Marketo to HubSpot migration.
Programs, tokens and history, carried across. Marketo teams do not leave because Marketo stopped working. They leave because the Marketo and Salesforce stack asks more of a marketing operations team than the business can justify. The migration is judged on whether program membership history survives.
The asset is the history, not the emails.
Anyone can rebuild an email template. What cannot be rebuilt is six years of program membership, acquisition programs and first-touch data that every attribution report in the business depends on. That is the thing to plan the migration around, and it is the thing a naive export loses.
Rebuild the email. You cannot rebuild the history.
Marketo — program membershipMarketo concepts with no HubSpot equivalent.
Program membership history
Acquisition program, success dates and membership status per person are the backbone of Marketo attribution. HubSpot models campaigns differently, so this is either mapped into campaign membership and custom properties or lost. Decide before export, not after.
Tokens and Velocity scripting
My tokens, program tokens and Velocity email scripting have no direct counterpart. Personalisation gets rebuilt with HubSpot personalisation tokens and programmable content, and anything genuinely computational moves into workflow or custom code.
Smart lists and smart campaigns
Smart lists translate to active lists reasonably well. Smart campaigns with multi-step flows, wait steps and choice logic are rebuilt as workflows, and the choice steps are where the semantics quietly differ.
Marketo Sales Insight
If sales lives in MSI inside Salesforce, the whole sales-facing surface changes. That is a change management project as much as a technical one and it needs naming in week one.
Custom objects and the Salesforce sync
Marketo custom objects and the native Salesforce sync are usually load-bearing. Whether Salesforce stays, and where the boundary sits afterwards, determines the shape of the entire migration.
Subscription centre and compliance state
Unsubscribe, marketing suspended and communication limits carry legal weight. These map explicitly and get reconciled record by record, because getting this wrong is a regulatory problem rather than a reporting one.
The sequence, start to cutover.
Discovery
Object counts, custom fields, automation and the integrations that will break on the way out, read from the source system rather than from a questionnaire.
Mapping
Field by field, including what will not carry across, agreed and signed before anyone exports anything.
Dry run
A complete rehearsal into a sandbox portal, reconciled against source counts so the gaps surface a month early rather than on cutover night.
Automation rebuild
Workflows, sequences and routing rebuilt to the new model rather than transliterated from the old one, which is how a migration inherits a decade of workarounds nobody remembers writing.
Cutover
A dated switch with the legacy system read-only for a defined window, and a rollback that was tested rather than assumed.
Post-migration support
A named engineer through the first full reporting cycle, which is when the questions actually arrive.
Nobody counts the programs.
A mature Marketo instance has hundreds of programs and a handful that matter. Teams try to move everything, run out of budget at eighty per cent, and ship a portal where half the attribution works. We inventory programs by last activity and by whether anything reports on them, then move what earns it and archive the rest as data.
What people ask before they commit.
Will we lose our attribution history?
Not if it is planned for. Acquisition program, first touch and program membership dates carry into campaign membership and custom properties so historical attribution reports can be rebuilt. What does not survive planning is a migration that treats Marketo as an email tool.
How long does a Marketo to HubSpot migration take?
Eight to sixteen weeks for an enterprise instance. The driver is program count and how deeply Marketo is wired into Salesforce, not the size of the database.
Do we have to move off Salesforce too?
No. Plenty of teams keep Salesforce as the CRM and replace Marketo with HubSpot Marketing Hub. That makes the Salesforce integration the critical path rather than an afterthought, and we design the boundary before anything moves.
What about our email deliverability?
Sending domain authentication, IP warming and list hygiene are planned as their own workstream. Moving a large sending programme to a new platform without warming is how a good sender reputation gets thrown away in a fortnight.
Can we run Marketo and HubSpot at the same time?
During cutover, briefly, with a clear rule about which system sends to whom. Running both indefinitely means two unsubscribe states and two versions of the truth, and it is not a place to live.
Where people go from here.
Carry the history, not just the emails.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.