I moved into a new house recently, and it backs up to a lake.

Every morning I stand in front of the house waiting for my son's school bus, and I keep noticing these massive flocks of birds flying overhead.

Like, hundreds of them at a time. Every single morning, same thing.

I'm no ornithologist, but I'm pretty sure this is migration season. They're heading north, or wherever birds go in the spring.

But what got me was how these birds migrate.

They don't all go at once.

It's small flocks, moving together, one wave at a time. The whole population shifts gradually over days or weeks until they're all where they need to be.

I watched this for the third morning in a row and thought, that is literally how you migrate email platforms.

Yeahh…. I'm a nerd. I know.

At some point, you're going to migrate email platforms. It's not a matter of if, it's when.

Usually it goes one of two ways.

You start on something cheap and simple, then outgrow it and need more power. Or you're on something powerful and expensive, and you decide it's not worth what you're paying anymore.

Either way, a migration is coming.

We’ve done dozens of successful migrations for clients, here are the exact steps we take every time.

Step 1: Set up your automations first, before anything else

Get your welcome series, abandoned cart, and post-purchase flows live on the new platform before you touch a single campaign. These are behavior-triggered emails. People are expecting them. They search for them, open them, click them, sometimes even reply. That engagement is exactly what Gmail and Yahoo want to see from a new sending domain. You're building trust before you start spending it.

Step 2: Track your daily send volume

Let those automations run for one to two weeks. Count how many emails are going out per day across all your flows. Say it's 1,000 per day. That number becomes your baseline for warm up campaigns.

Step 3: Start with your most engaged subscribers

Pull everyone who opened or clicked in the last seven days. Exclude Apple privacy opens and bot clicks so you're working with a real signal.

Send them a plain text email. Ask what products they want to see next, or just ask them to reply. You want genuine engagement. If your open rate comes back above 50% and clicks land between 1 and 3%, you're in good shape.

Step 4: Increase your send size by 30% with each campaign

1,000 becomes 1,300. 1,300 becomes 1,700.

Start at 30% increases. After three or four campaigns, if engagement is still solid, you can increase by 50% to speed things up a bit.

But you need to be watching your numbers the whole time. Keep Google Postmaster Tools open and check your platform's reporting after every send. You're looking for anything that drops sharply.

If your open rate goes from 54% down to 20% out of nowhere, stop and pull back. Go back to a smaller segment and rebuild from there before you push forward again.

Migration is always stressful. There’s a TON of moving parts and it usually takes longer than you’d like.

If you're going through a migration right now, don't try to figure it out alone. Reply and tell me where you're at. I'll help you map it out.

Ben

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