In the last blog, we discussed the ways SMTP platforms like Sendgrid can help you distribute mass emails to a large set of contacts. Here, we’re going to discuss a software you can use to take your email marketing a step further – Mautic.
Mautic is an open source marketing software platform used to reach leads and customers with well-informed digital marketing campaigns. As an open source platform with its own Cloud, anyone can access Mautic, but to run the program you must pay for server fees. That’s a mouthful! And a lot to take on board – so let’s start with the basics.
First, for non-technical users (like me), let’s describe the differences between Mautic and services like Sendgrid using an analogy. If Sendgrid is the fuel, allowing you to distribute emails on a mass-scale and collect contacts, then Mautic is the car. With in-depth features for analyzing recipient behavior and creating email campaigns, Mautic takes you where you want to go in digital marketing.
To integrate Mautic into your email outreach and digital marketing strategy, you may benefit from the help of a software consultant like OpenSource Technologies.
Getting Deeper Insight Into Your Audience with Software Like Mautic
With standard SMTP platforms, you can generate a list of contacts and get basic insights into the status of marketing emails. You can see how recipients interact with promotional messages. Specifically, you can tell when an email has been delivered, bounced, opened, clicked through and so forth.
However, these sorts of analytics can only take you so far. If you want to hone your audience, you don’t want to know just who opened your email. You want to know who opened your email, how many times they looked at it, how many times they went to your webpage, and so forth. You want to pursue the leads of the leads, if you will: those who show real promise in participating in your goods and services.
Mautic lets easily cull non-interested email recipients and elevate potential leads with analytic tools on its user interface, including but not limited to:
- Number of unique vs. returning visitors
- The rate of opened vs. ignored emails
- How much team each user IP address spends on the email/your page
- Which visitors are anonymous vs. which are identified
A user becomes segmented once he/she receives your email or visits your web page. One of the strengths of Mautic is it is a workflow program capable of creating multiple segments (which are essentially collections of contacts). Depending on your business’s processes and workflow, you can create designated segments for different types of leads.
You can create links in your email promotions that lead to different segments: for example one URL link can place a user into “Leads-CRM,” or “Leads-Opportunities” and so forth. Whenever they interact with your emails or page, Mautic records those interactions. Then, later when you want to filter each segment by emails opened, links clicked and so forth, you have that information ready for use and sharing between Mautic and your custom CRM.
Once your relationship with a particular contact grows, you can either manually or automatically segment them into a particular group for the future. When you have a custom CRM, you want to keep it clean and organized. Mautic helps you do so by allowing you to transfer segments into the CRM using an API. Not all segments need to be automatically transferred, only the ones with users who demonstrate real interest in your business. With the help of a custom software developer, you can develop a CRM, app or other platform to store your best targeted audience for future campaigns.
Developing Smart Campaigns
Mautic helps you design campaigns with smart templates. To simplify some of the terms, let’s view them step-by-step:
- Components:- These components will make up the parts of your digital marketing campaign. Examples of components include landing pages, blank box forms (to be filled in with Name, Email Address, Phone Number, etc.), dynamic content such as videos and/or images, and promotion codes.
- Channels:- Channels are the ways you get in contact with your audience. In the previous blog we highlighted email marketing and newsletters, but other channels include text message notifications, web notifications, and social media notifications. With Mautic, you can designate certain segments to send certain campaigns on channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and different segments to send email newsletters, organizing your different audiences neatly.
- Campaign:- Informed by the data you collect with Mautic’s analytic tools, you can create campaigns tailored to the needs and interests of your most promising contacts. The forms that you embed in your campaigns can also be a great way of developing new leads.
- Integrations: You can elevate contacts into particular segments based on certain actions, or embed plugins on your website or email campaigns from media of all kinds.
The Next Steps: Integrating Mautic with a Custom App
The smart analytics and campaign-building tools of Mautic can help propel a business into the next phase of their audience-outreach. But to tailor Mautic’s features to the needs and processes of an existing business requires a significant amount of software integration. Thankfully, you don’t need to do this integration on your own. OpenSource Technologies serves as a marketing expert, with backgrounds in third-party integrations with Mautic. If you think your business could benefit from smarter digital marketing, you shouldn’t hesitate to reach out!
To return to the earlier analogy: if SMTPs are the fuel, Mautic is the car. Without fuel, you can’t go from one place to another – but to arrive where you want to arrive, you need a car that can go the distance.
