What Happened:
Vimeo initiated an ESP RFP after rising costs and a CDP + enterprise ESP setup that created unsustainable tech debt and operational strain on the team.
Joseph Lee from Vimeo told Lifecycle Letter that Snowflake-native architecture became a non-negotiable requirement, eliminating vendors that required copying customer data into their own systems.
The migration forced a move away from hard-coded, city-specific campaigns toward dictionary-driven automation that reduced operational load.
More Insight:
At Vimeo, Lee said the ESP migration revealed how much operational complexity had accumulated over time as the team scaled.
A CDP layered alongside an enterprise ESP introduced additional coordination across systems, with data, campaigns, and reporting increasingly intertwined.
A major inflection point in Vimeo’s RFP was rejecting the assumption that ESPs should store customer data at all. By requiring a Snowflake-native model, the team prioritized vendors that worked with their existing data architecture instead of duplicating it.
“From a security standpoint, we did not want data copied from our systems into a separate system,” Lee said.
That constraint immediately narrowed the field and clarified which vendors had the potential to be the right fit.
The architectural shift also unlocked a different way of thinking about scale. Instead of building hundreds of near-identical campaigns by hand, Lee pushed for dictionary-driven logic that could control audience, content, and timing from a single external file. That approach reduced campaigns, templates, and reporting lines by orders of magnitude.
“I can now have one template, one audience, and one campaign,” Lee said.
The result was fewer failure points and cleaner measurement.
Lee’s broader takeaway was that ESP decisions are rarely about features. Most platforms can technically send the same emails. The real differentiator is how campaigns are set up inside the ESP and whether the platform supports scalable, transparent execution across the who, what, and when.
In Vimeo’s case, consolidating from two platforms into one reduced multi-step debugging, while a Snowflake-native model off-loaded much of the monitoring and maintenance required when data has to be copied between systems.
In that sense, the migration paid off, creating a lifecycle system that could scale without burning out the people running it.