Stay Ahead of the Game: Essential Strategies & Planning for Migrations

In the fast-evolving marketing landscape, the migration of campaigns from legacy platforms to modern innovative solutions has become a crucial strategic maneuver. New solutions enable businesses to leverage advanced functionalities, integrate ecosystems, and enhance campaign effectiveness. By shifting from legacy platforms businesses can overcome limitations, optimize their strategies, and stay ahead of the competition.

In this first blog of our 4-part series, we will explore the intricacies of marketing campaign migration and how to maximize the value derived from marketing efforts. Upcoming segments will delve into key elements like end-to-end migration planning, ensuring data integrity, security during migration, and sharing leading practices for a successful cutover.

Campaign migration is a complex process that requires careful management and cross team coordination. Employing a holistic migration framework that considers people, process, technology, data, and compliance improves the likelihood of success.

The migration framework outlined above provides a holistic approach, considering key aspects at every stage. Marketers can begin by identifying essential elements required at each phase, giving a broad perspective on what to achieve and how to do it successfully.

Performance Analysis and Campaign Rationalization:

During the pre-migration phase, it is vital to analyze the performance of current campaigns. Performance metrics will vary by campaign and team, but conversion rate is a common starting point. Evaluating current state performance metrics enables organizations to determine whether a campaign should be migrated & optimized, consolidated, or discontinued.

This analysis supports migrating impactful campaigns to the new solution while also providing benchmarks to compare the performance against the new solution. By analyzing campaigns prior to migration, organizations can streamline their efforts and focus on high value campaigns. This not only enhances overall marketing effectiveness, but also simplifies and streamlines the migration by reducing the overall level of effort.

Once campaigns have been evaluated, an overall migration strategy can be formulated. This strategy includes defining clear goals and objectives for the migration and agreeing on key KPIs and success criteria and then moving into detailed activity planning to execute against the overall strategy.

Initial Data Migration Planning:

The data migration is both the most complex area of the migration while also presenting one of the most significant opportunity areas. The first step is the high-level data mapping, this involves identifying the key sources and destinations that data come from and flow to as well as the key categories of data used to power existing campaigns.

It also includes the identification of any historic data that may be required for future campaigns or compliance reasons. This will lay the core foundation for more detailed data migration planning and provide high level guidance on core solution configurations.

Initial Solution Configuration:

Before anything can be migrated, the new solution must have core features configured. This involves key steps like creating user accounts, activating single sign-on (SSO), and defining user roles and access permissions. By diligently undertaking this initial setup and configuration, organizations can minimize disruptions and optimize productivity throughout the migration process.

Detailed Data Mapping:

Data mapping is the most crucial step in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the campaigns identified for migration. To begin, double-click on the sources, destinations, structures, and formats of your existing data set. Be sure to understand how data flows from start to finish for each campaign. Understanding nuances in the data can enable your team to identify potential challenges and determine transformations needed during the migration.

A comprehensive mapping document helps ensure that the original data is aligned with the new system or platform's structure, identifies corresponding fields, and attributes, and facilitates the accurate transfer of data. This meticulous mapping is crucial for validating the alignment of data with the original source to maintain data integrity. Throughout the mapping process, it is important to promptly record and resolve any errors that may occur to prevent any negative impact on the migrated campaigns.

Data Standardization & Normalization:

A migration initiative provides an opportunity to standardize and normalize historically inconsistent data. To achieve this, it is important to establish data standards and formats that will be applied in the new system. These standards and formats should encompass naming conventions, standardized dates and numbers, and a unified system for categorization or tagging.

Map the data from existing sources to the new destination and leverage the predefined data standards to clearly articulate the transformations needed. Additionally, implement validation techniques to verify the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of the mapped data, ensuring a successful data mapping process. Key challenge areas that frequently require attention are duplicate record and free form text fields.

Content Inventory & Migration:

A successful migration requires a combination of data and creative content. Gathering a complete inventory of the content required to migrate campaigns is critical for success. It may also present an opportunity for campaign creative to be revisited and content tests to be activated upon deployment in the new solution.

Teams should pay special attention to campaigns that run across geographies and may be deployed in multiple languages. Rebuilding these campaigns requires more time for configuration and testing and regional differences may require additional reviews and approvals.

The migration effort is also the perfect catalyst to review and validate existing campaign assets align with brand standards and meet compliance needs. The detailed review provides an opportunity to reduce duplicate content in operational systems and enable teams to standardize content taxonomy and metadata.

Campaign Build & System Cutover Planning:

Developing a well-structured cutover plan requires data from each of the sections above and is essential to ensure a seamless campaign migration. Establish a timeline for the cutover process, considering campaign schedules, geographic intricacies, dependencies on data, and upcoming blackout periods.

By following this approach, the potential disruption to active campaigns can be minimized, ensuring a seamless migration process. It is vital to conduct comprehensive testing before and after the cutover. Running test campaigns and comparing the results with the original campaigns will serve as a validation step to ensure accuracy and completeness of the migrated data. This meticulous testing phase will effectively identify any issues or discrepancies, enabling swift resolution.

Hypercare and Post-Launch support:

The post-migration phase is crucial for ensuring a seamless transition. Ongoing assistance, monitoring, and troubleshooting are essential to help guarantee optimal performance as the new solution goes live. Timely and knowledgeable support is crucial as users may encounter difficulties or have questions. Supporting users will instill confidence in navigating the new system effectively and drive adoption of the new solution.

Ongoing Monitoring and Optimization:

Through Hypercare and post-launch support, the focus seamlessly shifts to ongoing monitoring and optimization. Building upon the support provided during Hypercare, continuous tracking and analysis are necessary to maximize campaign effectiveness.

By taking a data-driven approach and closely monitoring campaign performance metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates, valuable insights can be gained. This data analysis uncovers patterns, trends, and optimization opportunities. For example, if a creative consistently underperforms, alternatives can be explored, and A/B testing conducted to identify the most effective design. Based on Litmus' analysis, the inclusion of AB and spam testing in your email program has the potential to yield a significant 28% increase in return on investment.¹

Change Management and Communication:

Teams significantly increase their risk of failing to drive adoption of the new solution without a structured approach to change management. Persona focused change management is a leading practice that helps drive adoption and increase the success rate of migrations, especially compared to traditional one size fits all approaches.

A persona-based approach uses a combination of communication and training tailored to unique audiences (e.g. administrators, marketing managers, data engineers). It focuses on driving home what is changing, the value of the changes and the impact the changes will have on that audience.

The approach also includes conducting regular check-ins and establishing processes to gather feedback as the transition continues. Building a strong support network and open lines of communication foster acceptance and adoption of the new system and drive business impact.