How Do I Change My Marketing Automation Software? (Part IV)

As part of our marketing automation series, Website Magazine asked your marketing peers how to change vendors.

While the question is simplistic in nature, many marketing automation users are not making the most out of their systems - falling into the same patterns without exploring other features. What's more, the answers can help those enterprises who have yet to dive into automation or are thinking about switching vendors. Let's take a look.

john-headshot "We've transferred from HubSpot to SharpSpring successfully. Our biggest tip is to back everything up. Create a master folder in the cloud to house exports of every contact list. Write down existing lists and the rules that create dynamic lists. Save every email that's scheduled, automated or has gone out in recent months for reference, to help recreate each.. Document automation rules. For contacts, make sure every field from the old system has an equivalent in the new system. If not, create custom fields. Record where each form exists, its purpose, and its fields.

It's certainly a large undertaking, for some businesses more than others. Carefully consider the scope of the transfer, given all these steps, before you begin to make sure you build in enough overlap time between platforms. Many platforms will have a platform migration support option. With HubSpot, that costs $7,000, with SharpSpring, it's included for free."

" Jon Saxton, Inbound Marketing Executive at PHOS Creative

"At a previous company we changed from Eloqua to Hubspot. We made this decision as we needed an all-in-one solution with richer features for our marketing, which Hubspot offered at the time.

It can be a daunting challenge, especially if your database size is large. We had around 10,000 contacts at the time so we wanted to make sure that we didn't lose this information. During the planning stage we conducted an audit of all the different campaigns, landing pages, forms etc., to ensure we didn't have any gaps in our Marketing.

Before we did anything else we exported and backed up every customer datapoint we had. We then decided to run new campaigns in Hubspot and maintain the older campaigns in Eloqua. As we spent time in Hubspot, learning how to use it correctly, we slowly transferred older campaigns into the new system by replicating (and improving them) in Hubspot."

" Mark Colgan, B2B SaaS Marketing Automation Consultant at https://www.yellowo.co.uk

"I'd say, don't be afraid to wipe the slate clean and start all over. It will take you half the time to do a better job building out your automation correctly with a better vendor and your results will be worth the investment in time and aggravation."

" Greg Warner, CEO & Founder of MarketSmart

Keep Reading