The First 90 Days of a Successful Customer Engagement Platform Migration
A migration can be a time to change not only your communication platform, but also your communication strategy – with risks of over- or under-sending, broken personalization, and inconsistent user experiences, getting it right is crucial.
You’re migrating Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) or Email Service Providers (ESPs) for a reason – whether it’s better functionality in the new platform or moving away from constraints in the legacy platform. Starting a migration process can be daunting, especially if you’ve been on your platform for years; there are users to migrate, templates and campaigns to move, not to mention all the data powering your automations. A migration can be a time to change not only your communication platform, but also your communication strategy – with risks of over- or under-sending, broken personalization, and inconsistent user experiences, getting it right is crucial. The first 90 days are critical to setting your team up for success.
Days 1-30: Define the Vision and Strategy
Ragnarok has completed hundreds of migrations to Iterable over the years, and one thing stands out: CEP/ESP migrations are an opportunity to modernize and optimize your marketing program. Over time, teams create one-off journeys, emergency “oops” sends, and unpublished flows that end up cluttering your system and causing operational drag.
Once you determine your best path forward – whether it’s a lift-and-shift or a true modernize-and-optimize – you’ll need to anchor your migration efforts to business goals. Whether your goal is improved conversion rates, increased personalization, or something else altogether, keeping these goals in mind ensures you’re tracking towards continuous improvement rather than checking the boxes of implementation. This is also the moment to identify cross-functional partners you’ll need: engineering, data, and compliance. Getting leadership support is key to making sure there’s space for integration support and any data clean-up that needs to happen to keep the team unblocked. CEP/ESP migrations don’t happen in a silo, and early buy-in reduces risk and keeps you on track. In organizations with busy engineering teams, it can be difficult to carve out time in upcoming sprints.
Finally, use this phase to perform a thorough audit of your existing setup. Catalog what’s currently sending, understand the data powering each message – from triggers to personalization – as well as priority within the migration. Consider what messages you need to migrate (core marketing automations, reusable content components) and what can stay in the legacy platform. This is a great time to note any red flags as well, such as very complex journeys, automations that haven’t been reviewed recently, or messages relying on old and outdated data. This level of clarity sets the foundation for your team to be efficient and intentional.
Days 30-60+: Execution, Testing, and Monitoring
Once your goals and priorities are set and you know what data you need, it’s time to get into the execution phase. Staying organized here is key to protecting customer experiences.
Get started by migrating and validating your foundational data – things like email addresses, names, and loyalty point values – that you’ll be leveraging often in your campaigns. This also supports your IP Warming efforts as you migrate your most engaged users into the platform – one of the most important parts of a migration. Warming your new IP tells inbox providers like Google and Yahoo that you’re a valid sender, ensuring your messages make it to users’ inboxes (and not their spam folder). Iterable’s Data Schema Management tool is powerful to keep track of naming conventions, data types, and definitions. Its ability to block unwanted data is incredibly valuable to protect your schema.
Image source: https://support.iterable.com/hc/en-us/articles/26678893969812-Data-Schema-Management-Overview
Once you’re confident with your data and IP Warming is well underway, you can begin rebuilding your high-priority automations that anchor your strategy. Testing and monitoring is critical in this phase. Keeping a close eye on rendering, user paths through automations, and deliverability will help catch any errors before they cause a problem. Since you’ll have programs running in both platforms at this point, monitor your users’ subscription states to ensure they’re staying aligned across both ESPs. Leverage the metrics in both tools to ensure you’re still tracking well. Iterable’s reporting features can be leveraged for individual campaigns and journeys, a group of tags (such as all campaigns tagged ‘IP Warming’), and everything running in the whole project – making it easy to get a bird’s eye view and drill down to specific metrics.
Throughout this phase, treat each component as an opportunity to simplify and optimize your automations. Migrations often reveal areas where journeys have gotten messy, overcomplicated, or just too manual. Instead of copying every legacy flow exactly, question if steps are still needed, align with your goals, or can be improved in the new platform. This will likely take more than 30 days, especially with a large program and IP Warming. That’s okay!
Days 60-90+: Operationalize and Scale
As you enter the final phase of your migration, the focus will shift from building to getting comfortable in your new platform. Your foundational data and core automations have already been implemented – now you’ll transition to monitoring metrics and setting the team up for continued success.
While you’re monitoring your core sends, continue migrating the remainder of your campaigns to your new CEP/ESP. Leverage Iterable’s existing out-of-the-box reporting and its ability to send system events out to other systems to take advantage of the tools at your disposal. With both of these, it’s easy to track deliverability and engagement metrics to ensure you’re keeping ahead of any unexpected patterns.
Just as important as setting up your platform is making sure your team members are confident using it. Invest time during this phase in documenting your setup, internal enablement sessions, and clear ownership to guide users in leveraging the new tool to its full potential. This documentation should also include processes like QA, governance, and testing to prevent clutter and inconsistencies from creeping back in. Encourage your team to leverage Iterable’s Academy as well, which is a great starting point for new users and an excellent reference for power users.
Iterable Academy
Finally, take some time to evaluate the early results against your business goals from the start of the migration. Are you seeing improved conversion rates? More personalization leading to better clicks? These insights both help you optimize your setup and provide a narrative of value to the business – reinforcing the importance of the migration and securing continued buy-in and support cross-functionally.
The first 90 days of your migration set the foundation for everything that follows. A successful CEP or ESP migration isn’t defined by how quickly you get data moved from one platform to another. It’s defined by how intentionally you consider your marketing program, clarify goals, and strengthen your processes. Treat this as an opportunity to streamline and refocus your strategy, and you’ll come out with a program that’s positioned for scalable, long-term growth. Ragnarok is here to help from beginning to end – from your tool evaluation and your RFP all the way through a successful migration.
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