What is marketing automation?
The concept itself isn't new. Essentially it saves time, reduces human mistakes and increases the efficiency of undergoing (often repetitive) marketing tasks over multiple channels.
Essentially, it's the practice of using technology to simplify and improve marketing activities is known as marketing automation. It employs a single automation platform to handle all aspects of each campaign in one location, including email and social media marketing, mobile messaging, and ad management, among other things.
The finest marketing automation software allows teams to construct 1-to-1 cross-channel journeys that result in a unified experience for customers by recording and analysing visitor behaviour. Using a variety of approaches enhances the productivity of a sales funnels; swiftly converting a large number of leads into pleased clients.
What advantages can marketing automation provide?
Marketing automation may save up time and resources by automating some of the tedious and repetitive tasks associated with a company's marketing function. It may also provide insight to assist marketers get a better understanding of their customers and provide more focused and measurable marketing.
One of the advantages of marketing automation is that it may assist firms in:
- Make time to concentrate on strategy
- 2. Get a deep, thorough picture of prospective consumers' behaviour
- Personalise their follow-up tactics
- Launch a broader marketing strategy
- Prioritise leads
- Improve marketing ROI
- Accurately forecast future investment
What's the difference between a CRM and a marketing automation system?
Marketing automation and CRM have duties and activities that overlap and complement one other, and in many firms, the two systems are used together to maintain a consistent, thorough profile of a person from contact to lead to prospect to customer.
Marketing automation, on the other hand, tends to concentrate more on the automation of activities for lead generation and lead nurturing, with the potential to do so at a large scale. First, marketing automation tracks prospect interest and manages lead creation and nurturing at scale via programmes that span a variety of online and offline channels.
Sales employees may get information on a lead's behaviour, such as the sites they view and the material they download, while marketing teams can see a customer's previous purchasing behaviour, thanks to a unified approach. Furthermore, monitoring and analytics across the closed-loop between marketing automation and CRM enable firms to fine-tune campaigns for maximum performance.
What is Mautic?
Mautic is an open source marketing tool created by a developer community. Lead management, campaign management, contacts and emails, and responsive email production are all included in the programme.
It also includes capabilities not found in all emailing systems, such as the ability to create landing sites and signup forms.
Mautic is owned by the parent company, Acquia, which is the only open marketing cloud provider. Mautic lets brands personalise and integrate various digital platforms and channels into one, creating a straightforward path for customers to follow.
The good things about include:
- Time saving: marketing automation will undoubtedly save you time and increase the smoothness of your operation.
- It builds key integrations: your sales staff will know which leads to contact and which leads are ready or not to purchase due to robust tracking and sourcing.
- More than 200,00 companies currently trust Mautic, which is accessible in more than 35 languages
- It's free! As Mautic is open source, it means you must host it on your server. So, yes, Mautic is free, but this doesn't mean that it's ready to use. You must utilise your own server (or get the likes of us to host it for you).
So, Mautic is an alternative to the likes of Marketo. David Hurley, Founder of Mautic describes the platform as:
"Cutting edge marketing automation empowered by open source technology. This is the future; Mautic is leading the way."
What David Hurley aimed to do was make people the focus, internally and externally. The thing is, Mautic started life with just one goal: Equality. And their community focuses on giving everyone the ability to better understand, manage and develop their business. And so, Mautic helps businesses to achieve this via robust automation of marketing processes through a platform available to everyone.
The peace of mind offered by Mautic comes from the fact that you can configure what you track, so you can be confident that you stay within the boundaries of GDPR.
This is a modern marketing approach allowing marketers to deliver high-quality campaigns of genuine value to potential customers by learning what it is they want and need. We wrote more on why we use it, here.
What is Matomo?
Matomo, previously known as Piwik, is an open source marketing analytics software platform that may be downloaded. It generates thorough information on your website's visitors, including the search engines and keywords they used, the language they spoke, the sites they liked, the items they downloaded, and much more. Essentially Matomo is an alternative to Google Analytics. It is another robust tool that gives you total ownership of your data and protects the privacy of your customers.
More specifically, it's the open-source competitor to Google Analytics. So, as with Mautic, Matomo is a PHP MySQL database management system that you can download and install on your own web server. Or we can do this for you.
Matomo vs Google Analytics
At any point, Google might use your data for their own interests. If your customers find out about this action, you could very well lose their trust and this would damage your reputation. You're actually able to use Matomo without seeking consent.
Matomo is an ethical platform. It offers unparalleled data privacy. You know exactly where the data is stored and you're aware of what happens to it. There is no third-party intervention.
Matomo is another open-source triumph, to boot. It's been put through rigorous testing by hundreds of keen developers.
It's also highly customisable, doesn't limit the amount of data you can store, is user-friendly, offers powerful insights into customer behaviour, but most importantly, adheres to the world's strictest privacy laws (unlike GA).
We use both systems now on our Drupal website! We had to slightly alter the Mautic module to ensure it only tracks people who give consent, but the Matomo module is GDPR compliant out of the box.
We're keen to deliver highly personalised, high-quality and most importantly, unparalleled data privacy when it comes to meeting our clients' needs. Considering recent changes to EU-US data privacy laws, we're thrilled to know we were always on the right path regarding GDPR.
The truth is, this is all relatively easy, but you will need some expertise to get it right. If you'd like to discuss self-hosting Mautic with us, simply contact us.