STRATEGY / CAMPAIGNS
MagicINFO end of sale: a migration strategy that didn't panic anyone
When a platform your customers run on reaches end of sale, the worst thing marketing can do is panic them. The second worst is to pretend there's only one answer.
The problem
End of sale is a strange brief. The product your customers know is going away on a schedule nobody in the room set, every one of those customers now has a decision to make, and your competitors are writing to them too. The lazy play is fear: urgency banners, countdowns, a single migration offer pushed at everyone. It works on a spreadsheet and fails in reality, because customers in genuinely different situations can smell a one-size answer, and the trust you burn in that moment was the only durable asset you had.
What I built
This one is a strategy story, so I'll keep it at the level of thinking rather than internals.
The core decision: treat the moment as a trust problem first and a demand problem second. Customers needed a clear, honest map of their options before they would care about anyone's offer. So instead of one forced route, I designed a three-path migration framework, with each path matched to a different customer situation rather than to what was most convenient to sell. The job of the marketing was to help a customer locate themselves on that map quickly, then make the next step for their path obvious.
The second decision was consistency. The framework was deployed across our group's brand websites, so a customer met the same map and the same honest framing wherever they entered. One story, told once, everywhere.
The outcome
The framework went live across the group's brand sites, and the migration conversation started from guidance rather than alarm. Qualitatively, that is the outcome I designed for: a customer facing a forced change met a vendor behaving like an adviser. That posture is also a long game, because the customer you treat honestly at end of sale is the customer who takes your call about what comes next.
The stack
- HubSpot CMS and Marketing Hub
- The custom module and template system, carrying the framework across five web properties
- A single source-of-truth content framework keeping every brand's version aligned
Where next
Next build
A design system for HubSpot: 21 modules, 30 templates, five web properties
Component thinking applied to CRM content, so a multi-brand portfolio ships consistent email and web without rebuilding anything twice.
The thinking behind it
When the platform your customers run on reaches end of life
How to think about marketing a platform sunset: trust before demand, situations before offers, and one story told the same way everywhere.