How to Make a Smooth Transition Without Losing Your Audience

We are continuing our series for the month of May on email marketing reset. Today’s episode is entitled “How to Make a Smooth Transition Without Losing Your Audience”. Last week we talked about whether or not it was time to switch your email service provider. If you have not seen that blog, I highly recommend that you go back and do so before you read this one. It will help you understand what we’re talking about.

Today we’re going to talk about the critical steps you need to take when moving from one email service provider to another, without confusing or losing your subscribers. Switching email service providers can seem overwhelming, but if you follow these steps, prepare, and back things up, then the transition will be smoother.

Back Up Your Email List

Before you move anything, the very first step that you’ll want to take is to back up your list. Here’s how you do this. You will go into your current email service provider and you will export your current subscriber list. In this file, which needs to be a CSV file, you will want to include all custom fields. Some potential custom fields might be your first name, tags, segments, et cetera. You’ll want to download any current copies of email templates, landing pages, and automation workflows.

An optional piece would be to back up your email performance reports that show how many people opened versus how many people clicked, all that deliverability data. If you want those reports, you can do this. I would however recommend doing what I mentioned above before hand.

Migrate Your Automations and Tags

I’ll be honest, migrating automations and tags can be a little bit of a headache. Let me walk you through this step by step.

1. Create a list of all your active automations and tags that are in your current platform.
2. Decide what you really need to bring over and what you can leave behind.
3. Rebuild essential automations in your new email service provider. For example, your welcome sequence and lead magnet.
4. Re-apply tags manually or with some import rules. Many platforms will let you import your tags. Recently I shared with you that I am helping to migrate a client from MailChimp over to Kit. Kit has a lot of automated pieces to their migration process, which made it super simple.
5. Test each email or each automation with a dummy email to make sure that it’s working before going live.

Notify Your Subscribers

Remember to tell your subscribers of the change, communication is key to trust and continuity. You will want to notify them, ideally, one to two emails before and after the transition. An example of something you can say is “We are improving our emails and moving to a new system. You may notice some slight changes. Here’s how to stay connected”. Another example you could use is “We are moving email homes, thank you for staying on this journey with me”. Make sure that you tell them to White List this email address to make sure they get future updates. Most importantly, you want to reassure them that their information is safe and you will continue to deliver value to them.

The main thing you want to remember is that you want to be prepared. Switching email service providers can be a daunting task, but if you start with this list of things to do in mind and you prepare and back things up, then it will be so much easier. Plan ahead for how you will handle the switch over and how you will share and communicate with your list. You’ll want to pre-write out the “we are moving” emails to use later. Audit your list and see who has been opening the emails and who hasn’t. You can even go in and audit the automations that you have and decide is it worth keeping this automation and moving it over, or is it not. That will help you simplify your email marketing in the process of this move. You may find that you can clean up your email list in this process.

Looking Ahead

Next week I will have a guest on my podcast and we’re going to be talking about building a better email strategy and how to engage and grow your list. She will be sharing on how to know who is opening your emails. She will also share on how to re-engage people in your email list once they are not opening your emails, giving them a chance to re-engaged with your emails.

As I mentioned last week, one of the things that I have failed to do as a podcaster is to ask for your feedback. If there is topic that you would like to hear about on the podcast, please contact me, I would love to hear from you. If you have enjoyed the podcasts, I would love for you to go over to Apple Podcast and leave me a rating and a review. I appreciate it as these reviews are very helpful to me. If you are not a member of The Christian Business Advantage Facebook group, I would love to invite you to join the group. It’s free and I offer a ton of value in there. Go over to Facebook and type in The Christian Business Advantage and it’ll pop up so you can join.