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Many firms depend on inflexible, outdated, legacy techniques that don’t empower them to maintain up with the fast-paced nature of contemporary shoppers or scale to satisfy their progress. Others rely on a mess of built-in level options that make it difficult to execute engagement successfully.
Nevertheless, shifting to a brand new system can appear extremely daunting; it means rewriting your processes and procedures, studying a brand new answer from scratch, and migrating your treasured knowledge. And with this shift come dangers, together with how safe the info switch is, how lengthy it’s going to take to be taught the brand new system and execute campaigns, and the way lengthy earlier than you’ll get worth from the prices related to the migration.
It’s no shock then, that many firms have anxiousness round making this shift. Regardless of understanding {that a} change will definitely be helpful, it means leaving the perceived security of what you understand and venturing into the unknown. Nevertheless, this ‘security’ is actually solely based mostly in your familiarity with the system, and never its precise capability to ship the shopper engagement options and capabilities required to satisfy buyer expectations.
Potential dangers apart, with out the proper system in place, you’re lacking out on vital engagement alternatives since you don’t have an optimized advertising tech stack for buyer engagement.
On this article, we’ll make it easier to get a kickstart on navigating the complicated (and generally scary) migration course of by explaining the advantages of platform migration and easy methods to do it efficiently.
What’s Platform Migration & Why is it Essential?
A platform migration is the method of transferring your group’s digital property from an present answer to a brand new one. This implies migrating all your knowledge, together with buyer particulars, account info, campaigns, content material, and extra.
Client conduct is consistently altering which implies that entrepreneurs should frequently assess and consider the know-how they use to interact them.. On the similar time, know-how can be evolving quickly. Failing to adapt can result in important drops in effectivity and output, resulting in greater buyer churn and misplaced income.
Updating your tech stack is vital to make sure your operations can preserve tempo as you scale and develop. Typically, this may be accomplished utilizing an improve to your present answer, an add-on, or a third-party integration, however in different instances, it could be time for a full platform migration.
What Does a Buyer Engagement Platform Migration Entail?
A buyer engagement platform (CEP) migration entails consolidating knowledge out of your present techniques and migrating it to a brand new CEP. By the top of a CEP migration, you’ll have totally migrated all of your knowledge and have your new system totally arrange and operational. This implies transferring all buyer knowledge, marketing campaign knowledge, and buyer journey knowledge.
When migrating to a brand new buyer engagement platform, you’ll must take various essential steps. The platform migration guidelines under lists just a few of the principle issues it’s essential to do to finish the migration.
- Set up your new knowledge taxonomy and construction: Design the info taxonomy you propose on utilizing in your new platform and restructure your previous knowledge to suit this new system. Ensure you’re considerate about your construction and configure your knowledge so that you’re capable of leverage new options and capabilities successfully.
- Arrange your integrations: It’s usually perfect to have your integrations arrange as a lot as attainable earlier than migrating knowledge to keep away from points. Arrange your integrations for net, iOS, Android SDK, electronic mail onboarding (and for different channels), and APIs so the back-end is operational.
- Migrate person profiles and buyer knowledge: Migrate your buyer knowledge, together with person attributions and properties like their private particulars and account info, in addition to buyer exercise knowledge and preferences.
- Migrate all related marketing campaign knowledge: Salvage your present (and profitable) campaigns by migrating all marketing campaign knowledge, together with metadata, segments, content material, and scheduling. Ensure you maintain your main campaigns whereas becoming them into your new system so you possibly can combine further options.
- Migrate buyer journey knowledge: Hold profitable journeys intact by migrating all buyer journey knowledge, together with buyer journey maps, web site and cell app navigation insights, cohort insights, and many others,
- Migrate knowledge for added performance: Now’s the time emigrate any knowledge associated to optionally available options you’re trying to make the most of, together with any knowledge related to a Dynamically Customized Messaging (DPM) setup, a content material API setup, or PII tokenization.
You have to migrate all of your knowledge securely with out loss. It’s a frightening activity and it’s essential to belief the supplier you select along with your knowledge. That can assist you make the proper alternative, we’ve created a CEP purchaser’s information, full with a breakdown of an enterprise-level migration course of.
The right way to inform your buyer engagement platform isn’t working
For those who aren’t seeing the engagement you count on out of your campaigns, or they merely take an excessive amount of effort and time to deploy and handle, it could be an indication that it’s essential to replace your CEP.
Under, we have a look at some high indicators that your present CEP is not performing as much as customary (and will should be changed).
- Lack of automation capabilities: As your online business grows, it turns into inconceivable to do work manually, at scale. These processes may cause operational friction and inefficiencies, and may even result in bottlenecks that utterly halt operations.
- The tech stack is simply too gradual: Whether or not your staff is simply too reliant on builders, your knowledge is siloed, or the interface of your present CEP is subpar, points along with your tech stack may end up in gaps between your planning and execution and may make it extraordinarily troublesome to react shortly and proper course when issues go south.
- The present system has grow to be too complicated: For those who’re working too many campaigns and initiatives throughout varied platforms and struggling to successfully maintain monitor, manage, and handle all of them, you might must consolidate your efforts with a single answer that may do extra.
- Restricted integration capabilities: A CEP wants to have the ability to combine seamlessly with the opposite instruments and software program that make up your Martech stack. It should additionally empower your staff to ship higher buyer experiences whereas bettering operational effectivity.
- Inadequate buyer help: Your vendor shouldn’t simply promote you a product, they need to help you from onboarding, to integration, and thru to ongoing use, guaranteeing that you simply’re persistently getting probably the most out of your CEP. Sufficient help is vital to make sure you could resolve points proactively and reduce downtime.
- Lacking intuitive options: A single particular person has a restrict on how a lot they’ll take a look at and implement. With AI, firms can transcend human capabilities and do issues people can’t, like predict buyer actions, take a look at quite a few campaigns at scale, and make course-corrections in real-time.
- Buyer and marketing campaign insights are unclear: A CEP must empower you to grasp your clients’ exercise and conduct so you possibly can present higher buyer experiences. For those who’re combating knowledge silos, don’t have real-time analytics, or your knowledge merely isn’t complete or correct sufficient, you’ll battle to search out actionable insights and run efficient campaigns.
For a extra in-depth evaluation of why you have to be utilizing a contemporary, mobile-first buyer engagement platform that’s insights-led, overview our full record of warning indicators you want an clever buyer engagement platform.
6 Buyer Engagement Platform Migration Methods to Comply with
Now that you understand the fundamental steps to comply with within the preliminary section of the migration and what to search for in your individual system which will warrant a migration, it’s time to take a look at high methods for finishing up your migration efficiently to completion.
Under, we cowl a number of the finest CEP migration methods and finest practices to comply with.
1. Make clear the required steps and phases to ascertain a practical timeline
Work along with your new vendor to map out every stage of the migration, together with migration parts, what every step entails and timelines, and who would should be concerned from each groups. Overview this along with your staff and your CEP’s staff to set it in stone.
- Be particular: Don’t simply determine “knowledge migration” as a stage, however record the info parts (like person attributes and properties), and the way it’s being imported (CSV or API) to verify all the pieces is accounted for.
- Be lifelike: Guarantee your staff has the bandwidth to contribute to every stage as you might have mapped it out, and ask for examples out of your CEP of migrations they’ve accomplished that require an analogous quantity of labor to set a practical objective for the way lengthy the migration will take.
- Maintain everybody accountable: Guarantee all staff members comply with the established timeline and designate somebody accountable for policing this all through the migration course of.
💡Enjoyable Truth: Drop, a card-linked affords and rewards app, went reside by way of MoEngage in simply seven days. Our flexibility and ease of integration ensured that they had well-documented SDKs and APIs so they may simply import historic knowledge, combine buyer and occasion knowledge, and arrange server-to-server backend occasions so they may shortly and simply activate electronic mail and push notifications.
2. Set up a staff and designate clear obligations for every particular person
You’ll probably wish to appoint a chosen staff for the migration job, with stakeholders from all crucial groups and departments, equivalent to product improvement, advertising, IT, and knowledge administration. The objective is to have a CEP that allows all your staff members to do their jobs extra successfully and effectively, so that you’ll wish to faucet their insights and experience when planning and implementing the migration to make sure every staff’s wants can be met.
- Be inclusive: Embrace stakeholders from all departments so that each division has direct entry and may present enter.
- Keep in contact: Don’t simply meet as soon as initially of the method; ensure you verify in frequently with one another and have open traces of communication so you possibly can work cooperatively in the direction of the identical objective.
- Appoint a frontrunner: You continue to need all groups to have an equal say, but it surely’s a good suggestion to place somebody answerable for the challenge to assist maintain it on monitor and supply a centralized administration system for the migration course of.
3. Automate any parts of the method you could
Guide procedures is usually a big time suck on the migration course of and infrequently result in important downtime, trigger bottlenecks, and lead to an extended wait earlier than your engagement campaigns are deployed. Automating as a lot of the method as attainable will make it easier to save time and allocate assets extra successfully.
- Automate and simplify knowledge switch: Streamline the info migration course of by leveraging instruments that make it simple to robotically switch bulk knowledge directly. Use an API to create a direct connection and leverage CSV imports fairly than copying knowledge manually from spreadsheets and databases.
- Cooperatively handle your workflow: Create an intuitive system for managing and monitoring your progress. Guarantee all groups have entry, can simply share their enter, and monitor what they’ve accomplished so all stakeholders are within the loop. The extra automated this workflow course of is, the extra time might be dedicated to the precise migration.
4. Doc the method completely to be used post-migration
It’s essential that your staff can perform all the pieces they should effectively and doubtlessly even replicate the method sooner or later. Your new supplier ought to provide you with thorough documentation for APIs and SDKs so you possibly can confidently arrange knowledge transfers, and doubtlessly refer again to this documentation.
- Ensure you have what you want: Overview the documentation completely initially to ensure you have all the pieces you want, and don’t be afraid to request up to date documentation or clarification the place wanted so your migration can proceed easily.
- Hold notes for later: You by no means know if you’ll must make modifications to your infrastructure, and there could also be a time when it’s essential to migrate extra knowledge. Ensure you maintain clear documentation and thorough notes on the method so it may be repeated sooner or later.
- Be exact: Be certain the documentation you might have (and the notes you allow for yourselves) are exact and detailed so that folks can simply interpret them and comply with them. Ideally, a wholly new migration staff ought to have the ability to go off the documentation alone if want be.
5. Check and repair any points in the course of the migration – not after
Regardless of your finest efforts, if you flick the ‘on’ swap, it’s unlikely that completely all the pieces works with out a hitch. Ensure you permit time to check your system and that you’ve got a well-defined plan for doing so. Don’t simply verify off simple packing containers, however rigorously take a look at that the brand new platform will carry out as anticipated. It’s vital you run these assessments instantly after setup whilst you nonetheless have the seller’s help.
- Be calculated: Set up a transparent plan to check whether or not the platform meets your expectations. Have clearly outlined, measurable strategies of testing the efficiency of your campaigns by way of the brand new CEP.
- Be complete: Bear in mind how we insisted that every one stakeholders and departments have enter? That’s essential at this stage as effectively. Be certain all groups take a look at the system and guarantee it’s going to allow them to carry out their roles as anticipated.
- Vigorously take a look at efficiency: Now’s the time to verify all the pieces is working appropriately. Don’t conduct easy-to-pass assessments at this stage, take a look at the answer to its limits and check out the capabilities of various options to make sure the CEP is assembly your wants.
6. Leverage onboarding and post-onboarding help out of your vendor
Even with all of the preparation on the planet, you received’t be poised to make the most of all of the CEPs capabilities on day one. Be certain to get some onboarding help to get conversant in the device, full with coaching and extra time to acclimatize your self. However be sure your supplier doesn’t simply disappear after setup, and that they’re round to offer constant help within the coming months as your staff adjusts to the brand new platform.
- Set up a coaching program: Work along with your vendor to arrange a transparent coaching program with a inflexible schedule. Onboard and get everybody in control as quick as attainable whereas guaranteeing they’ll make the most of the brand new platform’s core options and capabilities.
- Work post-onboarding help into your timeline: Earlier than you even begin, set a transparent goal to your staff to completely make the most of the brand new platform. Set up this timeframe along with your vendor and make sure you’ll have satisfactory help.
- Host periodic catch-ups along with your vendor: Preserve some extent of contact along with your CEP vendor. Meet frequently to debate marketing campaign efficiency and have updates, and brainstorm future concepts that may make it easier to leverage the CEP to optimize your campaigns and take away any bottlenecks.
💡When working with ClickRain, the MoEngage Skilled Providers staff clearly outlined all phases and steps of the onboarding course of and offered full transparency on progress alongside the best way. This ensured a swift, seamless migration from their legacy answer and weekly coaching on key contact factors in order that they could possibly be totally operational as soon as the migration was full.
Full a Fast, Stress-Free CEP Migration with MoEngage
Whether or not you’re a small enterprise or an enterprise-level group, a CEP migration is a frightening activity that naturally brings with it some fears and anxiousness. Whereas this new answer could also be intimidating within the quick time period, most manufacturers know {that a} shift to a extra trendy, intuitive answer is for the very best. Nonetheless, although, making that leap—and a last choice—can nonetheless be troublesome.
Right here at MoEngage, we perceive that this course of might be uncomfortable, which is why we goal to make it as painless and expedient as attainable. Our Buyer Engagement Platform (CEP) has a future-ready tech stack that’s agile and scalable, so you possibly can adapt to your clients’ ever-changing wants and preferences.
But it surely isn’t nearly comfort and peace of thoughts, it’s additionally about mitigating downtime so you possibly can keep operational. We work shortly to get you reside and operational so your campaigns can get again on monitor. And our job doesn’t finish there both; we help our clients effectively past onboarding, providing them end-to-end help to allow them to all the time get probably the most out of MoEngage.
Find out how seamless the implementation course of was for manufacturers that moved to MoEngage with real-life examples from our shoppers.
Additionally, schedule a demo with our gross sales staff at the moment to learn the way we deal with CEP migrations and the way we may also help your online business obtain its engagement objectives.