Email marketing can be a powerful tool in a dog trainer’s marketing strategy — but what happens when you realize the email marketing platform you’ve been using is no longer the best choice for your business?

Changing your email marketing system can be intimidating, but sometimes making a change is in your business’ best interest.

Reasons to Consider Changing Your Email Marketing System

There are a number of different reasons you might decide to change your email marketing system.

Changing Your Email Marketing System Due to Pricing

As your email list grows, it’s worth periodically re-evaluating how much your email marketing platform charges you. Most email marketing tools (platforms like Kit.com, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign) charge based on the size of your email list—that is, the number of people or contacts that you have saved in their system.

Different platforms have slightly different tipping points for when prices increase and you may find that the platform that was cheapest when you started out has become the most expensive as your list continues to grow.

Changing Email Marketing Systems For More Features

As you learn more about what you can accomplish with a good email marketing platform, you may decide you need new features that aren’t available (or that aren’t user-friendly) in the platform you started out with.

For example, you may want to integrate your email marketing platform with your registration system, so that contacts are automatically marked with classes as they sign up… but perhaps your current system doesn’t offer that feature and another platform does.

Or you may want to be able to automate emails or create email sequences as part of  your marketing strategy or your client onboarding process… and your current system limits how many automations or the types of automations you can create, while another system offers more flexibility.

Changing Your Email Marketing System Because of Performance or Service

You may also find that the platform you’re using seems to be sending an awful lot of the emails you send out to your clients’ spam folders. Some providers get ‘blacklisted’ by popular email services like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft because spammers use them too frequently. Or maybe you find that you need help and the customer service for the platform you’re using isn’t ideal.

There are many reasons you might choose to change email marketing platforms… but once you’ve decided, what should that process look like? What should you consider?

Changing Your Email Marketing System: Step by Step

If you haven’t been doing a ton of email marketing or if you haven’t been using many of the more advanced features and tools available, this process may be VERY simple… but if you’re doing some of the cooler stuff email marketing can enable, planning out a process ahead of time is essential to avoid accidentally sending emails to people who shouldn’t get them or making big mistakes that make your business look unsophisticated and inept.

Step 1: Set Up Your New Account

The very first thing you’ll need to do after deciding to change your email marketing system is actually go in and set up a new account with your newly chosen email marketing provider.

If you’re working with Kit or Mailchimp we have guides to help you do that — but whatever tool you choose, you will need to create an account, set it up to send email as you, and create the list where your contacts will eventually live.

This often involves logging into your domain registrar (where you bought your domain name) and adding small snippets of text to your DNS records, or updating  some of your files there so that your emails won’t get flagged as spam (we walk you through this in our guides on email marketing — but feel free to book a call if you need help).

Your last step here should be to add yourself to your email list in your new account and send yourself a test email. This will let you know that everything is set up and working as it should.

Step 2: Document EVERYTHING

Once you’ve got your shiny new account set up, it’s time to document everything from your old platform. Go through your account carefully.

• If  you have email marketing incentives (ebooks, videos, or coupons that you send people if they sign up for your email list), make a list of what they are and where those files live.
• If you have any automations or email sequences set up, copy both the automations and the content of those emails into a word doc or a google doc, so that you have a backup. Sometimes a screenshot is enough here — other times you may want to write things out in a notes doc or document things in other ways.
• If there are emails you send often, for example a newsletter, take a look at the template you’re using and decide if that is something you need to keep a copy of so you can recreate it in your new email marketing platform.
• If you SELL digital products, be sure to look at how those work — any and all emails or files associated with that part of the process. How will those work in your new system?

Some dog trainers may find they have almost none of the above—in which case changing your email marketing system should be pretty simple. Others will find they have ALL of the above and need to step carefully to migrate everything successfully.

Step 3: Migrate Your Framework to Your New Account

If you have any of the above, now is the time to re-set it up in your new email marketing platform. Rebuild any automations, re-set-up any email incentives, and re-connect any digital products, etc.

Important Note: If you ARE migrating these types of frameworks, pay special attention to the triggers you are using. It’s very easy to accidentally set up a trigger that will cause you to send out unintended emails in bulk when you migrate your subscribers. Depending on your system, you may need to add a tag that causes an automation NOT to happen — and then assign that tag to all of your subscribers who have already gotten that email in the old system, to avoid spamming people with emails they do not need.

Step 4: Update Your Website & Sign Up Links

Once your shiny new email marketing system is all set up, the next step is to make it so NEW subscribers get added to the NEW system instead of the old one. This likely means updating any sign up forms on your website and any links you may have from your social media accounts.

Take time with this step and make sure you don’t miss any of the places where people can sign up — the last thing we want is for someone to go to sign up, end up in an old system you don’t use anymore, and never hear from you again!

Step 5: Notify Your Existing Subscribers (Optional)

Before officially moving all of your existing subscribers into your new system, it can sometimes be a good idea to let them know change is underway. It’s not uncommon for something to go wrong when changing your email marketing system (thus this guide!). So consider sending out a preemptive email that says, “Hey, we’re changing some things behind the scenes with our email marketing; if you see anything weird, we apologize in advance and would appreciate you letting us know!”

This can prevent people from being annoyed or upset if they get an unintended email — but if you have a very simple set up, this may be overkill. The cases where doing this are important is when you’re migrating a lot of automations, use a lot of segmentation, or otherwise have a more complex email marketing set up.

Step 6: Migrate Your Existing Subscribers

The second-to-last step in changing your email marketing system is to move over your email subscribers. You’ll want to begin by exporting your email contacts from your old email marketing system as a .csv file. All email marketing platforms should offer this option. After exporting all of that data (save a back up copy somewhere!), open up the file and take a look.

You’ll likely want to clean up the file a bit. Look for information that you won’t need going forward — for example, when leaving mailchimp, there’s often columns that are empty or labeled “member rating” or “cleaned,” with information you won’t need in your new system.

Make note of any tags or other information that you definitely want to use in the new system. You may find there are things you will need to set up in your new system (depending on what that system is) before import to ensure that information is added correctly.

Once you’ve cleaned up the file as much as you can, save it (again in a .csv format), and then go ahead and import it into your new platform!

Step 7: Test Your New System

The final step is to send out your first email using your new platform — if you notified your subscribers in advance that you were changing email marketing platforms, this may just be an email that lets them know that the process is now complete.

If you didn’t, it might just be a matter of sending out your typical newsletter or other update to your list.

Whichever makes sense for you, once you’ve successfully sent out your first email from your new system you can officially check changing email marketing platforms off your to do list!