Amy Jo Berman
I honestly can't imagine having done a project of this magnitude without Felicia. Now that it's done, things are running smoothly and take less time. All our automations are streamlined. Our new members site is working perfectly.
Amy Jo Berman
HBO's Former VP of Casting and Mentor to Actors
Migrating 13 Years of Infrastructure Off Infusionsoft Without Interrupting a Single Member
Amy Jo Berman spent years as a casting director, including as HBO’s VP of Casting, before building an online business that helps actors get cast. Thirteen years in, that business runs on a membership with live group coaching, a signature course, live and evergreen webinars, and a list she promotes to constantly. Underneath all of it sat Infusionsoft, the CRM she had been meaning to leave for years.
What finally forced the move was deliverability. Open rates looked healthy, but clicks and sales kept falling, and an independent deliverability audit confirmed roughly two thirds of her email was never reaching the inbox. In her words, she was “bleeding money from sales.” The sales sequences that had carried the business for a decade had simply stopped being seen.
Leaving Infusionsoft meant more than switching email platforms. Her membership site was built on Memberium for Infusionsoft, her roughly 400 subscriptions were billed through Authorize.net inside Keap, and her products were spread across ThriveCart, Stripe, and a dozen supporting tools. Amy Jo needed someone who could see the whole picture, sequence it, and carry it through while the business kept selling.
Challenge & Solution
The scale was the first challenge. Roughly 19,000 engaged contacts, close to 2,000 tags, hundreds of custom fields, 20 to 40 live automations, and a member site with 31,000 user accounts all had to move. None of it could go dark. Live webinars, a promotion in mid October, and Black Friday all sat inside the project window, so the migration had to be planned around a revenue calendar rather than a blank one.
Evaluation first. We began with a paid project evaluation: full access to Keap and the dev site, a walkthrough of every priority automation with her assistant, and an inventory of what should be rebuilt, what should be replaced natively, and what should be retired. That produced a phased plan with a 50-hour starting retainer and a 3 to 6 month timeline she could actually see.
A better answer for subscriptions. The obvious route was a third-party token migration vendor quoting eight weeks and a vague five-phase process. We advised against it. Instead we built a new billing hub on WordPress using WooCommerce Subscriptions, Stripe, and CartFlows, with thirteen migration products matching every legacy price point, and designed a self-migration campaign so members moved themselves with an incentive instead of being moved by a script nobody could explain.
Warm-up and rebuild. ActiveCampaign’s migration team imported contacts and tags, then we launched the warm-up in eight hourly batches, segmented by engagement, compressed into a two-week window between promotions. Alongside it we rebuilt the webinar, evergreen, coaching reminder, and lead magnet automations, replacing the PlusThis date tools with native date logic.
Pivoting when a vendor stalled. Memberium support went silent for a week during Black Friday prep. Rather than wait, we cloned the old member site to a legacy domain so existing billing kept working while the new hub went live, then connected password sync between the two. The project closed with SOP videos for refunds, cancellations, and upgrades, so her team could run the new stack without us.
Final Result
The warm-up outperformed Infusionsoft from day one. The first batch posted a 42% open rate and an 11% click rate, against a baseline where Amy Jo hoped for 1% clicks on a promotion. Within two weeks the full list was cleared to send, and the self-tape guide email became the strongest performer she had seen in months.
The new stack carried its first launch in December. Two annual memberships sold before 7am on the first morning of cart open, a Cyber Monday workshop sold the membership through the new hub, and the self-migration campaign began moving members onto WooCommerce billing at their original rates. Member pauses and exceptions that once needed a developer are now a date edit.
The lasting result is operational. Three paid tools were retired or slated for retirement, including a $200 a month list hygiene service. Her assistant now builds in ActiveCampaign independently. And after months of “I can’t wrap my mind around it,” Amy Jo’s own summary was simpler: “Boy, did I pick the right person.”
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Amy Jo Berman
In Her Words
I have a thriving online business that’s been around for 13 years helping actors succeed in the film and TV industry. We have a membership, run live online trainings, classes and coaching.
With so many years of online business under my belt, I have a lot of infrastructure built. The biggest of which was my former CRM, Infusionsoft. Many times over the years, I’ve sworn I was going to move to something else, but the size and scope of that move always made me reluctantly change my mind.
So, when the time came where a move became an absolute must instead of a “maybe I should,” I knew I’d need some help. I needed to hire someone who could manage this beast of a project. Someone who not only understands online business and my particular tech stack, but who also understands the intricacies of making sure that my subscribers, clients and customers still get served with ultimate care. Someone who could help make the whole thing seamless so they barely noticed the huge construction project we were about to undertake. That someone is Felicia Chanell and her amazing team at Swanked Digital.
One of the biggest issues we were facing is that we had hundreds of automations that needed to be redesigned and rebuilt in ActiveCampaign. We also had hundreds of fields and thousands of tags and other assets needed to be brought over as well as dozens of SaaS tools. All this needed to happen while we were running a membership site, doing live webinars and serving our clients and members, with no downtime. In addition, we had to rebuild our entire membership portal with hundreds of courses because it was built on membership software that was made for Infusionsoft, not ActiveCampaign. On top of that we had to migrate all our membership subscribers over to a whole new subscription experience that Felicia and her team custom built for us using WooCommerce and CartFlows.
There were so many moving parts, I honestly don’t know how to begin to explain it. That’s where Felicia shines. She was not only able to hear my overwhelm and see what the project required, she was able to map it all out into functional pieces. A timeline with steps and stages so it all made sense. She helped us create a plan that suited our needs and execute it seamlessly. I honestly can’t imagine having done a project of this magnitude without Felicia.
Now that it’s done, things are running smoothly and take less time. All our automations are streamlined. Our new members site is working perfectly. And even though there was a steep learning curve for us, Felicia created some great documentation and made herself readily available to help us all throughout the several months-long process.
I met with A LOT of Project Managers before I hired Felicia. I was stressed and was having trouble seeing what it would all look like when completed, and who I could trust to get it done. She helped me feel like it was possible. I said to my team several times throughout the project, “Boy, did I pick the right person! Thank God for Felicia!” I know it sounds crazy but that’s truly how I felt over the months of this giant project and still feel today.
If you’re considering a migration or rebuilding your backend systems, save yourself time, money, headaches and heartaches. Hire Felicia immediately and don’t look back.
Amy Jo Berman
HBO's Former VP of Casting and Mentor to Actors
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