Data Migration Best Practices for Moving to Marketing Cloud Next

Data migration is the least glamorous part of a Marketing Cloud Next implementation, and also one of the most consequential. The quality of your marketing programme on the new platform depends directly on the quality of the data you bring with you.

This guide covers the practices that prevent the most common migration data failures — from pre-migration audit through post-migration validation.

The Migration Data Layers

A marketing automation migration involves several distinct data layers, each with its own migration approach:

Contact and lead data — the person records: names, email addresses, job titles, phone numbers, company associations. These typically stay in Salesforce CRM and flow into Marketing Cloud Next via Data Cloud's CRM data stream. The migration question is not "how do we move contacts" but "how do we clean contacts before MCN starts consuming them."