Five Things to Never Skip Before Your Next ESP Migration‍

Switching email platforms isn’t just a software change. It’s open-heart surgery on your customer communications. Most of the scars brands carry after a migration come from skipping the unglamorous prep work. Here are the five steps experienced CRM leads insist on doing first,  because each one can save weeks of firefighting later.

1. Clean before you connect

A migration copies everything that’s already in your ecommerce platform.

If that data is messy, you’re just importing the mess into a second place.

Riley Newman from Loop Earplugs put it bluntly:

“Clean your Shopify data before you turn the connection live. Getting it back out or cleaning it once it’s in two different places is a huge headache.”

Deduplicate profiles, fix naming conventions and settle on a single customer ID system before you flip the switch.

2. Map events before you draft a single email

Every abandoned-basket or win-back flow depends on specific triggers and properties.

If those don’t exist or aren’t firing, your campaigns won’t either.

Start by listing each flow you’ll need, then note the data events that power it.

Only once that’s mapped should you open the email editor.

3. Catalog every integration

Integrations often account for half the delays.

Make a list of every tool that needs to share data with the new ESP; loyalty apps, review platforms, quizzes, customer service tools,  and decide which can use native integrations and which will need custom work.

4. Plan the warm-up period, not just the launch date

Deliverability is earned slowly and lost instantly.

Define the cohorts you’ll move first, how many emails they’ll receive in the first week, and which segments will be phased in later.

Budget time for running the old and new platforms in parallel.

5. Guard your welcome flows

Bulk-importing customers can accidentally trigger welcome automations for people who’ve been on your list for years.

Add a migration flag to suppress imports from entering those flows until the cut-over is complete.

As one CRM lead admitted with a wince:

“I’ve made this mistake,  imported 200,000 profiles and the welcome flow fired to all of them.”

The migration shortcut that isn’t

Skipping these five steps looks like a shortcut, but it almost always creates a longer, and far more expensive, path.

Do them first and the visible part of the migration, the emails, will land exactly where you want them to: in the inbox, on time, and with your team still smiling.

Have questions? Feel free to DM me or schedule a call in my calendar.