How to migrate from Taxi for Email, step by step

Most of the large teams we talk to who are still on Taxi for Email have thought about leaving. What stops them is the migration. Years of design systems, modules, lifecycle campaigns and ESP connections sit in Taxi, and moving all of it sounds like a project that needs its own budget and a quarter of someone's time.

In our experience it is smaller than that. Co-op, one of the UK's largest co-operatives, moved from Taxi to Better Email with five design systems merged into one. They sent their first large campaign from Better Email after three weeks, and the full migration took about seven.

Why it is smaller than it looks

Three things keep the work down.

• Nothing gets left behind. Everything you do in Taxi has an equivalent in Better Email, down to validation on input fields and the tracking parameters added to links. The table further down maps each Taxi feature to where it lives in Better Email.
• We do the technical work. You hand over your Taxi design systems, and we rebuild them. Our AI translates Taxi's markup into a Better Email design system, and our team checks and adjusts the result with you.
• Your marketers already know how it works. Better Email organises work the same way Taxi does: a design system made of modules, and campaigns built from those modules. Teams coming from Taxi have needed an intro session, not a training programme.

The steps

1. Walk through your Taxi setup together

We start with a call where your team shows us how Taxi is set up today: which design systems you have, how the modules are structured, which fields marketers can edit, and where campaigns go when they are done. This is where we agree what to keep as it is and what to change.

2. Rebuild the design system

You export the master templates from Taxi and send them to us. We have the first version of the Better Email design system ready within three days. After that, a few rounds of feedback and sign-off on your side get it to where a campaign built in Better Email matches one built in Taxi.

A design system in Better Email can do more than a Taxi Email Design System. It knows which integration, campaign type and language each campaign belongs to, and can change with them: the colours, the footer and small print, and which settings marketers see. With an integration per brand, one design system can cover several brands and kinds of campaign, and each marketer only gets the options that apply to the campaign in front of them. Groups decide which integrations and campaign types each team can use.

That is how Co-op merged five Taxi design systems into one. Other teams use the migration to refresh their design. If you would rather move first and redesign later, that works too.

3. Connect your ESP

Better Email sends finished campaigns to your ESP, the same as Taxi. Your contacts, journeys and sending stay where they are. Someone on your team with access to the ESP sets up the connection, and we walk them through it. It is usually the quickest part of the migration.

This is also the point to set up campaign types and destinations, so each kind of campaign lands in the right place in the ESP. A newsletter and a transactional campaign can go to different folders or business units without anyone having to remember where.

4. Configure Better Email for your team

Next we set up the workspace with you:

• Campaign types, and which design system each one uses
• Permissions, groups and folders, so each team sees and edits what it should
• Pre-flight checks, the rules a campaign has to pass before it can be exported
• Betty, our AI agent, with your tone of voice and the brand and content details she needs to build campaigns your way

5. Set up single sign-on

We connect Better Email to your identity provider, so people log in with their company account. The security page lists the identity providers we support.

6. Move your lifecycle campaigns

Once the design system is in place, we move the lifecycle campaigns that live in Taxi today: welcome series, abandoned basket, renewals, and the rest. Betty converts each one to the new design system, and your team approves them before they go live.

7. Get the team started

Training is a 30 to 60 minute session where we build a campaign from start to finish with your marketers. After that, they work on their own. When they get stuck, they can ask Betty, who knows the product and your setup, or write to us. Enterprise customers also get a shared Slack or Teams channel with our team.

What your team provides

We do most of the work, but a few things have to come from your side:

• Exports from Taxi: the master templates for each design system, and the lifecycle campaigns you want moved.
• Someone with access to your ESP to set up the integration. We help them through it.
• Someone to set up single sign-on in your identity provider.
• A technical owner. One person who owns the design system, the integrations and the security setup on your side, or delegates them. They are our point of contact during the migration and sign off on the design system before it goes live. We build the first version, but the design system is yours.

How long it takes

Most migrations take between two and six weeks from the first call until your team is sending from Better Email. The range depends on how many design systems you have, how many lifecycle campaigns move with you, and how quickly sign-off happens on your side.

It does not have to happen all at once. You can move one brand, market or campaign type first and run the rest from Taxi until it is ready. That is how Co-op could send a large campaign from Better Email four weeks before the migration was finished.

How Taxi features map to Better Email

Taxi and Better Email use different names for most things. This is where each part of your Taxi setup goes.

What you get on top of that:

• Performance data from your ESP. After a campaign is sent, Better Email brings the results back into it: sends, deliveries, opens, clicks and unsubscribes, and for most ESPs the clicks on each link, shown on the layout of the revision that went out. It works with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Bloomreach, Agillic and Braze. Better Email only stores campaign totals, never recipient-level data.
• Feedback and approvals in the campaign. Comments are pinned to the spot they are about, each revision can have required approvers, and you can block export until they have signed off. External reviewers, like a legal team or an agency client, review from a private link without an account.
• Real-time co-editing, so several people can work on the same campaign at once.
• Betty, the AI agent that builds campaigns from a brief, a URL or a document, inside your design system.
• Translations, with each language version linked to the master campaign.
• Design systems as code, for developers who want the design system in Git.

Do you still need a tool like Taxi?

Some teams use a pending migration as a reason to look at their whole stack, and ask whether a new ESP's built-in editor could replace a separate tool for building campaigns.

An ESP's editor has to work for every customer the ESP has, so it is built for the simplest case. It handles building a campaign, but not the rest of the production process: approvals, quality checks, brand rules, and translations. Teams that rely on it end up working around its limits, or waiting for the few people who know the ESP well enough to make changes.

Most Taxi customers already know this, because it is why they bought Taxi in the first place. Better Email keeps the way of working you have built with Taxi and adds the features listed above.

When to start

You don't need to wait for your Taxi renewal. The sooner you move, the sooner your team gets the features above.

Running both tools for a few weeks shouldn't mean paying twice. We agree terms with you that cover the overlap until your Taxi contract ends. The migration itself is free.

To start, get in touch and we will plan the migration with you.