Outbound segments migration tool

We all know Outbound is deprecated and will be removed from Customer Insights – Journeys on June 30, 2025. There are still companies working on transferring everything over to real-time marketing (rtm). Segments seems to be one of the biggest hurdles for a lot of companies. What I most often recommend to my customers is to have a workshop with the people who are creating the segments. Manually go through all the segments and re-create them in rtm. This is to be able to learn how the segment builder works and go through and only move the segments that are in use. That way they get to learn how to create segments and clean in the segments at the same time.

I do understand that a lot of companies has a lot of outbound segments and manually moving them would take way too much time. Don’t worry, Microsoft has you back with this Segment Migration Solution. In this post I’ve used Scottish Summits environment to move the last segments from Outbound to real-time marketing.

Start by downloading the zip file with the solution.

Open the maker portal and go into your solutions (make sure you’re in the right environment!), click “Browse! and select the Segmentation Migration Tool zip file.

Click “Next” and “Next” one more time. You’re now asked for some environment variables. Paste the URL for your Customer Insights – Journeys environment and click next again. Be aware that you can only add a maximum of 2000 outbound segments per run, but you can run the tool multiple times.

The import of the solution shouldn’t take too long, and now we can start working with the tool.

Your environment now has a new app where you can start working with your segments.

You now have an app to transfer you outbound segments to real-time marketing. As you can see you just have a long list of segments and no way of filtering or searching for segments.

You select the segment or segments you want to transfer and click on the button “Transition Pre-Check”. You can now see the pre-check summary which tells you if the segment passed the pre-check and can be transferred to rtm. Now you click migrate.

And you can see that the segment is successful and transferred to rtm. Click on the next button to move to the next screen.

You can see that the segment is transferred and and is in a draft state. All transferred segments are put in draft stage and you should go through all of them to make sure they are correct and then publish them.

You can also mark the segments and publish them from this screen, but I highly recommend going through all of them to make sure they are correct before publishing them.

Back on the home page of the app, you can now see the segment you’ve transferred to rtm.

And you can see it in draft in Customer Insights – Journeys.

I do a comparison of the segment from outbound to real-time and can see that the definition is correct and will give the same members. In this case, there’s an error in the outbound segment and it wouldn’t work, but gives me a result in rtm. The transition tool doesn’t look at errors you’ve made in your outbound segment, it just transfers it if it can understand it and translate it to a rtm segment.

If you have some more complex segments you will get an error message. Lets look at the “Scottish Summit 2022 Attendees” segment in outbound and see what they mean with “TRAVERSE” which is a blocker.

What does traverse means and why is it not working? Or how could we get it to work? Because my segment starts with the “Event registration” and then moves on to how the contact is related to the event, that’s traversing. If I started with contact and then checked the event registration, then it would’ve worked.

Lets look at another example. In the left of the image below, you can see we’ve started with sponsorship and ended with contact. This is traversing and will not work.

On the right side we’ve started with contact and done the connection to the sponsorship from the contact, and that segment will pass the check and will work.

As you can see, the PGL segment fails, but the switched PGL is a success and will be moved to rtm.

Segments containing behavioral and interaction data will also not work. If you have segments containing contacts with bounces, you’ll need to recreate these in rtm.

Be sure to look at the error messages and see if you can fix it in outbound, or if you just re-create them in rtm.

The tool doesn’t solve everything, but hopefully it’ll help you with with transferring some of your outbound segments.

Original Post https://malindonosomartnes.com/2025/04/09/outbound-segments-migration-tool/