Big Promise – How you can dramatically lower the cost of switching your ESP or CRM
Ok, big promises require a big delivery, and today I guarantee you we’ve got the goods. Every marketer and CRM leader knows how painful switching providers can be. It’s painful, yet inevitable. New capabilities, better data tooling, more competitive pricing, or maybe a new messaging channel (I do hear whispers that SMS is making a comeback) are all compelling reasons to make a change.
When I discuss Dyspatch and our approach to Email Production, your knee jerk reaction might be “maybe after we complete our migration to %NEW_ESP_X%”. After going through this several times with customers both large and small, I’m here to tell you that only Dyspatch can alleviate some key hurdles and open up new opportunities for you and your team.
Digging in: the landmines of email migration
There are several key areas we see companies struggle with their migrations. The first is simple but scales in difficulty as your team grows – training. Every platform does segmentation, automations, and reporting differently. Having to learn to use a new builder, while not a showstopper, will seriously slow down your team’s ability to get campaigns out the door quickly.
The real killer is the dreaded content migration. We typically see teams split this into two parts: first, rebuilding your templates, modules and email building blocks. This gets complicated because every platform has a different interpretation of what a module is, whether or not there is a visual builder for them, and how constrained a template can be. The next step is to use these new components to rebuild every single email in your marketing arsenal. Even if you’re leveraging an agency or consultants for this work, you’re still looking at a herculean rewrite for every email.
Unfortunately, once your content is migrated the work isn’t even close to being over. Every platform handles things like inlining CSS or formatting HTML code just a little bit differently, meaning you’ll need to retest every email for responsiveness and mobile compatibility. What a pain!
Missed Opportunities
With all the focus on just getting your new platform up to speed, the real loss is that your time is being siphoned away from more valuable projects. What else could all this time be used for?
1. Let’s optimize those old emails
Copy and pasting code between emails, between platforms, often leads to severe inconsistencies. Automated emails get setup, forgotten, emails get bloated or use outdated logos. You’ve built some beautiful new hero modules, but has anyone brought the new look to old emails? That’s what email optimization can help you achieve. Make sure there’s no bloated code and ensure every email still adheres to your latest style guide.
2. Rebrand with ease
Due to the mammoth task of migrating all your email content, many brands chose to use a platform switch as the opportunity to do a brand refresh. You have to touch up every email anyways, right? The unfortunate problem is that an already significant project can grow significantly. I’ve encountered brands running two platforms side by side for multiple years, due to a rebrand and migration blowing up in scope. The missed opportunity here is not levering Dyspatch’s design system, which makes updating all your emails’ branding a cinch with just a few clicks: New logos, hero styles, buttons, and fonts, and all your email content moved over. Magic, right?
3. No data loss
A major issue whenever you’re switching platforms is the data loss, which might make you think of reporting, analytics, or customer information. Institutional knowledge around why an email was built a certain way, how one design performed compared to another, or why you had to use image buttons for an email targeting Outlook users (hint: rounded corners). That’s the kind of institutional knowledge you lose when you switch platforms and only port a portion of your email content.
Something that brings a tear to my eye: have you worked with an agency on an extra special campaign, maybe a big Black Friday promotion? Agencies routinely charge low five figures for a beautiful new email. Are you going to throw that away in a migration?
Decoupling your email from your ESP or CRM insulates you from this data loss and means that your emails truly belong to you. Dyspatch’s unique advantage is that an email can be instantly deployed to multiple platforms, and that includes fun things like personalization!
Move faster, more efficiently, by decoupling your Email
So how does this all work? Dyspatch connects with your existing platform and through a combination of AI, machine learning, and some very talented email developers, we import all your existing emails into a bespoke email design system. Whether you’re managing multiple brands or even multiple sending platforms, we recreate it all in our Email Production Platform.
Now that your email is portable, you can decide which templates to push to the new platform of your choice with the push of a button. Leveraging our modular design system, updating all emails to use a new logo can be done quickly, as can syncing the changes back to your current sending platforms.
Email migration projects that might take upwards of 6 months to over a year can now be accomplished in record time, and free you and your team up to focus on many of the other pressing marketing objectives you have.
What else could you accomplish if your next migration was as easy as pressing a button?
