Email best practices
7 must know tips when switching email service providers
Discover the crucial steps to take when considering switching email service providers. Learn what you need to do for ESP migration.
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There are various reasons companies make the jump to a new service provider, whether it be a growing contact list, new budget or need for new features, but ultimately the switch is a good opportunity to re-evaluate current sending processes and improve deliverability.
If you're in process of switching email service providers then you're in luck. We’ve put together a handy checklist for you to reference, so you can spend less time stressing about the migration and more time planning out your year ahead.
1. Sign up to your new Email Service provider and make sure it’s up and running. When creating a new account, make sure that you use the same sender name and address so your existing customers can recognise you. Here's a quick tip on how to create a personal sender name.
2. On the new platform, confirm Authentication Keys (DKIM SPF) are set up with new email IP address. This will ensure high deliverability, especially if you’re looking to send emails through SMTP. Here's some more info on DKIM in case we made you curious.
3. Migrate your contacts, either manually by download it as a CSV file or if your email provider is supported, you can automate this process by using elastic.io. One important thing to remember here is to make sure you also migrate your bounced and unsubscribe contacts! This is to ensure you don’t SPAM anyone by accident and risk having your new account blocked.
4. Make sure to rebuild your reputation since you’re moving IP address & domain (warming process - send slowly). This means as a rule of thumb, for the first couple of weeks after migrating to Mailjet, break down your contact list of 50k to 4 portions and send one blast to 12.5k per day for 4 days. Repeat this process for the first 2 to 3 weeks. This is to ensure that you don’t trigger any SPAM alerts.
5. Remember to migrate your HTML email templates that you worked so hard to create. This is fairly important as your customers are used to receiving a certain look and feel from your emails, so it’s important to maintain these standards. Again this can be an easy process as you will be able to copy and paste the HTML codes from your previous dashboard on to your new email provider.
6. With the new email templates migrated, make sure to check all your links still work and amend that don’t. Especially the unsubscribe button!
7. Finally give your customers a heads up (ask them to add your email address to their address book to help deliverability and ensure they continue to receive your messages). In case you haven't contacted your customers for a while, you may want to consider opting them in once more to make sure they still want to receive your emails!. Here's some wisdom around benefits of double opting in.
