘speed of business’ approach, with a blend of data speeds that will make the difference

• Optimise and document your data flows and data structure

• Focus on data quality – you’ll need this for delivering personalisation at scale

• You may want to establish datamarts, data lakes or CDP’s – or a combination of all of them.  All add value if used in the right way.  Ask your delivery team for a recommendation best suited to your business and goals

• Expose response data to external reporting platforms. This step is often overlooked or dropped due to cost or time overruns. However, the benefits are significant; it can help with improved analysis and more confident decision-making

Considerations for your marketing team

Unfortunately, migrating to a new platform isn’t a simple “lift and shift”.  There are many details to address – but that’s where the magic is.  Keeping these details in mind will help your migration to the new platform (and the decommissioning of the old one) as painless as possible.

Audit your existing campaigns and infrastructure 

Before any migration and decommission, make sure your team conducts an audit and documents all your existing campaigns, APIs, landing pages, automations, segmentation rules – essentially, everything you don’t want to lose! 

Review all automated campaigns and validate their targeting, steps, and the content itself.  You have a blank slate to iron out any inconsistencies such as naming conventions, content, folder structures and reporting, not to mention your campaign processes.  Now is also the best time to clarify sender names, reply-to addresses, SSL hosting (most vendors offer it), inbox placement, and BIMI.

Managing your old marketing automation platform 

Don’t decommission your old marketing automation platform just yet. You’ll need to keep it running and collecting unsubscribe actions for a certain period after your last email.  This can vary, but it’s typically 14-28 days.  Check with your current provider and ensure you comply with any regulations that may apply to your company.  Remember, you need to ramp down when turning off the old and ramp up when migrating to the new.

LEVERAGE THE EXPERTS

Projects are always much smoother with a team of experts to back you.  Your new vendor will never be more engaged with you than during your onboarding - we recommend you make the most of their support. 

Datamine is also here to help, from planning, preparation, and platform implementation to ongoing optimisation and guidance.  You’ve likely spent a small fortune investing in a new marketing automation platform; we’re here to ensure it delivers the most ROI, as fast as possible.  Get in touch today for a no-obligation initial discussion.