Fallacies of Lift and Shift MAP Migrations

We have all heard the term “lift and shift” when it comes to migration in the world of marketing automation platforms. It can fool one into thinking that a complex, time-consuming process can actually be an effortless move. If only we could move our carefully built campaigns, intricate data structures, and seamless integrations from one system to another with a simple copy-paste.

If you’ve ever navigated the complexities of switching from one Customer Engagement Platform or Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) to another, you know the reality is far more nuanced. That phrase “lift and shift,” while convenient, often hides a whole world of challenges that demand planning, strategic re-evaluation, and a deep understanding of both your old and new systems.

While all marketing automation platforms share the fundamental goal of helping you connect effectively with your customers, how they actually work behind the scenes can vary dramatically. This core difference means a true 1:1 replication is practically impossible, even when you’re moving between platforms that seem similar or consolidating different instances of the same platform. The journey isn’t really about rebuilding what exists. It’s more about rebuilding, optimizing, and strategically adapting.

The “Lift and Shift” Myth Challenged

The core misconception of “lift and shift” stems from an oversimplification of what a marketing automation platform actually does. It’s not just a message sender; it’s a sophisticated ecosystem managing customer data, segmenting audiences, orchestrating complex journeys, personalizing content, and integrating with a myriad of other business systems. Each has developed its own proprietary way of handling these functions, leading to unique:

• Data Models: How customer attributes, activities, and relationships are stored and accessed.
• Workflow Logic: The specific methods for building campaigns, programs, and automation flows.
• Content Management: How emails, landing pages, and other assets are created, stored, and rendered.
• Integration Frameworks: The APIs and connectors available for interacting with external systems.

These inherent differences mean that even if you’re moving from one instance of Eloqua to another, or from Eloqua to Braze, elements like image links, form submissions, and tracking mechanisms will inevitably require updates. Furthermore, crucial historical data, such as past campaign performance and individual contact activity, cannot simply be “transferred” into the new system’s native reporting environment. This necessitates a strategic approach to data archiving and historical analysis, often involving external data warehouses.

Key Considerations Beyond a Simple Replication

A successful marketing automation migration requires a comprehensive analysis that goes far beyond the superficial resemblance of features. Here are the critical areas that demand careful consideration and often significant effort.

1. Data Structure and Schema Mapping

Your customer data is the lifeblood of your marketing automation efforts. Different platforms handle data structures in distinct ways. Does your existing platform support one-to-many relationships (e.g., one customer with multiple purchases) or even many-to-many relationships (e.g., multiple customers attending multiple events)? Do any of your existing processes rely on complex relational data tables, linking customer profiles to product preferences, order history, or loyalty program tiers?

Migrating this data often requires an entirely new data structure in the target platform. This isn’t just about moving fields; it’s about understanding how the new platform’s data model (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Data Extensions, Adobe Marketo Engage’s Custom Objects, Oracle Eloqua’s Custom Data Objects) can accommodate or improve upon your existing relationships. This phase involves:

• Schema Analysis: Deeply understanding the structure of your current data.
• Mapping: Identifying how each field and relationship in the old system translates to the new.
• Normalization and Cleansing: An opportune moment to clean up inconsistencies, remove redundancies, and standardize data formats.
• Data Transformation Rules: Defining how data needs to be manipulated during the transfer process to fit the new schema.

Failure to properly map and transform your data can lead to broken segmentation, inaccurate personalization, and flawed campaign execution.

2. Data Compartmentalization and Security

Many organizations, especially larger enterprises or those with multiple brands and business units, require strict data compartmentalization. This raises questions like:

• Do separate business units need their data housed in distinct data objects or even entirely separate instances within the platform?
• Will there be a need for separate profile lists for different brands, as is often required in platforms like Oracle Responsys?
• Is contact-level security a necessity, where specific groups of contacts are only visible to particular lines of business or user groups?

Implementing these security and organizational requirements in a new platform can be complex. It involves configuring user roles, permissions, and data visibility rules to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations (like GDPR, CCPA). This isn’t a simple data dump; it’s about recreating a secure and logically segmented environment that aligns with your organizational structure and compliance needs.

3. Data Transformation and ETL Processes

Beyond the raw data, many marketing automation platforms perform “hidden” data transformation processes. These might include:

• Data Enrichment: Automatically pulling in demographic or firmographic data from third-party sources.
• Calculated Fields: Deriving new data points (e.g., “days since last purchase”) from existing ones.
• Aggregation: Summarizing data (e.g., total purchases over time).
• Deduplication Logic: Rules for identifying and merging duplicate contact records.

These crucial processes, which might have been built into your old platform’s native capabilities or custom scripts, will need to be meticulously replicated in the new environment. The new platform may have different capabilities or limitations in how it supports these transformations, potentially requiring custom development, middleware solutions, or a re-engineering of the process entirely.

4. Third-Party Integrations

Modern marketing automation platforms rarely operate in isolation. They are part of a broader martech and sales tech ecosystem, integrating with CRMs (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics), Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics), e-commerce platforms, and more.

Each of these integrations represents a potential point of failure during migration. You’ll need to:

• Analyze Compatibility: Ensure your existing tech stack is compatible with the new platform.
• Reconfigure and Re-authenticate: All existing integrations will need to be set up anew in the target platform, requiring new API keys, authentication tokens, and mapping of data fields.
• Potentially Re-develop: If native connectors aren’t available or sufficient, custom API integrations may need to be rebuilt from scratch, adhering to the new platform’s API specifications.
• Verify Data Flow: Rigorously test that data is flowing correctly and synchronously between all connected systems.

This can be one of the most time-consuming and technically challenging aspects of a migration, as it involves coordinating across multiple systems and often multiple vendors.

5. Content and Asset Migration

Emails, content cards, landing pages, forms, templates, images, and dynamic content blocks are the visible face of your marketing efforts. While they appear to be simple assets, migrating them is far from a drag-and-drop exercise:

• Image Hosting: All images linked within your existing assets will need to be hosted in the new platform’s asset library, and every single reference to those images within emails and landing pages will need to be updated. This is a manual and error-prone process if not automated.
• Form Rebuilding: Forms are often deeply integrated with data capture and lead routing logic. They will need to be rebuilt in the new instance, and any external web pages hosting these forms will require updates to point to the new form URLs.
• Template and Dynamic Content: Platform-specific template languages, dynamic content rules, and personalization tokens will likely not translate directly. This often means recreating templates and logic from the ground up, ensuring that personalization functions as intended.

6. Campaigns, Programs, and Journey Rebuilding

This is where the true “automation” lives. Your multi-step nurture programs, trigger-based campaigns, and complex customer journeys are the culmination of your marketing strategy. These cannot simply be “copied.”

• Rebuilding Workflows: Each campaign and program will need to be rebuilt using the new platform’s workflow builder, adapting to its unique logic, decision points, and branching capabilities.
• Segmentation Logic: The audience segmentation criteria used in the old platform must be accurately translated and implemented in the new system, ensuring that the right messages reach the right people.
• Prioritization: Given the effort involved, it’s crucial to prioritize which campaigns and programs are critical for immediate migration and which can be rebuilt over time.

7. Deliverability and IP Warming

One of the most critical, yet often overlooked, aspects of a MAP migration is deliverability. When you move to a new platform, you’ll typically be sending from new IP addresses and sub-domains. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) view new sending IPs with suspicion to prevent spam. This necessitates an “IP warming” process:

• Gradual Sending: A controlled, gradual increase in sending volume from the new IPs over several weeks or even months. This builds a positive sender reputation with ISPs.
• Timing is Key: The timing of your migration must account for this warming period, potentially requiring a temporary pause in message cadence or a carefully managed cutover from the old to the new platform.
• Risk of Poor Deliverability: Skipping or rushing IP warming can lead to emails landing in spam folders, being blocked, or even blacklisting, severely impacting your marketing effectiveness.

8. Historical Data and Reporting

A significant challenge is the inability to transfer historical reporting and activity data (e.g., email opens, clicks, unsubscribes, form submissions, website visits) from the old instance to the new one. This means:

• Loss of Native Historical View: The new platform will only begin accumulating data from the point of migration.
• Impact on Trend Analysis: You won’t have a seamless historical view within the new platform for year-over-year comparisons or long-term trend analysis.
• Data Archiving Strategy: A plan must be in place to archive historical data from the old system, often in a data warehouse or business intelligence tool, to maintain a complete record for compliance, analysis, and auditing.

9. Contact Management and Database Optimization

A migration is an invaluable opportunity to critically assess your overall contact database. Instead of merely replicating existing issues, consider:

• Data Cleansing: Is there missing data on your contact records that could be filled in more completely?
• Deduplication: Are there duplicate records that need to be merged or removed?
• Inactive Contacts: Should inactive or unengaged contacts be included in the migration, or is this an opportunity to start with a cleaner, more engaged audience?
• Strategic Re-evaluation: Now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your targeting strategies, messaging personalization, trigger-based campaigns, and lead management processes. Can they be improved or streamlined in the new environment?

This process ensures you’re not just moving problems but actively optimizing your database for future success.

10. Process Improvement and Strategic Re-evaluation

The true value of a migration often lies not just in replicating existing functionality but in leveraging the new platform’s capabilities to drive process improvements. This is the antithesis of “lift and shift.”

• Automation Opportunities: Data that was traditionally transferred via manual file uploads could potentially be automated and integrated in real-time via APIs or native connectors, reducing manual effort and improving data freshness.
• Advanced Features: Does the new platform offer advanced features like AI-driven personalization, predictive analytics, or more sophisticated journey orchestration that you couldn’t achieve in your old system?
• Rethinking Legacy: This is the ideal moment to challenge legacy processes that might be inefficient, outdated, or simply carried over due to inertia. A migration forces a critical look at “why we do things this way.”

The Human Element: Change Management

Beyond the technical hurdles, the human element is crucial. A new platform means a new user interface, different workflows, and potentially new ways of thinking about marketing automation. This requires:

• Comprehensive Training: Ensuring your marketing team is adequately trained on the new platform’s features and best practices.
• Change Management: Communicating the benefits of the migration, addressing concerns, and managing expectations throughout the process.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Ensuring that all relevant stakeholders, from IT to sales to marketing, are aligned on the migration goals and prepared for the transition.

A Strategic Investment, Not a Simple Swap

The seemingly straightforward notion of a “lift and shift” marketing automation migration is a deceptive one. While the end goal is to transition your marketing operations, the journey itself is a complex project demanding meticulous planning, deep technical expertise, and strategic foresight. It’s not merely a technical task of copying data and assets; it’s an opportunity to re-evaluate, optimize, and modernize your entire marketing automation ecosystem.

By acknowledging the inherent differences between platforms, anticipating the challenges related to data structures, integrations, content, campaigns, deliverability, and historical reporting, and embracing the opportunity for process improvement, organizations can transform a daunting technical exercise into a strategic investment that yields long-term benefits in efficiency, personalization, and customer engagement. Approaching a migration with this comprehensive mindset, ideally with the guidance of experienced partners, is the only way to ensure a smooth transition and unlock the full potential of your new marketing automation platform.