What do you take with you?

Here is the minimum information you NEED to take and why:

  1. Bounce information and history – Re-mailing to old bounced addresses is a good way to get blocked and cause issue with your new provider before even breaking in your new home. Most ESPs will monitor your deployments during your on boarding to look for weird or abnormal behaviour from your account. This could cause termination of your account and further interruptions of your mailing program.
  2. Opt-outs – Failing to migrate these from one provider to another may result in; Excessive complaints, blocking or filtering, Legal issues (remember CAN-SPAM requires a 10 day opt-out), Privacy issues and investigations. This is a key hygiene process that should be completed before your first mailing with your new provider.
  3. Your from address – You have been asking your subscribers to Add to address book for the last two or more years, why ask them all to do it again with a new domain. Chances are only your loyal readers are going to see this and without proper notice and forethought it maybe too late and your already in their junk folder. With some careful planning and a couple days to adjust your settings your entire program can migrate from one system to another with out impeding the average program.
  4. Supporting Tools – Don’t forget to update your analytics, CRM solution, and other supporting aplications as needed. If these are critical pieces of your program you need account for them well in advance to changing providers and time your migration accordingly.

With these items your program should progress without many hickups or issues. Have any other tips or ideas for system migrations? Email them to contact or leave a comment.