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.
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.
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 are consistent across all our channels.
Mautic is open and adaptable.
The short answer is yes. You can use a self-hosted version of Mautic, which you can access at mautic.org or host 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:
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 offers a free trial, so you don’t have to financially commit first.
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 personalized content, A/B testing, and the ability to track and record all kinds of behaviors in the user journey.
Let’s dive into 14 of the features that make Mautic a really valuable open-source marketing automation tool to have in your stack.
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 behavior. For example, they open your email, then 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 personalized content to your potential clients, in the hope they can relate to it. This encourages them further toward the decision to purchase.
This might be the most powerful thing about Mautic. It lets you create a campaign or workflow incorporating multiple decisions, behavior triggers, and actions.
These are displayed clearly so that almost anyone could look at them and immediately understand what is going on.
There’s a drag and drop function which you use to build your conditions, actions, and decisions and you name them yourself, so you’re always able to recognize 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 behaviors.
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.
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 too.
Once you’ve decided which item you want to focus on, you pick how to engage your visitors. For example, on arrival at 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.
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 customize. It’s easy to build and they look great. It has a handy drag and drops function to help create the emails that will drive conversions.
A 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 analyze your data and therefore your customer behavior.
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 personalized by nature. Users appreciate this approach.
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 the two approaches were most effective by analyzing 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 trialing. This makes decision-making easy for you.
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.
People like opening personalized emails. Mautic encourages you to personalize emails by way of forms, and landing pages dedicated to specific groups or segments of prospects.
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 behavior.
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.
A good marketing campaign will easily show you if you’re getting a good ROI on your spending. 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.
Mautic offers personalization 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!
