Despite your business size and the volume of data to transfer, the migration process is a very complex task to handle. At the same time, it is an excellent time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies, see what needs to be improved, and consider new trends, such as contacting your customers through a different communication channel. This article walks you through the main steps in the transition process to help you migrate your customers' data and share our best practices.

Before you can start migrating, you need to connect your store to Omnisend. This integration will allow us to sync and pass the information about your customers, add our sign-up forms, and trigger automation workflows.

Important! We do not recommend closing your Bronto account before you transfer all of the data, re-create your automation workflows, and ensure everything works as intended. 

We would recommend sticking to this list:

Once you connect your store to Omnisend, we start importing the information about your customers, products, and orders they've placed. However, this information is not complete, and you may want to migrate the data you've collected with Bronto.

Note that the instructions below will guide you through your contacts export from Bronto. However, if you have any questions or need any assistance, we recommend checking their Help Center or contacting their Support for the up-to-date information.

To export your contacts, in your Bronto account, go to Contacts -> Manage -> click Export. In the Choose Filter section, choose the filter to use for the export. You can choose:

We recommend exporting each of these lists separately since each of these statuses should be mapped to the corresponding status in Omnisend. 

During the export process, you will need to go through the following steps:

2. Choose GeoIP / Technology DataB, with the information on your customers' location and on the device, browser, and OS Data. 

3. Choose the RFM Metrics section, and select the RFM metrics you want to be included in the report. You may skip this stage since this metric is also exported from your store. 

4. Email Notification, in this field, you can enter the email address for the notification about successful export to be sent.
​

Note that either the email address or the contact phone number should be provided; otherwise, the customer won't be added to the platform.

Once you've finished selecting fields for the export, you should click Export. A downloadable file will be added to Reports > Downloads and Reports > Legacy Downloads.

The file needs to have an appropriate format for your customers' data to be migrated successfully. All information about each contact should go into one separate row, and each column should contain a single type of information, e.g., First name, Last name, City, etc.

Just like in the example:

Omnisend accepts the following data types:

Find more information on each of the data types here.

We would recommend paying attention to the phone number and the date fields.

The phone number should be recorded in the international format: +11231234567 (+ country-code area-code phone number). To tell Excel to treat this data as a text, not a function, you may add an apostrophe ('+1 ...) or change the format of the cell to the text one.

Date fields should be imported in ISO 8601 format. Example: 2020-01-01, 2020-02-29 14:23, 2020-02-29T14:23Z, 2020-02-29T14:23+02:00, etc.

To import your contacts to Omnisend, go to the Audience tab -> click on the Add contacts button -> File import -> Select file.

After selecting the file to import from your computer, you will need to map the properties imported from Bronto with those available in Omnisend.
​
​Managing your customers' data

All of the contacts added to your Omnisend account will get a source tag assigned automatically. Source: platform tag will be added to the contacts imported from your store, and source: manual import to those you migrate from Bronto. If you upload the duplicate contacts to Omnisend, we will only update the information or add the missing one.
​

The fields exported to the file can be mapped with the default properties available in Omnisend or assigned to the custom ones. If you see the default field for that data, it is better to use the default instead of creating the custom one. For example, the Birthday date field, which is recorded as a custom property in Bronto, can be assigned to the Default property in Omnisend.

When transferring your contacts for the first time, we recommend mapping all the fields available for the import. 

Since the information you can export from Bronto is pretty limited, it would be good to migrate some of the Segments to Omnisend. Here is the list of the Segments we would recommend transferring:

After you export these Segments from your Bronto account, you may import them to the corresponding Segments in Omnisend. Check this article for the instructions on your contacts import to the Segment.
​

We advise importing your unsubscribed contacts (Suppressed in Klaviyo) under a specific tag. Once you have saved the contacts to the Segment, you should open the Segment → , select all contacts → click on the Actions → Unsubscribe.

When starting with a new service, it is essential to spend some time warming up your sender's reputation. You should send your newsletters to the most engaged contacts that are likely to open and click through your emails during this period. We highly encourage you to look through this instruction for more information on the warm-up plan concept. 

To define the Segment of engaged contacts, you can use the Segment you've transferred from Bronto or create one in Omnisend. To create such a Segment in Omnisend, you can use the information imported from your store, your customer's purchase behavior, and the custom fields about the Last Open and Last Click dates you've migrated from Bronto.

In Omnisend, you can send SMS messages to contacts both inside and outside the US. While there are no specific regulations for the rest of the world (apart from the GDPR in the EU), to send your texts to US customers, you need to be TCPA compliant. Both Omnisend and Bronto allow collecting your customers' consent, but the consent obtained with Bronto cannot be mapped with the corresponding property in Omnisend. 

Although Omnisend cannot take any responsibility for the consent collected with Bronto, still, we may still recommend adding this consent as a custom property in Omnisend. In that case, you will be able to create a Segment of the customers that provided consent in Omnisend and Bronto.
​
​

In Omnisend, we are not only trying to develop a powerful marketing tool but also a user-friendly platform with multiple channels included. We highly encourage you to look through the options offered by Omnisend before you decide to transfer your old templates. Recreating your content will ensure that you have a responsive and well-working setup on Omnisend. Check these articles for more information:

Nevertheless, if you cannot dedicate time to recreate all the email templates and other content you created in Bronto, we have two options for you: