The problem
The client operated two flagship casino and resort properties, one on the east coast and one on the west coast, each with its own audience, its own sending patterns, and its own compliance obligations around responsible gaming. Marketing lived on a legacy email service provider and a legacy campaign management tool. Data lived in a warehouse that was being migrated at the same time. The client needed to move off both platforms onto Braze, with Segment feeding audience data in, without losing the ability to send during the cutover.
Any email migration at this scale carries one existential risk. If the sender reputation breaks during the move, recovery takes months and revenue bleeds the whole time. The client sent to audiences in the millions and could not afford that.
The work
Alloy12's founder was part of the core delivery team during a prior consulting engagement. The work covered configuration, account setup, and the IP warming strategy that protected sender reputation through the migration.
The delivered work included workspace configuration for each property, team and role setup separating marketing and IT permissions, DNS and SSL configuration for the new sending subdomains, authentication setup for each sending domain, and migration of suppression data from the legacy provider. The Braze implementation used Liquid and catalog-driven personalization to replace dynamic content patterns that had lived in the legacy ESP.
IP warming was the most delicate part of the engagement. Separate warming plans were built for each property, with daily send volumes ramped from thousands to hundreds of thousands over multiple weeks, split across ISPs by domain. Send performance was monitored against delivery rate, open rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe thresholds. If any metric drifted, the current volume was held until it recovered. The warming also covered marketing sends and transactional sends on separate paths.
Suppression management for responsible gaming was implemented using segments with CSV-driven suppress attributes, a non-trivial workaround for Braze's standard suppression model. Campaign calendars, approval workflows, dark mode email design, and training agendas for each property rounded out the migration.
What changed
Both properties completed IP warming successfully and moved live traffic to Braze without a reputation incident. Marketing teams went from a fragmented stack of legacy ESP, legacy campaign management, and spreadsheet-driven audience selection to a single platform with integrated segments, Liquid-based personalization, catalog-driven dynamic content, and native integration with the customer data platform. The client unified marketing and transactional sending under one roof, with IT and marketing separated by role-based permissions.
Stack
The work combined Braze across multiple workspaces, Segment for customer data infrastructure, a cloud data warehouse for source data, Liquid templating for personalization, and suppression management for regulated gaming compliance. The legacy ESP and legacy campaign management platform were decommissioned through the cutover.
Why this matters for your business
Email platform migrations fail when someone thinks you can just flip a switch. At the volume and sensitivity this client operates at, a failed migration would have meant months of reputation rebuilding and real revenue loss. The engagement combined deep Braze configuration knowledge, IP warming discipline, and hospitality industry compliance awareness. If you are migrating a regulated, high-volume email program to a new ESP, this is the pattern.