Best Practices For Changing Your Email Marketing Provider

If you are using one of our Managed application platforms like ManagedWooComerce or Managed WordPress, now may be an optimal time to look into switching your email provider to a different service.

MailChimp made a change earlier in the year to become more of a marketing platform, which was also accompanied by a pricing increase in their plans. Due to this change, we have reviewed several reliable options which may make choosing a replacement easier! We considered three other services which may be a better alternative; they are EmailOctopus, Moosend, and MailBuster. 

Both EmailOctopus and MailBuster offer robust and stable features and are well-priced for all list sizes. EmailOctopus and MailBuster also use AWS SES (Amazon Simple Email Service) to send out emails, which means emails are sent reliably. In this article, I personally recommend using EmailOctopus.

To use EmailOctopus, you will need to sign up for an account. You can sign up for a starter plan, which includes up to 2,500 email subscribers. After you have signed up, you will need to follow the steps to verify your account. The first step will be to create a new list in EmailOctopus.

Next, you will need to login into Mailchimp. To export contacts from MailChimp, you have to export each individual list:

1. In your Mailchimp account, click Audience.
2. Click the “Current Audience” drop-down and click View audiences.
3. Click on the name of the audience you want to export.
4. Click Export Audience.
5. From the Audience exports section, click Export As CSV and save the file.

After the export has been downloaded, go ahead and extract the zip file. The zip file will contain two different CSV files; one for subscribers and one for people who have unsubscribed. The CSV file that you want to upload in EmailOctopus will be the “subscribers” CSV file.

After you have selected the correct CSV file to upload into EmailOctopus, you will need to map the fields in the original CSV file to your new list.

Once your subscribers’ list has been imported, the next step will be to create your campaign in EmailOctopus.

Since both EmailOctopus and MailBuster use Amazon Simple Email Service, you will be required to sign up for an Amazon SES account. Once you have the account setup, follow the steps outlined in the EmailOctopus tutorial.

As an added benefit, the Amazon Simple Email Service includes up to 62k free emails a month. This advantage saves you from having to incur any additional costs to use this service. EmailOctopus also includes a setup wizard to help you easily connect your Amazon SES account, which makes that process even more convenient.

Now that you have imported your existing subscribers, you can replace any/all of the generated forms on your site using an embedded MailChimp form. You can also create this new form via the Design option in EmailOctopus. If you are using a WordPress plugin for Mailchimp, EmailOctopus also conveniently has a WordPress plugin you can use.

Both Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms both have EmailOctopus integrations that are useful on your site. Having these options available allows for minimal modification to the existing forms on your website. The only change needed is to modify the current form slightly, so the submissions go into the EmailOctopus list, and not into Mailchimp).

If you were already using Zapier for your site form integrations, EmailOctopus includes several existing zaps to make things easier. The other combinations that EmailOctopus has available are covered here.

If you currently have automations set up in MailChimp, similar options also exist in EmailOctopus. After you have tested your forms are working correctly, you can now close your Mailchimp account.

Moosend and MailBluster also include several site form integrations and also incorporate a WordPress plugin.

This information should help you to easily migrate your existing subscribers from MailChimp to another service like EmailOctopus without experiencing any gaps in between the mail services connected to the mail forms on your website.

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