Make portability part of the brief
Klaviyo’s migration guidance recommends exporting suppression information and preserving those suppressions when moving to another provider. That narrow official example highlights a useful buying question: can the store move the information needed to respect customer preferences? The evaluation below is research-based. It does not rank providers or claim AMZ12 has completed a migration.
Begin with three real tasks your team performs: a scheduled campaign, a welcome sequence and a response to an unsubscribe request. Describe the required result and the colleague who would carry it out. This makes a shortlist about the store’s work rather than the longest feature table.
Map the information you need
List customer identifiers, subscription states, signup context, product references and events used by your existing campaigns. Distinguish essential fields from information nobody actively uses. Ask how each essential field enters the proposed system and which system remains responsible for correcting it.
Include people who should not receive marketing. A migration exercise limited to active subscribers can conceal the most consequential gap. Use synthetic records or an appropriately controlled sample for evaluation, and avoid sending test marketing to real customers merely to prove that an integration connects.
Rehearse one full campaign cycle
Ask the evaluator to draft a message, select its audience, obtain approval, schedule it and correct a discovered mistake. Include a second colleague so the exercise covers permissions and handoffs. Record which steps require a specialist or an additional service.
Inspect the review experience on a phone as well as a desktop. Check whether the approved links, audience exclusions and message version remain easy to identify. The useful question is whether your actual team can repeat the process reliably during a busy trading week.
Test a lifecycle change
Use a sample customer journey that enters a welcome sequence, places an order and changes communication preferences. Write the expected messages before configuring the sequence. Then ask the provider or implementation partner to explain how stale events, duplicate identities and preference changes would be handled.
Look for clear ownership of failures. If an order event stops arriving, the store needs someone to notice and a way to investigate without guessing. Treat monitoring, access to useful logs and the ability to pause a sequence as evaluation requirements rather than post-purchase cleanup.
Perform the exit exercise
Request a sample export of the relevant records and a field explanation. Verify whether another system could distinguish active contacts, exclusions and the information required to reconstruct your core audience rules. Inspect the format with the colleague who would be responsible for an eventual move.
Create a short migration runbook covering a sending pause, final data extraction, preference reconciliation and confirmation of the new setup. This is a planning exercise, not a reason to move immediately. It reveals whether the business understands the information on which its marketing depends.
Compare ownership and total work
For each shortlisted option, record the implementation tasks, training needs, ongoing maintenance and unresolved questions. Ask for current terms and charges directly from the provider using your actual usage assumptions; avoid treating a headline price as a complete project estimate.
Choose the option whose required workflow the team can demonstrate and support. Keep a written reason for rejecting attractive extras that do not solve an identified need. A sound decision leaves both a working campaign process and an understandable route out if the store’s requirements later change.
Official reference: Klaviyo Help Center: migrating off Klaviyo. Source checked on 29 October 2026. AMZ12 analysis and suggested checks are independent editorial guidance.