Planning a large migration

This guide is for teams moving a large program to Letterhead: several newsletters, a big audience, or a dedicated onboarding with the Letterhead team. If you’re setting up a single newsletter on your own, start with Moving your newsletter to Letterhead.

The basics: keep your newsletters reaching the inbox

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook decide where your newsletter lands partly on your history as a sender. When you switch platforms, some of that history has to be rebuilt. Four things protect you:

1. Send from your own domain, set up properly. Use a subdomain such as mail.yourdomain.com and publish the records Letterhead gives you. See Setting up your sending domain.
2. Bring a clean list. Move only people who still want your newsletter. Sending to old, inactive or invalid addresses is the quickest way to hurt your reputation. See Importing your audience.
3. Start with your most engaged readers and build up. Don’t send to your whole list on day one. See Warming up your sending reputation.
4. Keep sending on your usual schedule. A long gap followed by a sudden large send looks suspicious to mailbox providers.

The order of steps

1. Plan your structure. Decide how your newsletters map to channels and how to arrange them in groups. See Understanding company and channel workspaces.
2. Set up your sending domain and senders while you still send from your old platform, so DNS has time to take effect.
3. Invite your team and give each person a role. See Managing your team and roles.
4. Export and import your audience, keeping subscription status and tags. Leave unsubscribed and bounced addresses suppressed.
5. Rebuild your templates and connect your content sources, such as RSS feeds.
6. Send tests to a range of inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) and check how they look.
7. Warm up: send to your most engaged readers first and add more each send.
8. Switch over fully and stop sending from your old platform.

A realistic timeline

• Before you move: allow a few days for DNS records to be published and verified.
• First two to four weeks: volume rises gradually as your new sending reputation builds. Larger lists take longer, and newsletters that go out weekly or monthly build up per send rather than per day.
• After that: you send at full volume. Keep watching your list health for the first couple of months.

Run your old and new platforms side by side until the warm-up is done, so no reader goes without an issue.

What the Letterhead team does during onboarding

If your plan includes onboarding with the Letterhead team, they:

• talk through your program with you on an onboarding call;
• create your company, groups and channels;
• give you an import template, so your exported audience lines up with Letterhead’s fields;
• build a starting template based on your website and show you how to edit it;
• check that your domain records are correct once you’ve published them.

Your team owns the parts only you can do: publishing DNS records, choosing who to import, and any custom work with the Letterhead API. The Letterhead team supports you with the API but doesn’t build integrations for you, so plan for your own developer if you need one.

Advanced: technical checks before your first full send

These are for whoever looks after your domain and email infrastructure.

• Authentication. SPF must include Letterhead’s sending service, and the DKIM and DMARC records Letterhead gives you must be published on your sending subdomain. Start DMARC at p=none with a rua address so you get reports while you check everything passes. See Setting up your sending domain.
• Reputation and blocklists. Check your domain isn’t on a blocklist before you move, and keep an eye on it during the warm-up. See Reading your List Health page.
• List quality. Remove hard-bounced and long-inactive addresses before importing. See Handling bounces.
• Content. Keep the same look and sender name your readers know, so they recognise the newsletter. See Improving your deliverability.

If your numbers drop sharply during the move, for example bounces or spam complaints suddenly climb, that’s ours to look at with you: contact support with the newsletter and the date it was sent.