How to prepare for email client changes

If you’re a brand switching email or SMS providers before BFCM, here’s how to avoid a disaster. Changing platforms this close to the biggest sales period of the year is high risk. I am not going to sugar coat this or be a hype girl, it doesn't benefit me either way. Get it wrong, and you could lose deliverability, segment accuracy, or key automations when you need them most. Your BFCM transition checklist: Warm your sending domain early Gradually ramp up send volumes to protect deliverability Maintain engagement by starting with your most active subscribers. Audit and rebuild key automations Ensure welcome, abandonment, and post-purchase flows are recreated exactly as they were performing before Test triggers and timing in the new platform Migrate your segments and tags accurately Double-check that engagement windows, purchase history filters, and suppression lists are identical Preserve historical data where possible Export campaign, flow, and customer engagement data before the switch for benchmarking and audience targeting Run a side-by-side test before switching off the old provider Send small campaigns from both systems to verify deliverability and reporting match expectations Bottom line: Don’t just ‘switch and send’. Treat your ESP/SMS migration like a product launch - test, measure, and phase it in. Your Black Friday sales depend on it.

Thinking of switching email platforms? Read this before you hit “send.” Whatever ESP you’re leaving and moving to, a platform switch isn’t just copy-paste-and-go. It’s a chance to clean up, set up, and step up your email game. But if you skip these steps, your emails might land in spam - or not land at all. Here’s what I tell clients to do when they switch: ✅ Authenticate your domain again. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC don’t carry over - your new provider needs to be properly set up. ✅ Clean your list. Remove cold subscribers. Don’t import people who haven’t engaged in months unless you plan to rewarm them strategically. ✅ Check your tags and segments. Different platforms handle tags and fields differently. Rebuild your key automations before importing everyone. ✅ Warm up the new platform. Don’t blast your whole list on day one - it can tank your sender reputation. ✅ Review automations and sequences. What worked on your old platform might need adjusting. Use this as an opportunity to optimize. Bottom line? Switching platforms is the perfect time to reset your strategy - not just your tech stack. If you’re about to switch (or already have), don’t just migrate your list. Make sure your setup supports strong deliverability and real results. Have you ever switched ESPs? What surprised you most about the process?

Starting from February 1st, Gmail and Yahoo are making some big changes to their policy. But the no.1 requirement is one too technical for most marketers: “Authenticate outgoing emails setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC” Here’s what all those terms means, and what you need to do to make sure your emails continue to reach your users: What email clients want is for a way to check the “authenticity” of your emails. So they ask you to set up these authentication techniques: 1. SPF allows a domain to specify which IP addresses can send that mail. It’s like specifying which ‘postman’ is allowed to deliver the mail. 2. DKIM is like a digital signature. Imagine a seal on the envelope telling you its contents were not altered. 3. DMARC is a policy that decides what to do with the mail if both SPF and DKIM fail. *** How can you check if your email is authenticated as a sender?  1. Open an email in your desktop  2. Click the three dots on top right  3. Click “Show original”  4. Should show PASS for SPF/DKIM/DMARC *** Besides having these in place, here are some other recommendations in the recent updates by Gmail & Yahoo: 1. DMARC policy of p=none is enough for now. DMARC policies can be of different types. In ‘p=none’, you don’t take any action against emails that have failing SPF/DKIM. But you receive reports to keep an eye. But if your brand has already seen phishing emails being sent in your name, it’s better to switch to p=reject/quarantine.  2. Separate email types by IP or DKIM domain I.e., don’t send marketing emails and transactional emails from the same source. It ensures that any negative response to a marketing campaign doesn’t also lead to your important transactional emails to land in spam. *** None of these requirements are new. They were just more often called ‘best practices.’ If you need any other questions about these changes, ask away in the comments below

Are you ready for Gmail's deliverability changes? If you haven't heard yet, Gmail's anti-spam update (see link in comments) is coming in February 2024 (Yahoo as well) and you might be heading to junk mail if you haven't prepared for it. 3 key things: 1) Authenticate your emails with DKIM/SPF/DMARC 2) Make unsubscribing easy 3) Monitor your spam complaint rates: < 0.3% (target: < 0.1%) This is also the perfect time to do a list clean up in preparation for this change. I recommend to do a clean up once or twice a year. Here's a few segments to look at to get started: 1) Ghosts - Subscribed 12+ months ago, Never purchased, received 10+ emails, never opened or clicked - you can purge these 2) Zombies (strangers) - Subscribed 12+ months ago, Never purchased, received 10+ emails, never opened or clicked in the last 6 to 12 months - may want to re-engage before purging but usually engagement is very low. 3) Zombies (friends) - Subscribed 12+ months ago, Has made a purchase, received 10+ emails, never opened or clicked in the last 6 to 12 months - may want to re-engage with a flow here and/or retarget via paid or print (for high LTV customers) 4) The Invisible Stranger - Never purchased, never received any emails. Investigate who this is and why they're in your platform. You might have a data issue. 5) The Invisible Friend - Made a purchase, never received any emails. Double check your post purchase flows to see if there are issues. Also double check your campaign segmentation to make sure you are reaching out to specific customers at the right time. 6) The Baller - Bounced 4+ time in the last 90 days. Not suppressed. They may have a full inbox. Take a break from sending to them.

Migration isn’t just about switching platforms. Most senders don’t even think about migration until they have to — a rebrand, compliance change, leadership decision. And almost never going into Q4. When it comes up, people picture a months-long project with RFPs, demos, must-have features. They think about price, UI, integrations. What most don’t think about is: Resilience. Consistency. Stability. With industry shakeups like we’ve seen recently (👀), it’s a good reminder that migration isn’t just “switching platforms” — it’s redundancy. And not just for “one day” of bad sending. Because... - Any ESP can have a bad day (yes, even the big ones) - Platform changes happen fast - Customer patience is shortest during your busiest season For high-volume, high-stakes senders, the risk isn’t “what if we need to migrate someday?” — it’s “what if our primary sending engine has a bad week… during Q4?” If your primary sending engine went dark today, could you reroute traffic to keep critical streams moving — without breaking things, delaying sends, or burning days in DNS purgatory? Because it happens: - Systems go down - API rate limits get hit - Deliverability tanks for a critical domain or stream - A vendor pivots their roadmap overnight If you’ve only built for normal days, you’ll be scrambling when it’s not. Here’s the mental shift: Migration isn’t just reactive. It’s a preparedness plan — to move critical traffic somewhere else quickly, safely, reliably… without burning your sending reputation. If I were building for resilience today: 1️⃣ Have a backup sending option ready before you need it. Authenticated, tested, integrated. Could be a backup ESP account, separate sending engine, or internal SMTP relay. 2️⃣ Separate traffic types by stream or domain so you can move one stream (like password resets) without untangling it from the rest. 3️⃣ Have authentication ready to go. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate. Document the process, keep credentials secure but accessible, and test it in a low-stakes scenario before it's urgent. 4️⃣ Monitor in a way that spots issues early. Most problems start small — one stream, mailbox provider, or a subset of recipients. If you’re only looking at top-line stats, you’ll find out late, so start thinking about how to spot the butterflies that might lead to a tidal wave now. 5️⃣ Have a clear (and tested) “oh sh!t” playbook Who makes the call on rerouting traffic, updates the configs, confirms sends are flowing, and who talks to leadership and customers? The middle of Q4 is not the time to figure it out. The upside: When you build with risk reduction in mind, migration stops being a panic project that wakes you up with cold sweats. It becomes just another lever you can pull when needed — whether that’s because of a platform exit, a dated set of tooling, or a temporary outage. Safe. Cautious. Successful. 💌 Have you ever had to migrate or reroute email traffic on short notice? How’d it go?