In the latest release of Mautic we’ve placed some focus on campaign functionality and the API. Your online brand experience has hundreds, likely thousands of handoffs being made each and every day. Information that is passed through campaign actions and shared through API’s is vital to engaging your audience in a meaningful customer journey. From critical notifications to releasing information at specific times and so much more, all of these elements ensure that your customers are feeling supported at each step.

To support you in maintaining these vital connections, here are the highlights of Mautic 2.10.0;

Campaign functionality

• • Company fields update via import and forms: You can now update fields on the company entity via forms and through imports. A new import button has been added to the company page. In addition, a new section called “Company fields” is available to map contact imports to. Similarly when adding a form field to a form, new company fields are available to map to. (Github link)

• • New Webhook campaign action: A new action has been added “send a webhook”. This enables you to send specified information to a specified URL as part of a campaign. (Github link)
  • Custom timeframe campaign condition: A new date function has been added where you can specify as part of a campaign condition, a custom number of days/weeks/month before or after a date associated with a custom field.(Github link)

• • Timestamp updates on contact field through a campaign: You can now update a timestamp field on the contact through a campaign using custom functions such as NOW, TODAY, YESTERDAY and TOMORROW. There is also a NULL function that is now available which when added as a contact field update as part of a campaign will clear out the existing value in the specified field for the contact. (Github link)
  • Internal notifications as part of campaign: A new action has been added to campaigns – ‘send email to user’ will allow an email notification to be sent to a user, contact’s owner or any To, Cc, Bcc email addresses as a campaign action. (Github link)

• Additional Campaign actions to;
  • Post to Facebook and Google Analytics: There is a new setting added in the configuration section under Tracking Settings. You can add your Facebook pixel ID or your GA id. Using this, information about a contact can be sent as part of a campaign when a contact visits a landing page so that this can be used for Facebook or GA paid campaigns to better filter data and generate target audiences. (Github link)
  • Show Focus Items: A new action has been added to a campaign after the page visit decision – to show a focus item. (Github link)

API and Integration Improvements

• API improvements – A number of significant improvements have been made to the API to enable data around contact activities to be more easily accessible. The following new data points are now available:
  • All events table: (Github link)
  • Form submission data: (Github link)
  • Webinar data from Citrix: (Github link)
• Bi-directional updates for Null values for all CRM integrations: Mautic now supports the ability to bi-directionally sync data where there are NULL values in fields, irrespective of the specified direction of sync. This means, if there is a blank value in a field that has been mapped as part of the plugin, if the value is missing in either system, it will be updated even if the system that has the value is not the system of record for this field. This has been created for the following CRM integrations – Salesforce, Hubspot, ConnectWise, Zoho, MSDynamics, SugarCRM. The feature is configurable by the user. (Github link)
• Keeping unsubscribes in sync: Unsubscribe information from supported CRM systems is now available to map as part of configuring the plugin. This is done so that subscription statuses can be kept in sync between CRM systems and Mautic. This is available for the following CRMs – Salesforce, Hubspot, ConnectWise, Zoho, MSDynamics, SugarCRM. (Github link)

UI/UX Improvements

• • Audit log and integration tabs added to contact for additional visibility: Two new tabs are available on the contact page to provide you with better visibility into updates made to the contact – Integrations and Audit log. (Github link 1 and link 2)
  • Clickable stats on emails, contacts card view: The stats labels on the email record are now clickable, enabling you to easily navigate to the list of underlying contacts. (Stats will show total metrics whereas the underlying list will show unique contacts – which means the numbers may not match.) Also, a list of contacts that have been sent the email will now be visible in a new tab called ‘contacts’ on the email detail page. (Github link 1 and link 2)
  • Apply buttons added to landing page, email, campaign builder: The Mautic builder continues to improve. Now applying changes to any of these elements is made easier with the addition of the Apply button. This enables you to save your changes before closing it.

• Tooltips added to improve usability: An additional six tooltips have been added to improve the user experience, making Mautic even more user friendly.

The customer journey is maintained not only by your people, but by the technology you use to support it. We trust that the tools in this latest release will assist your business, creating a lasting impression that will result in a relationship not simply a transaction. A huge thank you to our entire community for developing, testing and improving Mautic!

For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and the community will do their best to help.

Developer’s love APIs. There are APIs for everything. The popular ones like Google’s javascript mapping APIs, or Twitter’s REST apis. Amazingly useful APIs like Stripe and Paypal for running a business. APIs rule the world.

However, APIs aren’t everything, and they definitely can leave holes in your application’s integration when it comes data. This is because your application because responsible to go and fetch information from an API; or go and put information into that remote application using an API call.

What happens when that data can be changed by either application? Imagine a situation where you’re taking lead information from your website, and storing it in Mautic. But you also have another application that you want to house the information. You could use Mautic’s REST API and continually go and fetch new information, merge with any data you’ve curated on your own, and maintain a synced set of data that way.

You don’t have to think about that solution very long before you start realizing where it falls short – synchronized changes become a nightmare. What happens if a remote application changes some data?

A Mautic example might be a lead has the bounced flag added to it. Now your application has to be responsible to re-fetch that information. And your application can’t know that change has occurred, so it has to continually poll that external resource to keep that data synced. It can be a hassle for any application to continually do this. Add in other complications like API limits, which many large API providers like Paypal, Twitter, Google, and Facebook all enforce, and you’re left with a very likely possibility that at some point, you will not have an accurate representation of your data. This would be a lot like taking a roller coaster ride without knowing if the tracks in the loop are complete – you could end up careening to a swift and painful stop! Scary.

Enter Webhooks

Webhooks are a fantastic solution, guaranteed to save you time and money. A webhook is an HTTP URL endpoint supported by your third party application, which can receive a POST. It feels a lot like a REST API, but for you application’s purposes it is just one half of the API (eg: all the POST endpoints). That endpoint URL is then “executed” each time an “event” occurs. Webhooks close the roller coaster loop and ensure a safe ride for all your data passengers.

Adding webhooks to an application where data is changing constantly is a perfect solution to the API loophole, because now we know that data has changed, and our application just has to be responsible to receive the payload and update it appropriately.

Gone is the need to continually poll the remote resource to find out if data has changed, update it, and then check again in a little while to do the exact same check. This eliminates so many variables. API limits become a non-issue, out of sync data liabilities are reduced, and CPU cycles get saved by everyone in the transaction.

Webhooks are Simple

Webhooks are perfect at sharing bits of data on-time, when an event occurs, to a remote resource. This is usually all third party developers want from remote systems anyway. In these situations, using an API instead of a Webhook would be massive overkill. Using a webhook avoids the cost and time associated with building out an entire application to support API endpoints.

Next time you’re planning to create a full blown API for your application, ask yourself if the problem you’re trying to solve could be solved with some event listeners and a webhook call to a remote resource.