Migrating to a new multichannel marketing hub is one of the more sensitive changes a CX or marketing team can undertake. The hub typically coordinates email, SMS, push, in-app, and sometimes offline channels, and it often holds years of customer history. Poorly planned migration can interrupt critical journeys, damage deliverability, or dilute the customer profile data your teams rely on.
The goal, therefore, is straightforward: move to a modern hub while keeping campaigns running and preserving the customer record as a continuous story. This article focuses on two effective strategies to achieve that: sequenced cutovers and disciplined QA, supported by vendor practices from platforms such as Braze, Iterable, MoEngage, and Bloomreach.
According to Richa Choubey, Senior Analyst at QKS Group, “Successful migration to a Multichannel Marketing Hub is not measured solely by the absence of disruption during cutover, but by the integrity of what is preserved thereafter. Minimizing downtime is now a basic operational expectation, the more strategic differentiator is the ability to retain and reconcile years of customer interactions, attribution paths, and preference histories with full fidelity. Enterprises that treat historical data as a long-term strategic asset, rather than expendable collateral in a re-platforming exercise, are the ones that convert migration into a meaningful uplift in customer intelligence and decision quality.”
What a Hub Migration Really Involves
A multichannel marketing hub is not just a message delivery system. It usually contains:
- Customer profiles and identities
- Consent and subscription states by channel
- Engagement history (opens, clicks, purchases, events)
- Journeys and campaigns (flows, triggers, templates)
- Integrations with your app, web, ecommerce, CDP, and data warehouse
MoEngage describes customer engagement platform (CEP) migration as the consolidation of customer data, campaign data, and journey data into a new system that is fully set up and operational at the end of the process. In practice, this means you are moving both the data and the logic that drive your customer experience.
This includes delivering onboarding emails, transactional messages, and renewal reminders. Therefore, the migration approach must protect both, the continuity of journeys and the integrity of historical data.
Keep in mind the following while migrating to a multichannel marketing hub:
1. Use Sequenced Cutovers Instead of a Single Switch
Most modern hub vendors explicitly recommend phased migration rather than a single cutover. Some brands simplify migration. This article published by Braze suggests structured onboarding and migration from legacy marketing clouds. Iterable’s Cross-Channel Marketing Platform Migration Guide similarly emphasizes clear phases, from goal definition to campaign organization and data standardization, before full transition.
In practice, you have a few common sequencing options:
By channel
- Start with lower-risk or lower-volume channels (e.g., a promotional email) before moving high-criticality notifications.
- Bring SMS, push, and in-app into the new hub only after you are confident that identity, segments, and consent are working as expected.
By audience or region
- Cut over a small market, loyalty tier, or product line first.
- Compare performance between legacy and new platforms, then extend as confidence grows.
By journey
- Prioritize always-on journeys such as welcome/onboarding, cart abandonment, renewals, and key lifecycle flows.
- Rebuild these journeys in the new hub, validate them, and then redirect triggers one by one.
A sequenced approach makes it easier to monitor each change, isolate issues, and roll back specific components if required.
2. Define a Data Strategy for Preserving History
Preserving history should be treated as a design decision, not a blanket requirement to move every record. MoEngage highlights that by the end of a CEP migration, the new system should hold all essential customer, campaign, and journey data, and be fully operational. Similarly, Bloomreach’s ESP migration guide stresses standardizing data formats and field naming conventions, and building unified profiles ahead of migration to enable segmentation and personalization immediately in the new platform.
For most organizations, the following elements are critical:
- Identity and keys
- Primary customer IDs, emails, phone numbers, and any identity resolution keys used by your CDP or warehouse.
- Consent and subscription data
- Per-channel opt-in/opt-out, lawful basis fields, and regional consent indicators.
- Operationally relevant engagement history
- Enough look-back data to sustain key segments (e.g., “opened in last 180 days”, “purchased in last 12 months”).
- Important behavioral events such as last login, last order, last support interaction.
- Journey state
- Which customers are currently mid-journey and where they are (e.g., step 2 of a 5-step onboarding flow).
Older history can often be summarized (e.g., lifetime order value, total opens in last two years) and stored in profile attributes rather than migrated as raw events. This reduces data volume while retaining context for CX teams.
3. Treat Migration as a QA Program
Manage hub migration more like a product release by planning, executing, and closing it systematically. Iterable’s migration guide explicitly calls out the need to define goals, standardize data, and “own” technical integration, activities that lend themselves to structured QA.
A robust QA plan usually includes:
Schema and mapping checks
- Confirm that every source field from the legacy platform is mapped correctly into the new hub’s profile, event, and consent models.
- Run small, repeatable test imports before attempting full historical loads.
Data quality verification
- Compare key counts (profiles, events, subscriptions) between old and new.
- Manually inspect sample profiles to confirm identity, consent, and engagement fields are correct.
Journey and trigger testing
- Execute journeys using internal test accounts or a limited external cohort.
- Validate triggers, wait times, branching logic, personalization, and suppression rules.
Channel and deliverability testing
- For email, test sending from the new hub to seed lists across major mailbox providers.
- For SMS and push, confirm routing, formatting, and registration/unregistration flows.
Plan QA as part of the migration project, with clear exit criteria for each phase before moving more traffic to the new platform.
4. Minimize Downtime with Parallel Operation
Even with good sequencing, there are still sensitive points, including DNS changes, webhook re-routing, and integration updates. To avoid downtime, vendors increasingly recommend parallel operation, where the legacy and new hubs run side by side for a defined period.
Braze describes migrations as executed via onboarding programs in which the legacy systems continue to operate while the Braze team brings the new implementation online and tests it before shifting full traffic. MoEngage explicitly designed its MoUpgrade program to “reduce the effort, friction, and cost of migrating from any cross-channel customer engagement platform,” indicating a structured approach to transition rather than abrupt replacement.
Parallel patterns typically include:
- Dual write of events and profiles
- Upstream systems (web, app, ecommerce) send updates to both platforms for a time.
- Once monitoring confirms that the new hub is processing data correctly, feeds to the legacy system can be retired.
- Channel-level cutover windows
- Switch DNS, webhooks, or API endpoints for a specific channel during low-traffic windows.
- Maintain clear runbooks and stakeholder communication for those windows.
- Fallback paths for critical flows
- For password reset, OTP, and other high-criticality messages, ensure you have a fallback route (even if simplified), so user access is never blocked.
The objective is not zero change, but controlled and observable change, with clear rollback options.
5. Reuse Vendor Playbooks as a Migration Checklist
Most major multichannel hubs now provide their own migration playbooks, which are useful references even if you are not migrating to that specific platform.
- Braze publishes detailed content on moving from legacy marketing clouds and explains how partner-led onboarding structures phases, deliverables, and responsibilities.
- Iterable outlines a step-by-step approach to cross-channel platform migration, including defining quick wins, organizing teams and campaigns, and standardizing data before full cutover.
- MoEngage shares migration strategy articles and a CEP migration guide describing how brands consolidate customer, campaign, and journey data and decide between full platform migrations and targeted enhancements.
- Bloomreach offers an ESP migration guide that highlights preparing data and segmentation so that ROI from personalization can be realized quickly once the new platform is live.
These resources provide practical checklists for topics such as data audit, campaign inventory, sequencing, stakeholder alignment, and post-migration measurement. They can be adapted to your context regardless of the specific hub you choose.
Summary
Migration to a multichannel marketing hub is a significant step for any CX organization because it touches data, automation, and live customer journeys at the same time. A careful approach can reduce risk and create a cleaner, more powerful engagement foundation.
Key practices include:
- Planning sequenced cutovers by channel, audience, or journey instead of a single switch.
- Defining a clear data strategy so that identity, consent, key engagement history, and journey state are preserved without unnecessary volume.
- Running migration as a structured QA program, with explicit testing for mappings, data quality, journeys, and channels.
- Using parallel operation and dual writes to minimize downtime and maintain continuity while integrations and routing are updated.
- Leveraging vendor migration playbooks from platforms such as Braze, Iterable, MoEngage, and Bloomreach as practical checklists.
Handled this way, migration is not just a technical project; it is an opportunity to rationalize data, improve journey design, and put your new hub into production with confidence, without unnecessary disruption to customers or teams.