Us marketers have much better things to do with our day than repeat the tasks that end up very tedious. Open source automation tools for marketing like Mautic has come along and streamlined parts of the daily marketing and sales process.
EmailMonday tells is that 51% of the companies they asked currently use an automation system for their marketing.
More than half of those joining this revolution are B2B businesses.
Before diving in, let's define what we're talking about.
Defining marketing automation
Marketing Automation is needed by marketers to automate any repetitive marketing activity such as email, ad campaigns and nurturing leads. This is done using dedicated software.
As we're specifically covering Mautic, it's best we also outline what it is.
What _is_ Mautic?
Mautic is a piece of open-source software dedicated to marketing automation. It allows a business to automate commonly repetitive activities. This covers marketing campaigns, lead generation, segmentation and contact/lead scoring.
As an agency devoted to the open-source community, we're thrilled we can use open-source systems like Mautic in our stack. It empowers us to create personal experiences for our users, which is consistent across all our channels.
Mautic is open and adaptable.
Instant GDPR compliance
The forthcoming regulation changes in the EU involving Google Analytics' violation of GDPR is one of the hottest issues circulating the internet these days.
Companies of all sizes are paying careful attention to what this law implies and examining their operations to determine what is impacted. This scrutiny and worry are perfectly justified, given the substantial penalty. As an open-source marketing automation platform and community, Mautic shares these concerns, maybe to a greater extent than others. Mautic is used by hundreds of thousands of organisations to fuel their marketing automation and consumer data collecting efforts.
As a consequence, Mautic is keenly interested in not just comprehending but also complying with any and all new legislation promoting openness and transparency. It's more accurate to say "actively engaged" than "interested." We are committed to ensuring that our software not only complies with the law but also stands out as a standard for others to follow in terms of implementation.
With only a few easy steps, Mautic software may be simply customised to comply with GDPR rules. The strategy involves a quick step as well as a longer-term software feature improvement. The first step is straightforward and painless. And by making a few easy modifications to how you presently set up your Mautic instance, you'll be instantly compliant.
Is it free to use?
The short answer is yes. You can use a self-hosted version of Mautic, which you can access at mautic.org or hosted for you by owners, Acquia (mautic.com).
Mautic itself is open-source so the former is free. You will need a server to install it on, which will cost something.
If you want to go down the self-hosted route, as we do here at Code Enigma, here is what you need to do:
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Download Mautic - Make sure you select the most recent version
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Unzip your Mautic file and move it to your chosen install location in a remote directory via an FTP client
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Create a MySQL database
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Set up a database within that
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Add a new user and allow all permissions
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Head to your install URL, where there will be an installation wizard to help you complete the rest of the process
Self-hosted allows you to tailor the system as you need. You can really get a lot from the functionality. You can add third-party plugins and/or extensions that integrate Mautic with other useful platforms.
If you don't own a server and don't want to set one up, you can always go down the hosted route. Acquia offer a free trial, so you don't have to financially commit first.
Do marketers love Mautic?
Mautic has certainly had to prove itself. The USP is that you can access the plethora of features for free. It makes building an email campaign really easy, including personalised content, A/B testing and the ability to track and record all kinds of behaviours in the user journey.
What are the features that make Mautic so great?
Let's dive into 14 of the features that make Mautic a really valuable open-source marketing automation tool to have in your stack.
1. Generating leads
Naturally, generating leads is a critical task for all businesses selling a product or service. If you have no leads, you have no profit coming in.
Mautic has a lead generation and contact scoring feature that allows you to create a form and focus on specific items. Using a tracking script for those leads being generated, it will assign a score based on given user behaviour. For example, they open your email, then they read it, then they click a link and visit a page.
After you have assigned the scores to your leads, you can segment them.
Scoring your contacts means you can deliver targeted and personalised content to your potential clients, in the hope they can relate to it. This encourages them further toward the decision to purchase.
2. Building campaigns
This might be the most powerful thing about Mautic. It lets you create a campaign or workflow incorporating multiple decisions, behaviour triggers and actions.
These are displayed clearly so that almost anyone could look at it and immediately understand what is going on.
There's a drag and drop function which you use to build your conditions, actions, decisions and you name them yourself, so you're always able to recognise what is happening or about to. It's best to label these as literally as you can, to avoid any confusion later.
You build a comprehensive flow and deliver relevant content to your potential customer based on their own behaviours.
3. Segmenting
Segmenting your contacts means you can select individuals and put them into groups based on various criteria. This could be anything you know about them such as company, company size, location or demographic information. You do this, again, to deliver relevant content to those groups.
The cool thing Mautic will do is collect user data through automated forms or pop-ups. This means you can use this information to build a highly targeted and therefore high-converting campaign based on offering your user exactly what they wanted.
4. Focus Items
This is a handy feature that increases traffic to a given page. It helps with capturing and increasing lead generation.
You decide what you want to highlight, such as data capture, a specific link or displaying a notice.
Say you're having a period of maintenance. You might want to display a notice, a pop-up, to alert visitors of the date and time of the maintenance. This is just an example; there are many things you might want to alert your customers to.
Once you've decided which item you want to focus on, you pick how to engage your visitors. For example, on arrival to your site. Perhaps after a given number of sections, you'd like to present them with a pop-up? You're also able to select the style you'd like. There are more options than a pop-up; you might want a full-page window or a discrete notification, maybe a display spanning the header. It's up to you.
This feature is great at increasing your leads and therefore sales of whichever product/service you specifically want to highlight.
5. Building emails
Emails remain very popular in the sales process. They nurture leads and bring your potential customer back to your website to purchase. They can also give your users updates about your company or products and services.
As of January 2020, Barilliance tells us that the current email open rate is nearly 42%, with a CTR of 8.1%.
If the emails are designed well, you should do them justice with equally quality content that is well thought out. People will be encouraged to go to your website and buy your product or service.
Enter Mautic into the equation. You can use several email templates in your campaigns.
These templates allow for dynamic content you can customise. It's easy to build and they look great. It has a handy drag and drop function to help create the emails that will drive conversions.
6. Build pages
Page builder is a stand-out feature in Mautic. You can create bespoke landing pages to drive visitors to specific things. This might be an offer, a campaign, a promotion, a course… anything you like. You're able to create a responsive landing page using that handy drag and drop function. There's no need to rely on a developer for this; a marketer can easily create this for their campaigns.
You can run an A/B test on the landing pages including forms for data capture. Forms are a key feature of Mautic. They allow you to collect, manage and analyse your data and therefore your customer behaviour.
7. Nurturing leads
If your product or service isn't something a web visitor isn't like to buy the first time they land on your website, you need to nurture them if you're going to convert them.
This is a key process for any business, regardless of product. Your lead becomes a customer, but that customer then becomes a brand ambassador.
Email campaigns allow this lead nurturing by engaging with them and encouraging them along the marketing funnel successfully. Mautic encourages you to create content they can relate to at any stage of the customer journey they might be on. Mautic delivers the appropriate content for you.
By focussing on the customer when creating content, it becomes personalised by nature. Users appreciate this approach.
8. A/B Testing
We mentioned A/B testing already, but it's important to mention it as a feature of its own. You should test your approach and tactics to ensure they're performing well for you.
Mautic enables you to work out the successful tactics that work for you. A/B testing is built into both your landing pages and emails.
The A/B test will work out which of two approaches were most effective by analysing CTR and conversion rates.
You can test a few different elements to be confident you only use what works best. You can see what content is targeting your audience and engaging them.
It might be a particular email subject, the body or different CTAs you're trialling. This makes decision making easy for you.
9. Tracking user behaviour
Mautic tracks user activities you can use to identify their interests and predict that of others. You just add some code to Mautic CRM (if you're using it). This lets you start to track what pages a user visits and what they go on to purchase.
This gives you an insight into what products a type of customer wants. You use this information to plan your campaigns.
10. Personalisation through dynamic content
People like opening personalised emails. Mautic encourages you to personalise emails by way of forms, landing pages dedicated to specific groups or segments of prospects.
11. Client retention increases with Mautic
You've worked hard to create the content your website visitors wanted and you've successfully converted them to customers. It doesn't end there.
Now you want to guide your customers to create content for you. This could be a review, a testimonial, a referral or some kind of feedback. This is engaging and therefore increases your retention rate.
Nurturing a lead post-sale is an opportunity for up or cross-selling as well as collecting more information about their behaviour.
Some marketers get focused on bringing in new leads and forget about the converted ones. These people can be a big boost in your sales if you look after them right.
12. See your ROI
A good marketing campaign will easily show you if you're getting a good ROI on your spend. Reporting and analytics are necessary to bring this information out.
A marketer might create an engaging email campaign that sees leads and sales flying in and you consider that campaign a success. If you can't see the data behind it, how do you know what to attribute the success to?
Mautic will provide valuable data needed to have transparency over your success (or failures, so you know where you went wrong).
This means you can determine what activities are worthwhile and therefore grow your sales.
Final thoughts
Mautic offers personalisation on a level that enhances your customer experience. It also doesn't cost anything. It's also highly secure and incredibly robust. It saves your marketers time by automating commonly repetitive tasks. It's a win-win!