Many times we see knee-jerk reactions in an effort to solve situations that simply require reflection, time and precision. Consider our marketing. We all want to gather greater levels of information and foster deeper connections with our audience. So we do more, add more, give more. We certainly mean well. But if our desire is to develop more meaningful relationships with our customers, should we?

“If you look at everything Apple does, it’s constantly reducing the steps. Steve Jobs used to say technology can either be beautiful – and he was a fanatic about making products that could be as beautiful as possible – or technology should be invisible, which means simplifying.” – John Scully, Former CEO, Apple

At Mautic, we are always seeking to simplify the complex. Your customer should not see clunky steps and processes as engagement, those should be largely invisible. We’re constantly evaluating each feature and finding ways to eliminate steps as you develop your communication. Our goal is to help you create simple, seamless interactions with your audience. To help you accomplish this, here are just a few of the updates in the latest release of Mautic;

Enhancements:

• Update Contact Owner: The relationship an organization has with it’s customers is vital. That’s why when there are multiple owners, it’s important to adjust ownership throughout the customer journey. Now, users can update contact owner as part of a campaign so they can assign these to different reps to own the relationship with that contact. This is accomplished by a new campaign action called: “Update contact owner”.
• Merged Contact Tracking: Don’t use Mautic forms? No problem. Now you can merge activity for unknown contacts by passing the mtc_id cookie value to Mautic when using a non-Mautic form. This feature merges activity for unknown contacts that become known contacts and enables all activity to be tracked on the same contact.
• Customize Preference Center: Users now have the ability to build a custom preference center page that can be referenced as part of an email. Admin users have access to create this page from the landing page area and mark this as a preference center page. A new section has been added in the permission area to manage access to this page. (*The Channel Frequency feature must be used.)
• Internal Notifications Using Forms: Information sharing in your business is critical to keeping the customer journey moving. That’s why Mautic now allows you to trigger emails to internal team members when a contact timeline event is recorded through a standalone form.
• Campaign Previews: We’ve added a “preview” tab to the details view in the Campaign Builder. The preview will update in real time during any campaign builder update, however, modification to the campaign assets cannot happen from the preview.
• Dynamic Content For Visitors: Dynamic content continues to be an important part of user engagement. Now you can show dynamic content to anonymous visitors based on their IP to improve the conversion of unknown visitors to known contacts. This can be done for anyone coming to a Mautic or non-Mautic landing page. New filters have been added to the dynamic content creation area to enable this. Dynamic content can also be shown to known contacts based on segment membership.
• Files in Forms: Want to include document uploads in your Mautic form? Done. Contacts now have the ability to upload attachments/files as part of forms and store these in Mautic.
• Frequency Rules: Visibility into which communications have been delayed by frequency rules has arrived. See which communications are delayed due to a contact hitting a frequency rule. You also have access to cancel or reschedule the email directly from the contact timeline.

Integrations

• Filter Activities to Push to Salesforce: You can now configure which events from Mautic get written to the custom activity object in Salesforce. The benefit of writing the data to Salesforce is; 1. Visibility for the sales rep to marketing activities responded to by the contact and 2. The ability to create reports and dashboards in Salesforce to report on marketing activities.
• Improvements to Connectwise: You can now generate a task in Connectwise based on a campaign action in Mautic. You can also bring marketing groups from Connectwise into Mautic to create segments in Mautic.

Simplification takes a careful attention to the things that will help make what you are trying to achieve, easier. With each release, we’re working toward that goal.

A huge thank you to those in the community who made the effort to load the beta release of 2.11.0 and test these features, functionality, and fixes that were part of this release.

For more detailed information, 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 we will do our best to help.

If you’re not a community member, we would encourage you to join us! Download Mautic today and start growing your business.

For those of you who like to read here’s a quick breakdown of those two types of marketing automation forms:

Campaign Forms

These forms are forms you will use to collect information as a basis for a campaign. What this means is that the actions you want to associate with this form are handled by the campaign the form is associated with. Your actions will be defined in the campaign builder as part of your overall campaign workflow.

Standalone Forms

The second type of marketing form, a standalone form, is one where you are simply wanting to collect visitor information for your marketing automation platform but then trigger a set of immediate actions to occur. In this case you would want to perform some set of actions a single time immediately upon form submission.

Because of these descriptions you will notice that the standalone form has an actions tab in addition to the standard details and fields tab. This is because you will be triggering actions at the time of submission only. The campaign forms on the other hand may have immediate actions as well as long-term or delayed actions and as a result will have all actions defined during the campaign dripflow.

And here’s a video explaining it in a bit more detail:

Create Simple Forms

Your forms should be simple in nature. Don’t try to ask your user to fill out a 5 page form with a dozen fields on each page. Be smart about the information you want to collect and only ask for the pieces of info you really need. You may want to break it up into multiple forms if you have a lot of information you want. If you do this consider the possibility of sending the user to different forms at different times to keep the task from feeling overwhelming. Your lead forms should be quick and easy to fill out.

Create Beautiful Forms

You’ve heard that first impressions are important when meeting someone new. Well, this same philosophy holds true when talking about your website and your landing pages. Your landing pages are your first impression for your new site visitors. Your forms are the first interaction these visitors may have with you. You need to focus on keeping them simple, clean, and beautiful. Pay attention to your CSS and your use of images. Consider your site visitors when building your forms: Are they using a mobile device or a desktop? Are they on a fast internet connection or a cellular network? All of these things affect how beautiful your form is. Your website forms need to be optimized for speed, clarity, and readability.

Create Clear Form Button Names

There have been numerous studies and tests on form submissions based purely on the call-to-action button text. This text needs to be compelling but not pushy. You want to encourage the user to submit but not be in their face about it. The good news is you don’t have to panic about your button text. Sometimes the simplest wording is also the best. For example, “get” has proven to be highly effective for call-to-action buttons text. Keep your statements short and simple, don’t go over a dozen words (remember this is a button). If you’re interested in learning more here’s one article on button text and cta’s.

Pick Your Title Carefully

When you name your form (or title for your landing page) you want to use this opportunity to create a compelling story for your visitor. You should not be creating your forms and your landing pages just for a search engine. Remember that you’re working with people and human emotions and reactions. You want to target their interests and their behavior with your titles. Craft a title that speaks to people. This form title is the most read copy on your page and you should use your title to create an interest and a motivation to complete the form. What are you offering them as a result of their form submission? What is the value you are giving to them? Choose your words carefully and tell a story with your title. 

A/B Test Forms

Lastly, you should always A/B test your forms. This means creating two very similar versions of the same form and sending your users randomly to one of them. There is no perfect environment for A/B testing and there are some who would disagree with the value of creating these tests, however, while these tests may not provide immense value in fine-tuning a form they can be great help when massively overhauling a form design and layout. Don’t neglect the importance of reworking your forms based on user feedback, submissions, or interactions. Your lead forms should not be created once and then neglected or left alone. Always be looking for ways to improve your forms. Once you’ve found a lead form that works you should begin implementing small, incremental adjustments.

When you create your lead forms you want to keep this idea in mind: You are asking for trust from your user. You are asking them for information. You want them to give you something. When you do this you need to show them why they should feel safe to give you this information. You should make your landing pages, and your forms trustworthy and valuable. Give something to your visitors. Be open and honest. Your button text, your form title, and your form design all help make you more trustworthy. Now you’re ready to go and use these 5 tips to build amazing lead forms.