How to Migrate from Emarsys Marketing Cloud to Insider in 4 Easy Steps

Migrating to a new marketing platform can feel like trying to find your way through a maze in the dark—daunting, with worries about data loss, downtime, and other unexpected obstacles. 

These rollercoasters of emotions are strong enough to make you want to stick with the same old system. 

But here’s the thing: Marketing migration does come with short-term challenges, but the long-term gain makes it worthwhile. 

If legacy platforms like Emarsys aren’t providing an advanced website, in-app personalization, more channel options, consistent customer support, and a simpler setup process with zero hidden fees—it’s time to switch.

The good news is Insider takes the common complexity and implementation headaches of re-platforming out of the scene. That means, with Insider’s flexible setup and integration options, your whole experience will be a smooth sail.

This guide will walk you through the steps for a smooth and disruption-free Emarsys migration to Insider. But before we get into the meaty part, let’s explore why so many marketing teams are choosing to leave Emarsys behind.

Why are more marketers switching from Emarsys to Insider?

Modern consumers now use an average of six channels across at least two devices. Around 75% of them expect a cohesive experience across every touchpoint—Website, SMS, Email, Mobile App. With customer experiences becoming increasingly complex, multi-touch, and non-linear, marketers need tools that are not just powerful but flexible enough to adapt to these changes.

While Emarsys has been a popular choice to aggregate customer data, build and personalize marketing campaigns, and reach customers through channels like email, SMS, and digital ads, many brands are looking for better alternatives to fill its significant gaps.

Emarsys offers some level of personalization however, it lacks advanced features, especially for web and in-app experiences.

This limitation hampers a marketer’s ability to provide tailored, seamless interactions. With only 80 integrations, Emarsys provides fewer opportunities to connect with a broader range of marketing channels.

To top it off, Emarsys doesn’t provide a wide range of templates for web personalization, and real-time, dynamic segments.

Its complex and unintuitive user interface makes data interpretation really hard. A lot of its users experienced a lack of responsiveness and long wait times for resolving issues, leaving marketers without the guidance they need to leverage the platform effectively.

Insider brings together a wide array of channels like email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp in one platform. This extensive cross-channel support allows you to provide a personalized experience to your customers, and build and automate campaigns that truly engage customers wherever they are. 

This ability breaks down the barriers Emarsys users often face with channel limitations. 

Besides personalizing your customers’ website and mobile app experiences,  you can build fully personalized, cross-channel campaigns using our orchestration tool. 

The most important part, we eliminate any complication in the setup process (with no extra setup charge) and make sure you have a dedicated global support team with strategic advice and guidance to ensure your team performs at their best. 

Note: Check out how Insider stacks up against Emarsys

Insider customers frequently highlight the difference we make: “We’ve been working with Insider for more than a year now. What we really liked most about them was their team who supported us throughout the integration and implementation process. Their team has consistently provided us with the support that we needed….” – Maria Paula Valencia Gonçalves.

Switching effortlessly from a legacy platform like Emarsys to Insider enables you to build personalized, automated, and highly effective campaigns across touchpoints. This is helping brands like Slazenger, NA-KD, and Clarins drive more conversions and revenue and increase CLTV. 

6 reasons marketers are choosing Insider

In the previous section, we’ve touched on the surface-level reasons why many brands are nudging toward Insider. Let’s explore the six other factors that contributed to the users’ decisions to migrate from Emarsys.  

1. Omnichannel Marketing Capabilities

Emarsys provides a suite of omnichannel marketing capabilities, focusing on unifying customer experiences across channels like email, SMS, and digital advertising. 

However, it often falls short in areas like mobile app personalization and advanced website customization. Additionally, Emarsys relies on SAP integrations to expand its functionalities, which can result in a fragmented user experience and make it harder for marketers to create seamless journeys.

In contrast, Insider offers unmatched channel breadth with support for over 12 native channels, including web, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more—all within a single, cohesive platform.

This extensive range allows you to engage customers consistently across every touchpoint without relying on a patchwork of third-party integrations.
 

By providing comprehensive native channel support, Insider ensures that customer journeys are not just integrated but also fluid and personalized. 

This reduces the complexities that often come with having multiple vendors. Our unified approach gives you a clearer understanding of customer behavior and preferences to establish a more impactful engagement strategy.

While Emarsys might let you add basic pop-ups or banners, implementing more advanced personalization strategies usually requires developer support. 

Insider doesn’t bog you down with these hurdles and provides advanced personalization tools that are easy to use. For example, you can personalize your website’s:

• Categories
• Banners
• Product recommendation

2. Customer Support and Account Management

One of the recurring challenges with Emarsys is its customer support. Users have reported long wait times for issue resolution and a lack of intuitive guidance, leaving them to navigate the platform largely on their own. 

The frequent changes in account management exacerbate this issue, leading to inconsistent support and difficulty in maximizing the platform’s capabilities. Many customers end up using Emarsys for basic functions, unable to leverage its full potential for automated and personalized marketing.

Insider takes a proactive approach by offering comprehensive support right from the start. With dedicated onboarding resources, tailored training, and local expert support, Insider ensures a smooth transition so marketers can hit the ground running. 

Unlike Emarsys, Insider provides one-on-one guidance throughout the setup process, helping businesses adapt quickly and take full advantage of the platform’s advanced features. This hands-on support ensures that your team not only transitions seamlessly but also thrives with a tailored strategy that drives immediate results

3. Data and Event Strategy

Catalog Integration Wizard: 

Insider’s catalog hub is designed with the marketer in mind, offering an intuitive, step-by-step process to simplify data integration. Whether you’re dealing with SKUs, events, or customer attributes, Insider makes data migration projects seamless. Unlike Emarsys, which provides a limited range of integrations, Insider offers over 100 plug-and-play options that effortlessly connect customer, engagement, and product data across your entire tech stack.

Insider’s wide range of integrations covers crucial categories like CRM, analytics, paid advertising, and social media. This breadth ensures that all your data sources can be synced in one unified platform, avoiding the fragmented experience that Emarsys users often face.

 Plus, Insider’s built-in progress tracker keeps you and your team updated in real time, eliminating the guesswork commonly associated with complex integrations.

Web SDK Wizard: 

While Emarsys offers certain web SDK functionalities, it lacks the flexibility and depth needed for full-scale mobile personalization. This limitation can be a significant hurdle in today’s multi-channel environment, where delivering consistent user experiences across all touchpoints is key. 

Marketers are often constrained by Emarsys’ narrower focus, which doesn’t fully support mobile marketers’ demands for a more comprehensive engagement strategy.

Insider’s SDK-X, however, is built for versatility and scale. Specifically designed to cater to mobile marketers, Insider’s SDK-X provides a lightweight, customizable solution that goes beyond web-centric constraints. 

It lets you create seamless, web-like experiences within your mobile app, engaging users in a personalized manner. This feature is crucial for keeping users active and increasing the time they spend on your app, something Emarsys falls short of offering.

Data Planning: 

Emarsys’s capability of aggregating data can lead to a fragmented and cumbersome integration process. The reliance on SAP integration, multiple platforms, limited channels, and complex APIs means that marketers need to possess a higher level of technical expertise to navigate the system. 

This creates bottlenecks, particularly when trying to achieve a unified customer view.
Insider, on the other hand, unifies customer data from a wide array of sources into a single, accurate customer profile. This unified data strategy means you can analyze, segment, and act on customer insights without the technical hurdles.

Insider’s flexible API ensures that virtually any system can connect with the platform, while its global support team provides hands-on assistance, making the integration process both efficient and tailored to your specific business needs.

4. Pricing Framework

Emarsys provides a range of pricing options, but its structure can be somewhat vague, particularly as business needs grow. While Emarsys has fixed pricing tiers, hidden charges can accumulate quickly depending on the size of your contact list and the need for more advanced features. 

For businesses with more than 80 integrations or those requiring advanced personalization capabilities, the costs can become unpredictable. Insider offers a more personalized and flexible pricing model tailored to your company’s unique needs. 

By providing transparent pricing and personalized quotes, Insider allows you to understand exactly what you’re paying for upfront. We also provide a clear, predictable structure, allowing you to maximize your marketing budget without worrying about unexpected expenses.

5. Total Cost of Ownership and Consolidate 

Lots of enterprise marketers are frustrated. They’ve invested more and more into martech solutions, but the results don’t justify the spending. Marketing leaders no longer want to pay for redundant technology. 

It only leads to increased complexity, more integrations, and a greater burden to manage. Today, marketers are under intense pressure to demonstrate the clear ROI and value of their technology investments. Therefore, reducing the total cost of ownership while increasing productivity and efficiency is crucial.

Brands looking to migrate often cite the following top reasons:

• Improving efficiency and productivity (67%)
• Reducing the total cost of tech ownership (52%)
• Maintaining competitiveness in the marketplace (48%)

At Insider, we have successfully assisted hundreds of Emarsys customers in making the switch. The result? Enhanced productivity and efficiency alongside a significant reduction in total cost of ownership.

6. Interface and Development Dependence

A significant drawback of Emarsys is its reliance on technical teams for executing complex tasks like launching campaigns, making iterations, or performing tests. 

This dependency often leads to slower campaign rollouts and a lack of agility in responding to market changes. The platform’s complexity can create bottlenecks, eventually making it harder for marketing teams to adapt quickly.

Insider eliminates these barriers with a single, user-friendly code layer that empowers marketers to manage data, orchestrate processes, and create customer journeys without the need for IT intervention. 

With Insider, marketers can go live faster and execute tasks more efficiently. To make things even simpler, Insider offers a library of ready-made templates tailored for various industries, use cases, and metrics. 

This means you can launch campaigns that look and feel like your brand without needing any coding knowledge, providing a smoother and more intuitive experience than Emarsys.

4 key stages of migrating to Insider

Now that you’re convinced about Insider’s ability to help you build and automate personalized marketing campaigns across all touchpoints customers have with your brand, it’s time to begin the transition. 

We’ve simplified the Emarsys migration project into four easy-to-follow phases, based on our expert team’s hands-on experience managing these transitions.

1. Evaluation 

Start by setting clear objectives, pinpointing current challenges of using Emarsys, and setting KPIs to track the before and after journey of your migration. 

Prioritize which goals are essential to address immediately and which can be postponed to a “wishlist” for later phases. This strategic planning keeps you focused and guides your team to address key issues without getting bogged down in unnecessary details.

Engage with all internal stakeholders and align your objectives with Insider’s dedicated implementation team. This alignment is crucial for preventing misunderstandings and ensuring a streamlined migration process. 

Review the current platform before making the switch. Evaluate the current capabilities of Emarsys and identify all the missing features or areas. You can compare this with Insider’s offerings, which provide more advanced personalization, multi-channel support, and an intuitive UI.

Chart a migration roadmap, considering labor needs, costs, and timelines. A well-structured plan with clear milestones will keep the project on track. This will also avoid running into unexpected delays and costs. Prepare for potential challenges by proactively devising strategies to tackle them, ensuring a smooth transition.

2. Inventory

When transitioning from Emarsys to Insider, it’s essential to identify which data and assets are actively serving your marketing strategy versus what you anticipate to achieve with Insider’s features.

Insider opens up new possibilities by connecting data and assets across a broader range of channels. This offers you the golden opportunity to take your marketing efforts up a notch.

Audit your data and assets: Our team will collaborate closely with yours to audit all events, attributes, and custom attributes. We map these to new values, and clean, and de-duplicate your data, ensuring that only relevant and valuable information is carried over. 

This process isn’t just a simple clean-up; it’s a key step that sets the stage for your new marketing strategies with Insider. It’s an opportunity to declutter, streamline, and optimize your data to align with your current and future marketing goals.

Examine your existing campaign processes: The move to Insider is more than re-platforming—it’s an opportunity to redefine your workflow processes. Our platform’s intuitive setup simplifies what might have been complex in Emarsys. 

This lets you create, manage, and optimize campaigns with greater ease. 

We’ll guide you in outlining new workflows, and prepare you for any changes due to the differences between Emarsys and Insider. 

3. Workshop

After laying the groundwork, the next step is an intensive workshop with our dedicated Insider migration experts. This is where the real transformation begins. We work closely with you to design an optimal architecture and identify the best data sources and strategies to meet your goals. Our workshop process dives into three critical areas:

Architecture & Integrations: Here we thoroughly examine the mechanics of your data flow, and closely examine the specific use cases to uncover potential integration issues. This helps us ensure a smooth transition of all your systems to Insider’s platform. 

Campaign Process & Messaging: We take a close look at your existing campaigns and workflows. Using your specific use cases, we examine how campaigns can be optimized within the Insider platform. While some processes might stay the same, switching to Insider often brings operational improvements that save your team time and effort. 

Timing, Prioritization & Resourcing: We create a detailed migration plan that sets clear priorities and assigns responsibilities to avoid leaving out anything. 

We aim to make the migration process as quick and seamless as possible, helping your team adapt to the new system efficiently.

4. Migrate

Finally comes the transition part. Unlike the tedious and often complex migration process with Emarsys, Insider’s more streamlined approach takes any guesswork and chances of errors out of the equation.

Our focus on simplifying the migration process has earned Insider top rankings in categories like CDPs, personalization software, and mobile marketing software on G2. 

Customers consistently highlight our support team as a key reason for their rapid success with Insider. We help you get up and running fast with our white glove service and through the use of our Automatic Migrator to transition all of your data and assets smoothly and securely into Insider. 

Insider’s platform simplifies the Data & integration process by allowing direct, secure data ingestion via our Automatic Migrator. It not only enhances data integrity but also eliminates the need for intermediary storage platforms.

The Asset & Campaign Migration phase involves a comprehensive review of your current marketing assets, setting a fresh content strategy, and choosing the most effective formats. This process is also handled via our Automatic Migrator, which makes the process as seamless and fast as possible. 

With Insider’s advanced AI automation and personalization potential, you can expect a smooth transition that sets you up for improved marketing ROI and a more engaging customer journey.

Get started with Insider

Insider is designed to offer flexible setup and integration options that fit your business’s unique needs. It’s an ideal platform for enterprise marketers to unify customer data across various channels and systems. 

Our AI-driven intent engine enables you to predict future behavior and build tailored customer journeys that resonate. 

With Insider, marketers can seamlessly orchestrate consistent, engaging interactions across the Web, App, Web Push, Email, SMS, WhatsApp Commerce, and more—all from one central hub.

Our rapid implementation ensures you can start driving results right away, which helps marketers move faster and more effectively than ever before. 

Explore Insider’s features firsthand with our interactive demos and self-guided videos.Click here to book a demo with our Emarsys migration experts to learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.