When migrating customer accounts from an existing platform to Shopify Plus, these account holders will need to reactivate their account in order to log in and make use of their account information. This is pretty standard practice for a migration process and it removes any security issues with trying to migrate passwords etc.
The activation process is often missed off project plans (and somtimes completely) but it’s a very important area to get right, in order to avoid impacting the experience for existing customers to your new Shopify or Shopify Plus store – our recommendations for managing this process are:
Send all customers the activation link (via your ESP)
Shopify provides an activation link for existing account holders, which can be found against the customer record in Shopify. These links can be bulk exported into a spreadsheet via Excelify, along with the customer email. Excelify wrote an excellent guide to importing this data into Mailchimp and using the individual link as a variable – this is really useful for the same principle applies for other ESPs. You can also send the links using the bulk account inviter app, which allows for plain text or html emails also.
Although Shopify allows you to send this to customers directly, we always recommend sending via your ESP / email platform to ensure that you have visibility over how people are responding to it. Although you can see the number of activated accounts within Shopify, ideally you’d be able to send a follow up email to those who haven’t opened the first email etc. You may also find that the deliverability will be better coming from your existing ESP and send domain.
The messaging of this email should be very clean and direct and the whole process needs to be displayed as a simple one. We’ve actually found this these emails can drive a lot of revenue, as you’re bring a lot of users back to the website – you also then have the opportunity to remarket these users etc.
It’s also worth noting that you should ensure you don’t send activation emails when you import your customers into Shopify.
Potentially send a second activation email
As above, we’d suggest considering sending a follow up to those users who haven’t opened the email.
Export customer details + invite URLs
You’ll need to export all of your customers names and emails + their account invite URLs in order to send via a third-party email provider – this can be done via Excelify, as above.
Add a reactivation prompt on your account login page
Once you’ve sent out the activation links to your existing account holders, the other key part of this process is to add the activation prompt to the login page, as per the example below.
This prompt needs to be obvious so that users who go to login and find that there account doesn’t work are able to see it and understand the process they need to follow. Once they submit their email, they’ll then receive the account activation email and this will allow them to reset their password.
Add details to all other login prompts and to your FAQ section / Helpdesk
Another recommended action is to create a page on your Helpdesk or a listing on your FAQs page, just to explain the process to customers and ideally reduce customer service enquiries.
—
This is a pretty big part of the migration process and I’d also recommend explaining all of this to your customer services team, as it’s likely to result in a minor increase in enquiries.
