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Marketing Strategy

As announced in early March 2021, email marketing platform Bronto will officially have its End of Life on May 31, 2022. In light of the news, many merchants have been left on the hunt for a new solution in order to get their data fully migrated before the platform closes shop.

Migrating your Email Service Providers (ESP) can be a daunting task not only because the merchant has to transfer all of their mailing lists, but they also have to find a platform that will provide the right features to grow their subscribers and reach their revenue goals.

In this article, you’ll find the advice we give to our merchant clients on Bronto, and how we’re helping them make the transition to a new platform.

Why You Should Migrate Now

Even though Bronto’s expiration date might seem far away, many customers are already evaluating alternative solutions to be fully migrated and ready ahead of the holiday season.

It can take time to familiarize yourself with a new email provider and to build your sender reputation, which is why we recommend Bronto customers make the move to Klaviyo between now and September 2021.

“Brands should start evaluating alternative email service providers now, and decide whether or not they have the capabilities to complete the migration process in-house,” advises The Stable’s Senior Email Marketing Manager, Morgan Maguire.

Selecting The Right ESP (What You Should Consider)

When selecting a new ESP, it’s important to consider your current email marketing needs and what you anticipate you’ll need in the future.

Here’s a checklist of key considerations during your search:

  • User experience– Is the platform easy to use for your brand’s needs?
  • Channel offerings– Are you looking for both Email and SMS?
  • Automation capabilities– Are you able to create the workflows your business needs?
  • Segmentation– Is there a limit on the number of mailing segments?
  • Existing integrations with popular platforms– Do they meet all your integration requirements?
  • Template building capabilities– Will you be able to build and design all the email templates that you currently have, or will need?

It’s also important to understand if your brand is trying to start with a clean slate, or replicate what you’ve already been doing. Especially if it’s the latter, you’ll likely want to ensure you’re choosing an email marketing solution that allows you to recreate workflows and templates as painlessly as possible.

Many of our clients have chosen to migrate their email marketing campaigns from Bronto to Klaviyo in light of the recent news. The Stable is a Gold Klaviyo partner and our email strategists have a strong relationship with the platform. Our team has seen it repeatedly deliver results for our clients.

Sunseting Your Bronto Account & Setting Up Klaviyo (Dos And Don’ts)

If you’re migrating from one ESP to another, it can seem like a bit of a headache to transfer all of your historical data to the new platform. It’s important to remember that it takes more than an export/import of your contact lists into the new platform; you’re going to want to be able to migrate historical information, segmentation, and in some cases, workflows.

As you sunset your Bronto account, make sure you:

  • Have a backup of all your historical dataYou want to have all contact information and history, as well as analytics reports and metrics.
  • Redirect all sign-ups to your new ESP This is super important, as this is a task that involves developer resources.

When it comes to migrating to your new Klaviyo account, after you make sure you have everything you need from your Bronto account, here’s a few things to keep in mind that you should DO:

Use this as an opportunity to audit your email data! Going through a migration gives your business the chance to make sure your contact data is clean and that you’re leveraging it to the best of your ability going forward. Additionally, this is a chance to sunset old templates and lists that aren’t performing well or worth your effort going onto the new platform. Work smarter, not harder!

Format your import file for Klaviyo. You want to ensure that your contacts are imported accurately, so it’s important to make sure that the CSV file is prepped correctly for Klaviyo. Klaviyo provides instructions on how to comb through your list for errors and correctly label column headers.

Upload active subscribers, unsubscribes, bounces, and suppressions to your Klaviyo Suppression list. Through your migration, you want to make sure you’re in compliance with spam laws and keep your email performance healthy. For active subscribers, Klaviyo recommends creating segments of your 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 120 days customers to set up a warming campaign.

Migrate or recreate your email templates from Bronto to Klaviyo. Klaviyo’s template builder will make it easy to recreate your templates from Bronto. It’s also possible to export the raw HTML code from your Bronto templates and upload it into Klaviyo.

In addition, it’s important to avoid some crucial pain-points during the whole process. Ensure that you DON’T:

Wait until the last minute to migrate from Bronto. There will be a learning curve and you want to be ready for the holidays.

Underestimate the technical work required. As stated earlier, this migration is not a drag-and-drop or export-import type of scenario. It will most likely take time and technical resources in order to fully build new signup forms, redirects, transforming files before import, etc.

Do it in-house unless you have the correct resources. You don’t want to lose any data in the process or waste weeks by trying to learn the process as you are executing it.

Work With The Stable

Migrating from one ESP to another is a delicate project that requires technical skills and in-depth knowledge of the different email providers. Unlike traditional email agencies, our cross-functional teams’ expertise in both Shopify development and email marketing guarantees a secure and painless transition.

With The Stable, our team will work with yours to:

  • Have a quick and secure migration
  • Setup templates, flows, and warming campaign structure
  • Start building your email reputation
  • Help your brand grow its email list and meet revenue goals through an ongoing email engagement

Reach out to our team here!