ESP migration in a pressure-cooker economy: 10 frameworks for doing it right, according to the experts
Remember that scene in The Lion King, when Mufasa tells Simba their kingdom is “everything the light touches”?
Jen Brennan, director of digital marketing at full-service digital experience agency Northern Commerce, says that’s the best way to think about your brand’s email service provider (ESP).
“If you’re trying to achieve customer centricity and create positive customer journeys, your email marketing touches every part of your organization,” Brennan says.
From your IT team to your order fulfillment team to your customer success team and everyone in between, “every single one of them owns a piece of the customer journey,” Brennan emphasizes. “Everyone.”
More plainly, your business is only as good as your ESP. That includes your bottom line—and your profitability.
More plainly, your business is only as good as your ESP. That includes your bottom line—and your profitability.
At ecommerce businesses, Johnnie Regalado, director of engineering at Shopify-focused Tomorrow, encounters a lot of professionals who “tend to ignore email as an aspect of ecommerce work.”
On the surface, that makes sense. Compared to all the other mission-critical tasks you’re focused on in the midst of a historic economic downturn, taking a hard look at whether your ESP is accomplishing what you need it to accomplish might seem like a low priority.
In fact, the No. 1 reason brands don’t move forward with an ESP migration, says Justin Ragsdale, partner at full-service digital agency IM Digital, is fear. “The fear could be about any number of things, but often we keep coming back to the same thing—‘I’m using this, it’s working, I don’t want to change anything while I have a lot of irons in the fire,’” he explains.
But if anything, the pressure-cooker state of the economy is exactly why it might be the perfect time to re-evaluate your ESP options.
After all, your email and SMS lists are the only thing on the internet you truly own. Everything else, you’re temporarily renting. In 2023 and beyond, building strong relationships with loyal customers will depend largely on your ability to communicate with them in a way that makes them feel seen, heard, and valued.
Your email and SMS lists—as well as how you collect, organize, and use your customer data—is where that work starts.
“You’re looking for the tools that unlock more,” Regalado points out. “You don’t want to manually run a sync of the product catalog from the ecommerce site, or the ERP to the ESP, every day. You want all that stuff to be dealt with so you can just focus on creating and sending the best emails.”
So, is your current ESP delivering, or is it time to upgrade to a marketing platform that empowers you to, in Regalado’s words, “unlock more”?
We know those aren’t necessarily easy questions to answer. Here, we walk you through several mental frameworks to help you determine if ESP migration is really right for your business—and, if it is, what ducks you’ll need to get in a row before you begin.
10 reasons to switch ESPs: weak vs. strong motivations
Businesses of all sizes have plenty of reasons to switch ESPs. But not all reasons are created equal.
Look for your own motivations on this list of 10 expert-cited reasons businesses switch ESPs—do they fall in the weak bucket, or the strong?
1. Weak: You’re on the hunt for the lowest price
Today, Northern works with mid-market to enterprise clients on everything from development to marketing to performance creative. But the agency’s email and owned marketing solutions “cut our teeth,” Brennan says, migrating small to midsize businesses from Mailchimp to Klaviyo.
Lately, many of the clients Northern meets with are—understandably—“very price-sensitive,” Brennan points out. “Obviously with what’s going on in the economy right now, price sensitivity is at a higher level than it was even a year ago.”
But switching for price, Brennan says, “is one of the weakest reasons I hear come across the board.”
Why? Because it turns into one of Brennan’s biggest pet peeves: “treating marketing like a line item on your balance sheet.”
If you’re thinking about ESP migration, an important first step is “switching that mentality of not just being around price point,” says Brennan, who recommends kicking off that process by asking questions like:
- What is our monthly cost?
- What is our annual contract?
- What does all of that represent?
2. Strong: You’re re-evaluating total cost of ownership
Compared to price, total cost of ownership can be “hard to wrap your mind around,” Ragsdale says. “Because yeah, you have your licensing fees, you have your use fees, but what about all the headaches you have or don’t have? How do you price that out?”
That might mean the time you spend waiting for support you never get, or it might mean the time you spend working with a newly hired CSM who “has no idea how to use this proprietary technology, and they just send you support articles you already read,” Ragsdale explains. “How do you quantify the cost of those types of intangibles?”
Especially at the top of 2023, when the “macroeconomic situation is not looking good for a lot of businesses,” Ragsdale says, “a platform might be more expensive, or it might be a little bit cheaper, or it might be the same. You have to go into this thinking about, how do we cut costs? How do we do more with less? That’s the key factor here.”
“If you’re spending more on the platform but you’re making more money on it,” Brennan agrees, “then that ROI is still an ROI-positive relationship.”
3. Weak: You’re reacting, not responding, to a negative experience
Brennan’s also not a huge fan of any motivation for migration “that’s very reactive.”
“That could be a multitude of things,” Brennan says, “but if you’re coming at this conversation because you had one poor user experience—something didn’t deploy or something didn’t fire the right way and now you’re just mad and you want to leave—don’t do that.”
In other words, “don’t rage quit a platform,” Brennan advises, laughing. “Don’t go into things reactively, because especially when we’re talking about ESPs, there’s so much feature functionality baked into these platforms that some of them are going to work for you and some of them aren’t.”
“If you’re not being cognizant of what your real values and goals and pain points are,” Brennan continues, “you may end up making a reactive decision that’s not a good one.”
That’s especially dangerous if you’re considering a platform that has an annual contract, Brennan cautions: “Now you’re locked into something that may not fit your needs.”
4. Strong: You can’t accomplish what you need to accomplish
Of course, there’s rage quitting, and there’s valid frustration. If you have a solid understanding of what you’re trying to get out of your ESP and your current platform simply isn’t delivering, it might be time to start seriously thinking about ESP migration.