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Suzanne Carawan

By: Suzanne Carawan on August 7th, 2015

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Consideration Checklist: What You Need to Consider When Switching Email Providers

Email Marketing

mailto:demo@example.com?Subject=HighRoad Solutions - interesting article

Smart

While changing your email provider isn't as painful as switching out your AMS, you do want to make sure that you've got a good plan for how you want to make the transition as seamless as possible. Additionally, before you switch, you want to make sure that your new provider is going to offer you everything you need to provide the supporting services you need and ensure your email's reputation & deliverability.

We put together this checklist to help make it easy to ask the right questions to yourself & any new provider:

 

1)      Templates

  1. Template Rendering: How will your templates work in the new system? Most email platforms have their own quirks & you need to test your template within any new system to ensure how its going to render is what you wanted. Did you provide any time & resources to understand this aspect? 

  2. Email Antiquity: Most associations haven't designed their email templates from a mobile-first viewpoint. If you're moving platforms, don't bring an old template! Perhaps this is an opportunity to redesign and/or recode your templates to make them mobile-first and responsive (or better yet, adaptive)

  3. Email Graphics: Where are graphics currently hosted? Will you need to save these and reimport them to the new system? Email graphics work by making a call back to the server where the image is actually stored. If you change providers, you're changing the storage location of the image so make sure you've thought about moving your image library as part of your platform migration.

  4. Email Linking: Who will update image paths to new image host, update system tags, move templates, tweak & test? Ugh. Sounds like a lot? Consider outsourcing!

2)      Deliverability

  1. DKIM: Make a note to yourself that you're going to need to set up new DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) private keys to ensure that people know it's really you.

  2. Sender ID:  You'll need to make sure that you are setting up your new sender ID fields to help decrease phishing and bounce rates.

  3. Report Monitoring:  If you previously were monitoring your email's reputation, you need a plan for how that will continue. If you haven't been--yikes! Maybe time to set some resources aside to start.

  4. Dedicated IP: If you're sending gobs of email (if you're an association, trust me, you are), you should consider getting a dedicated IP with your provider to ensure the highest probability of deliverability. Like report monitoring, if you don't have a dedicated IP then double yikes!--get one! 

3)      Contacts/Subscribers & List Migration

  1. Contact Database Migration: How are you porting over contact database? Can you & in what format can you extract your data? 

  2. List Creation: Do you have resources assigned to re-establish lists, segments & personas if you aren't undertaking an integration? 

  3. Segmentation & Personas:  When you are moving to a new platform, it's always a good time to re-address your segmentation & persona strategy and do re-assignments (or assignments if you've never done this). Have you accounted for this? 
  4. Bounces & Invalids: Do you need to see if previous bounces/invalid/ineligible records are good email addresses? Are you sure that you're only importing good data and you aren't including total email addresses in your new contract? 

  5. Non-Responders: Most email marketing contracts are based on volume of email sent. Have you really scrutinized what your email subscriber base should be? Most associations give a total number of all people in their database, but this is cost inefficient and sets you up for low email metrics. Perhaps it's time to make hard decisions about who is your "active" subscriber based and only bring the people who have opened an email in the last year into your new system so that you can start with a truly active base. Have you thought about how many subscribers you truly have?

  6. Opt-Out & Preference Data: How are you accounting for opt-outs & preference data? If you previously collected information in your old system, you probably want to account for how you will export & import it into the new system.

 4)      Archiving

  1. Old Emails: How will you handle storing old emails? Many organizations like to keep copies. Do you have a good way to save these once you are off your old provider? Do you need to take screenshots & store them or keep the HTML? 

  2. Old Reports: Do you have a plan for what you’ll do with old reports? Can you import historic email data out of your system and put it into the new system, your AMS or some other type of data warehouse? Do you need to extract your reporting data and put somewhere?