Transferring customers data is one of the most important steps in re-platforming or migrating regardless of whatever platform you're migrating from. Besides the ease of migration, many brands have been migrating to Shopify Plus primarily to benefit from its various selling point. You can look up some of those benefits in my previous article: Top 10 reasons why we prefer to work with Shopify Plus so that we can focus on the process and considerations around migrating your existing customer data into Shopify Plus.

For those who are switching from another e-commerce platform to Shopify, customer reactivation simply refers to the process of having existing customers change their passwords so that they can log in to Shopify for the first time and retrieve their historical orders and so on. This procedure is essential since customer passwords cannot be imported into Shopify without some more sophisticated approach. So, while your team or agency will hopefully transfer all of the customer and related order data across, a new password should be set for each user to gain access to their previous account. Here are a few things you can do to manage the reactivation process:

Utilize your login page for account reactivation

Place a clear message on your login page requesting users to reset their password due to your migration to Shopify Plus. This is temporary and can remain on your login page for the first few months after your store is live.

You can also utilize a notification bar at the top of the site to direct users here. This is more important if you have a large number of existing customers who use their account functionality, and you'd likely use it for a few days while promoting reactivation. You also need to ensure this message contains a clear call-to-action in each case.

Send activation links to all customers directly from Shopify Plus

Shopify offers an activation link for all merchants, and this link can be accessed under the customer record. You can send this link directly to your customer’s email since Shopify allows for such and shows the amount of activated accounts.

Use your email service providers to send activation links

Although you can send the activation links from Shopify, some merchants prefer to send them through a third-party email service provider, particularly because it give them visibility into how people are reacting to their emails. To send the link via email platform, you only need to mass export the links together with the data and email of each customer into a spreadsheet. You can use third-party apps to import this data into Mailchimp and use the individual activation link as a variable. This is quite beneficial as the same approach applies if you are using other email service providers whether you send these link through Shopify or via your email service provider.

It is also advisable to send a follow-up email to those who haven't opened the initial email, and so on; that is where email service providers may come in handy since they will likely show you customer's reactions to your email. 

Educate your customer service team upfront and update FAQ page

Customers will be logged out of their accounts once you migrate into a new platform, and this will increase customer inquiry. When that happens, you don't want your customer support team looking clueless. So you need to pre-inform them and explain the account reactivation process on your Frequently Asked Questions page just to reduce customer service inquiries. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Data migration procedure is an important element of re-platforming, and it is sometimes overwhelming. Customer reactivation is frequently overlooked as some people don't consider it project-critical. However, it is usually worth the effort to move customers and all of their previous orders - and then encourage as many as possible to become active in the new store.

You can also read my Pre and Post-launch checklist for Shopify Plus for more information in case you missed anything.