Migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito: 9 steps for a successful transition

Migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito: 9 steps for a successful transition

Companies are constantly seeking more efficient and agile marketing tools. Yet, many find themselves trapped in complex, rigid and expensive platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which limit both their autonomy and agility.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to consider migrating to a solution better suited to your needs: Actito.

Actito promises an intuitive and powerful platform that gives marketers back control over their campaigns. It also ensures close support to help you succeed in your transition with peace of mind.

Discover in this article the 9 key steps to effectively migrate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito and finally unlock your marketing's full potential.

Step 1: Consider migrating to Actito and understand its benefits

Several reasons might lead you to consider transitioning from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito.

1 - Complex usage and excessive IT dependency

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is often seen as "overkill" by marketing teams. Learning to use it is long, laborious, and requires advanced technical skills. According to some of our customers who were using salesforce, you need to have SQL knwoledge. Demos make it seem easy, but it’s pre-built for show.

Result: for even the simplest email or scenario, you depend on your IT teams or agencies. And you feel like you spend more time configuring the tool than actually creating your customer journeys.

With Actito, you regain control over your marketing activities. Our intuitive interface is designed for marketers, with drag-and-drop features and visual creation that require no technical skills.

Simply put, where it used to take weeks to set up a campaign, it now takes just hours with Actito.

2 - Prohibitive costs compared to actual usage

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful solution, but this power comes at a price. Literally and figuratively.

First, the license cost is high, with significant initial fees. But it's especially the operating cost that can quickly become prohibitive, between surcharges for each additional module, recurring fees, and custom developments charged at premium rates.

This model is particularly frustrating as many companies end up paying for features they rarely or never use. Advanced personalization options, data management, or machine learning features look attractive on paper, but in practice, few clients actually use them - either due to lack of internal expertise or because they're unsuitable for their concrete needs.

In the end, you're left with a fancy tool that's oversized and underutilized.

The other problem with this pricing model is its lack of flexibility. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you commit to volumes and features defined in advance, with no possibility to adjust along the way. If your needs change or you overestimated your volumes, too bad. You'll continue paying full price, whether you use the contracted capabilities or not.

At Actito, we've made the opposite choice: simplicity and flexibility. With our platform, you only pay for what you need, when you need it. Our pricing grids are transparent, with no hidden costs or unpleasant surprises. You can adjust your volumes and options up or down based on your activity's evolution and marketing campaigns.

This flexibility ensures constant control over your costs and optimized ROI at every stage. And since we don't charge you for superfluous features, you can reinvest your budget in what really matters: creating ever more effective and impactful campaigns for your business.

Step 2: Evaluate existing setup before migration

Before diving headfirst into migration, take time to conduct a complete assessment of your current Salesforce Marketing Cloud usage.

This initial audit will help identify what needs to be migrated, what can be optimized, and what's no longer needed.

Key points to review:

• Campaign audit: Which campaigns are active on Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Which journeys and scenarios work best? Are there obsolete or redundant processes to eliminate?This analysis will help you sort between essential and non-essential elements to start fresh.
• Data mapping: What data is currently stored in Salesforce Marketing Cloud? How is it structured and used? Are there silos to break down or external sources to integrate?
• Key integration identification: Which tools are currently connected to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (CRM, customer service, analytics...)? Have some integrations become unnecessary? Are there new tools to connect? This ecosystem overview will help define data flows to recreate.

The purpose of this audit isn't just to know what you're migrating, but also why you're migrating it. Our advice: use your migration as an opportunity to question your processes, rethink your strategy, and refine your objectives.

Step 3: Secure stakeholder buy-in

A migration isn't just a simple tool change: it's a strategic project that impacts the entire company. To ensure its success, you must involve all concerned teams from the initial phases: marketing, IT, customer service, sales...

To drive the project internally, you'll need champions in each department. Target primarily profiles open to change, those who've expressed frustration with the current tool (Salesforce) or who've had positive migration experiences.

These "ambassadors" will help you communicate about the project, anticipate objections, and create a favorable climate.

But be aware: there will inevitably be people more resistant to change, either from fear of the unknown or attachment to the current tool. Rather than confronting them head-on, try to understand the reasons for their resistance. Is it lack of information, fear of losing productivity, or anxiety about not being up to the task? Take time to identify their concerns and then address them one by one through education.

Step 4: Strategically plan the transition

This step determines project success. The challenge is defining a realistic plan that considers both technical and business constraints without sacrificing transformation ambition.

The first element to calibrate is the timeline. When do you want to definitively switch to Actito? To answer, consider several factors:

• Your current ecosystem's complexity
• Volume of data to migrate
• Available internal and external resources
• Business imperatives (seasonality, peak activity...)

A migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito takes between 3 and 6 months, but this can vary depending on the case. The key is to set an achievable goal and leave some margin.

Next, you need to ensure you have the right resources at the right time. On Actito's side, a dedicated project manager will accompany you from start to finish, in coordination with our technical experts. But internally too, you'll need to mobilize skills (marketers, data analysts, developers...) for certain tasks. Anticipate these needs and pre-book the necessary resources to secure the schedule.

To switch smoothly to Actito, you must also ensure that your critical campaigns and processes will continue to run during the transition phase.

Two options are available to you:

• The "big bang" migration, where everything switches at once on a given date.
• The progressive migration, where you make the two systems coexist for a time.

The second option is often preferable to reduce risks. For example, you can start by migrating your email campaigns, then your journeys, then your landing pages, etc. The key is to always have a plan B for each step.

Step 5: Prepare and migrate data from Salesforce to Actito

Data is the cornerstone of any software migration project. It's often the most complex and time-consuming step, especially when starting from a tool like Salesforce Marketing Cloud with its own data structure standards.

For your migration to succeed, you must pay special attention to data preparation.

Inventory and clean your data

The first step is to thoroughly inventory the data present in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, distinguishing what needs to be migrated from what can be archived or deleted.

This is also the time to sort and clean to keep only relevant data. Ask yourself for each data point:

• Do I really use it?
• Is it of sufficient quality?

If the answer is no, it's an opportunity to clean house before migrating.

Structure and enrich your data

Once this initial sorting is done, you'll need to think about the best way to structure your data in Actito. Our data model is very flexible and allows easy creation of custom fields.

However, we recommend keeping a fairly simple and standard structure at first, to avoid reproducing Salesforce Marketing Cloud's complexity. Focus on the essentials initially; you can always progressively enrich later.

Map and convert your data

To concretely transfer data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito, you'll need to establish precise mapping between old and new fields. This is a relatively delicate exercise requiring good understanding of both models.

Our team will support you in this work to help find the right correspondences. Then, we'll set up a process to automatically extract, transform, and load data into Actito (known as "ETL" process).

Test and verify

Once data is migrated, the challenge will be verifying its integrity and quality. Be particularly vigilant about the following points:

• Have all contacts been properly migrated?
• Are opt-in/opt-out statuses up to date?
• Are links with other data (orders, products...) functional?

Data migration is an iterative process: there will inevitably be catch-ups and adjustments to make after the first switch.

The key is to go step by step, validating each brick before moving on to the next. At Actito, data quality and integrity are an absolute priority. We know it's the fuel for your marketing, and we do everything possible, with our technical and business expertise, to secure this precious asset during migration.

Step 6: Recreate and optimize your marketing campaigns

Once data is migrated, it's time for the most visible part of the project: rebuilding your campaigns and journeys in Actito. This is where you'll really be able to leverage our platform's flexibility and power to optimize your marketing scenarios.

Recreate your email templates

During migration, your email templates can't be automatically transferred from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Actito due to differences between the two editors.

If your emails are coded in HTML, you can recover their structure and import it into Actito, but adjustments will be necessary to ensure proper display and dynamic variable management.

If you were using Salesforce's editor, the most efficient solution is to recreate your templates directly in Actito using its drag-and-drop editor. According to some of our customers, it is 3 times easier.

Tip: this step is also an opportunity to optimize your templates by making them more modern, responsive, and aligned with email best practices.

Rebuild your segments and targeting

Next, you'll need to recreate your segments and targeting. Actito provides an advanced segmentation tool that lets you combine demographic, behavioral, and transactional attributes to refine your audiences.

Unlike Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which often relies on complex SQL queries, Actito offers an intuitive visual editor that lets you create precise segments without technical skills.

Set up cross-channel journeys

Once your segments are recreated, you can orchestrate your journeys across all channels. Our visual creation interface and library of ready-to-use scenarios will save you precious time.

You'll find all the triggers and actions you used in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Optimize with A/B testing and AI

Our platform offers advanced optimization capabilities to boost your campaign performance:

• You can easily set up A/B tests on all elements (subject line, sender, content, sending time...) and let our AI engine determine the best combinations
• You can also activate predictive models to personalize offers and content based on individual preferences

Working hand in hand with your Actito project manager, you'll be able to rebuild most of your campaigns in just a few weeks.

Our goal is really to make you autonomous as quickly as possible, so you can create and optimize your journeys without depending on us. And if you need to go further, our team of consultants and developers is available to handle the most complex configurations.

Step 7: Manage deliverability during transition

A critical aspect when switching to a new email tool is deliverability management. Indeed, migrating to a new platform often means changing IP address and domain name. A poorly managed migration can impact your reputation with ISPs.

To minimize risks, we strongly recommend implementing an IP warming plan over several weeks. Specifically, this means gradually increasing sending volumes from your new address, initially targeting your most engaged contacts (those who regularly open and click).

The goal is to gradually build your reputation without raising ISP suspicions. Your Actito account manager will propose a personalized warming plan based on your volume and database typology.

Throughout the transition phase, you'll need to closely monitor your deliverability indicators. Our dashboard allows you to track your deliverability, open, click, and unsubscribe rates in real-time.

If you notice abnormal degradation in any of these indicators, don't hesitate to immediately discuss it with your account manager to identify the cause and take necessary corrective measures.

Deliverability management is a complex subject that requires constant vigilance. It's expertise we've built at Actito over years of sending millions of emails for our clients. We'll support you through this transition.

Step 8: Train teams and promote adoption

Beyond technical aspects, your migration's success to Actito will primarily depend on your ability to get your teams on board with this change. After all, it's your employees who will use the platform daily and transform it into a real marketing performance lever.

Neglecting the human dimension risks seeing your migration project fail due to lack of user buy-in and skill development. For this reason, it's essential to include training and support in your migration plan.

The objective is twofold:

• First, give your teams all the keys to quickly and confidently master the new solution: interface mastery, understanding key concepts, knowing how to create campaigns end-to-end...
• Second, evolve mindsets and working methods to adopt an "agile" and data-driven mindset. Because Actito isn't just a tool, it's also a mindset oriented toward more collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement.

We support you in this both technical and cultural transition.

From the platform deployment phase, our teams work alongside you to define a training plan adapted to your challenges and teams. The idea is to allow each of your employees to build skills at their own pace, based on concrete use cases.

This support then continues over time, to help you continuously get the best out of the platform. Our teams remain at your disposal daily to answer your questions, advise you on best practices, or challenge you towards more innovation.

Of course, as each client is unique, we adapt the support system to your context and specific needs. Our philosophy is to be by your side at every step, to make your migration to Actito not just a simple technical switch, but a transformative project to accelerate your growth.

Step 9: Monitor performance and optimize continuously

Once the technical migration is complete, the real work begins. Because the challenge is not just to switch from one tool to another, but to exploit the full potential of your new platform to concretely boost your marketing performance. And this involves a continuous optimization approach.

Monitor key indicators to measure migration impact

The first essential step: monitoring performance before and after migration. The objective? To precisely measure the impact of the tool change on your main indicators: open rate, click rate, conversion rate, ROI...

Comparing pre and post migration metrics will help you identify the first quick wins related to Actito.

And this analysis will serve as a basis for your optimization approach, as it will then be about setting tangible improvement objectives on each of these KPIs, and implementing action plans to achieve them. This data-driven approach will allow you to finely pilot the ramp-up of your system.

Progressively exploit the full richness of the tool

The potential of an all-in-one marketing platform doesn't reveal itself in a day. It's through use that you'll discover the full range of possibilities offered by Actito: advanced personalization, cross-channel journeys, intelligent triggers...

This is why it's interesting, and even recommended, to implement a skill development program. The idea is to allow your teams to progressively master the tool and gain autonomy, via targeted training, peer support, and/or internal challenges.

And of course, we remain by your side to accompany you in exploring your platform's capabilities.

Enter a virtuous circle of continuous improvement

In marketing, nothing is set in stone: customer behaviors evolve, expectations transform, and technologies progress rapidly.

To stay ahead, you need to be in a process of continuous improvement.

Concretely, this involves approaching each campaign as a new field of experimentation. Systematic A/B testing, trials of new levers, micro-variations of messages... It's by constantly testing and refining your approaches that you can maintain a high level of performance.

Yesterday's strategies don't necessarily guarantee tomorrow's successes, hence the importance of staying tuned to the market and trends to constantly adjust your practices.

Actito was designed with this logic in mind: its flexibility and agile features allow you to easily iterate, test new approaches, and continuously optimize your campaigns, without technical heaviness.

So, ready to take the plunge? Our teams are at your disposal to study your project and consider a migration to Actito!