Are you afraid that your email marketing efforts using Mautic will be affected by spam bots? Wish that there was another alternative that didn’t involve CAPTCHAs? Research shows that CAPTCHAs are having a negative impact on conversions.

The short story is that CAPTCHAs kill conversions. (source)

The pain is even bigger if you have a high traffic website and use external email services like Amazon SES, Sendgrid and Sparkpost. If you don’t control these spam bots, you won’t be in compliance with their spam rules.

You know what? You aren’t alone.

Honeypot Method

There is a way to get past this struggle, even if you are not a developer. The solution is to implement an approach called the Honeypot method, in your Mautic forms.

First, login to your Mautic instance. Go to Settings (cog icon), then Custom Fields. In the Custom Field window, add a new field.

In the Label field lets call this honey, click Save & Close, and continue to the next step.

The Setup

Now, let’s go to the forms we need to protect using the honeypot method. I would suggest going to the forms that are more prone to attack.

Add a new email field in the forms and select call it email2 and map that field to the honey field we created.

Now in Mautic v2.8+ we have a new field type called HTML Area, we’re going to use this field and add the follow code in the HTML area;

This code will make the email2 field invisible to the human eye, but not for the spam bots.

NOTE: You have to replace the formname and fieldlabel with the form name without space and the field label in your honeypot filed you put in your Mautic.

Another approach to hiding the field would be to specify the Field Container Attribute of the email2 field you want to hide as:

style="display:none"

Now let’s start eliminating spam bots.

Eliminate the Spam

Go to all the campaigns you have attached to a Campaign form;

Now adding this condition at the first step of the campaign will check to see if the person that submits the form has information in the field “honey”. If the field is empty it is likely a real person. If it’s not empty, it is a spam-bot and we are going to delete it.

NOTE: If you use a Standalone Form and you have the action to send email to user you MUST disable this and create a campaign associate with this Standalone Form and replicate the step above.

Using the honeypot method will help you stop spam bots and the negative effect they have on your email marketing activities.

Mautic’s Rod Martin developed a short video tutorial to walk through this approach step-by-step;

Because of Mautic’s robust workflow, there are a number of different ways to accomplish any given task. This is simply one approach. Comment below if you know of others.

The Mautic community is filled with incredible individuals with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. We believe that each perspective represents unique value to the broader community. If you’re interested in becoming a contributor to our blog, please contact us.

This release is no different. With Mautic 2.5 we’ve added additional data and reporting functionality while continuing to add features that will improve your best practices.

Data and Reporting

• Automatically send company details from Mautic to your connected CRM system.
• Export your contacts directly from the list view, or activity data from the contact detail page.
• Measure and report on even more email metrics, like link clicks.

Features and Functionality

• Send email tests to multiple recipients, not just to the user creating the test.
• For those who use Mailjet, you can now test your Mautic campaigns using Sandbox mode.
• Turn on single sign-on (SSO) using SAML. (Feature not available on Mautic Cloud Free accounts)
• Place forms and focus items into dynamic content.
• Trigger activities using custom date fields and automatically send birthday or anniversary emails through a campaign.

Marketers must be better equipped to meet the needs of their audience online. Each connection you make with your customer requires even more relevance and personalization. With a more agile approach to development, you’ll begin to see more frequent updates giving you an even more open, integrated solution that drives audience engagement.

The Mautic 2.5 update has been released to Mautic Cloud and self-hosted users. For more information about this update, please check 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 we will do our best to answer them.

Video

This is the first in what we hope will be a long list of short tutorials on different aspects of Mautic.  Today’s tutorial answers a question I received from a user last week.

There are two kinds of forms:  “Campaign” and “Standalone”, each with its own characteristics.  How do I know which one to use?

Choosing the Right Form

Campaign forms allow you to send people straight into a campaign and be the source for that campaign.  These can be edited even after a campaign has begun. Any actions you might want to perform at the time of submission, are handled by the campaign itself, and that can be limiting.

Standalone forms can also allow you to kick-off a campaign. The main difference is that the form submitter must be added to a list as one of the form actions.  The form itself cannot be used as a campaign lead.  You can perform any number of actions on a standalone form!  For instance, if you want an email sent to an administrator when the form submits, then you would use the standalone variety.

Campaign Forms:

• Push the lead directly into a campaign.
• Can not perform other actions outside of the campaign workflow.

Standalone Forms:

• Can not initiate a campaign.
• Can perform actions at submission such as:
  • adjust a lead’s points
  • modify lead’s lists (which must be done if this form starts a campaign)
  • modify lead’s tags
  • download an asset
  • push lead to integration
  • send email to lead
  • send email to user
  • send form results (such as another administrator)

If you’d like to suggest a topic, please head over to the #support channel and message @imrodmartin.