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.

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.

We’re excited to share that there has been a number of improvements to existing integrations and features, as well as new features and integrations that have been added in the 2.9.0 release of Mautic.

Integrations:

Systems Connectivity:

• Zapier: A new integration with Zapier has been created which is available through the Zapier interface. This integration allows a you to create workflows in Zapier based on data from Mautic. These workflows can be triggered based on form submission data, email open data, page hit data, point change data and contact creation or updated data. So many opportunities to provide information across your organization, making each customer experience more relevant and valuable.
• Connectwise: Similarly, a bi-directional sync with Connectwise is now available as a standard plugin. Leads can be created in Connectwise from form or campaign actions in Mautic. Data from Connectwise can be brought back to the contact and company records in Mautic. There is also a full sync option available where any changes made or new contacts created in Mautic can be pushed to Connectwise on a periodic basis.

CRM:

• • CRM Integrations: With this release we are announcing a number of standard CRM plugins to Mautic. With each one of these plugins, a bi-directional sync is standard. Leads can be created in each of these CRM’s from form or campaign actions in Mautic. Data from the CRM’s can be brought back to the contact and company records in Mautic as well. There is also a full sync option available where any changes made in Mautic can be pushed to the CRM’s on a periodic basis. (NOTE: Although each plugin exhibits similar functionality, each will require unique configuration, so be on the lookout for further instruction.) These CRM’s include:
    • SugarCRM (v6.x and v7.x will be supported.)
    • Zoho
    • MS Dynamics
    • PipeDrive

• Salesforce optimization: Along with these standard CRM plugins, the Salesforce plugin has been refactored for performance improvements and scalability. We have also fixed the issue where boolean fields did not sync properly in some cases.

In addition to the exciting integration updates, there has also been work done on one of the most powerful aspects of Mautic, reporting. We all recognize that the ability to review the information that is being gathered is critical to the success of any given effort. These new filters and bug fixes will equip you with better data, making engagement with your audiences more effective.

Reporting

• Reporting filters: You can now specify And/Or conditions at the same level between multiple filters on a report. Additional operators have also been added – these include:
  • contains (e.g you can have a filter of last name contains “lbe” to pull in all contacts that match %lbe%)
  • starts with (e.g. you can have a filter of last name starts with “Gil” to pull in all contacts that match Gil%)
  • ends with (e.g. you can have a filter of last name ends with “bert” to pull in all contacts that match %bert)
• Device filters: You can now create segments based on what device type, brand, OS and model the contact has accessed a marketing communication from.
• Metric alignment: A number of issues regarding report inconsistencies in different areas of the product specifically around emails have been resolved.

Functionality

• Focus Items Formatting: You can now format the content for focus items! A new section called ‘content’ has been added to the builder for focus items that enables you to format content in basic, editor or html mode. This opens the door for even more creativity when engaging visitors to your site.

Infrastructure And Performance

• List upload speed improvement: The list upload speed has been significantly improved. Lists now take ⅙ of the time they did before this enhancement – meaning, if a file took 60 seconds to upload it now takes 10! From a UI perspective, for fields with more than 1000 records, the import process will now run in the background and notify you when complete. It will automatically switch to this background process for files that have over 1000 records so that you are free to leave the page and work in other areas of Mautic. Now there’s even more time to accomplish what you set out to do.

We’re grateful for the those of you who made the effort to load the beta release of 2.9.0 and test the variety of features, functionality and fixes that were part of this release. Mautic would not be where it is today without the incredible community that we have.

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 we will do our best to help.

Links to Tutorial Videos

• SugarCRM Integration Setup
• Microsoft Dynamics Integration Setup
• Pipedrive Integration Setup
• Zapier Integration Setup

When it comes to rolling up our sleeves and getting to the business of marketing, we certainly know how to execute. We are trained to ask probing questions to understand our audience, where they are in the buying journey and capturing their attention. This is now becoming true of marketing automation.

“What does the data say?”
“What were the results of the A/B test?”
“Did our content strategy work in the last campaign?”

The list goes on. While we are becoming great inquisitors, are we truly solving for the big why? When we consider marketing automation and its role in our business, we should first reflect on it’s purpose. It’s only then that we can fully tap into it’s full potential, lest we relegate it to an auto email responder.

We believe that marketing automation should be more than a bolt on solution. It should be an integrated part of your overall business strategy. Our latest release continues to equip your business with the tools you need to bring that strategy to life.

Enhancements

• Mail is Owner: Emails can now be sent from different senders who are owners of the contact, creating a more personalized experience for your audience. This means if a sales rep is the contact owner, a single email send can appear as though it came from that individual.
• Tweet Entity: Not all tweets are created equal. Recognizing the vital role of social media, it would be simple to create a generic interaction via Twitter. However this doesn’t support an integrated way of thinking. A new channel called ‘tweet’ is available to create tweets to send as part of campaigns. Unique tweets can be created, modified and managed from this new channel.
• Campaign Reporting: Channel and component reports can now be filtered for a campaign. A column called campaign has been added to email asset, landing page and form reports to enable the user to analyze these in the context of a campaign. Powerful flexibility that gives you greater clarity in your marketing.
• Custom Fields: Customizing Mautic to meet the needs of your business is important. And measuring them is even more important. Now you can include your custom fields into your reports giving you more valuable insights.
• Summary Columns: But it doesn’t stop there. Now you can summarize data in reports using the “group by” feature and calculated fields. What does this mean? This enables the user to create relevant summaries for your detailed reports.
• Editor Enhancements: The editor continues to grow. We’ve added two new slots to provide even more customization. The code mode slot lets you put in raw html into the builder giving you needed flexibility. In addition, the dynamic content slot can now be created and edited right from the builder.
• GoToWebinar confirmation link: The GoToWebinar integration has added capability. You can now insert the personalized confirmation link as part of followup emails, creating a seamless user experience.

Integrations

• Salesforce
  • Campaigns: Mautic now supports a bi-directional integration with Salesforce Campaigns! You can create a segment in Mautic and trigger a campaign based on campaign members from a Salesforce Campaign. You can also add contacts as campaign members in a Salesforce Campaign from a Mautic campaign or form action. Extending the integration far beyond sharing of contact, account, and lead detail.
  • Contact link: More Salesforce integration support! Now you can map the Mautic timeline link to a custom field in Salesforce to allow users (like your sales team) view that contact’s activities timeline directly from Salesforce. More data at your fingertips to encourage personalized conversations throughout the buying process!
• One Signal
  • Web Notifications: You can now user your own OneSignal account with Mautic to send Web notifications as part of campaigns.
  • Mobile Push Notifications: Mobile app push notifications are here! Use the One Signal plugin to send mobile push notifications to your iOS or Android app. Now you can create, send and track mobile notifications in Mautic.
• Twilio for SMS: Mautic can now connect to your Twilio account. If your contacts would like to receive communications via SMS, you can connect your Twilio account with Mautic and send SMS messages as part of campaigns. More integrations mean more relevance and personalization.

Whether you are moving prospects through a meaningful buying journey, or adding value at each stage, each area of execution requires a thoughtful consideration of the larger problem you are solving. That makes the tactics of marketing more significant.

We trust that these features, improvements and bug fixes will enable you and your entire business to respond to to each problem statement with clear focus and attention.

Release 2.8 encourages big picture thinking, while taking incredible strides to bring that picture to life for marketers. This release is now available for download to our open source community. For more detailed information, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions or find new challenges that arise, join our feedback team and reach out to us on the Community Forums, Slack, or social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will respond as soon as we are able.

Github

Are you a developer? Continue making Mautic an industry disruptor by contributing to the fastest growing marketing automation project in open source today. Join us on Github!

For all industries and business segments that want to use personal data to enhance their own customer experiences, it’s important to remember that customers are willing to share their information if they know you are using it to help them get what they want… (Source)

The responsibility is on us, as organizations to provide value with the exchange of data. We must assure our customers that we not only see them, but we know about them; and there is a significant difference. It’s critical that we seek to understand their specific needs at every step of the buying journey, from desktop to mobile and everywhere in between.

No matter what innovations businesses set in front of consumers, and no matter how they try to serve them, customer expectations will accelerate. (Source)

In the latest release, you will not only have access to more powerful information, but you can create a more connected, value-driven experience. From integrations to more effective communication tools, you will be able to know more about your audience, not simply know them.

Integrations:

• Workflow Integrations: There are 4 new plugins to integrate data from Citrix into Mautic. These include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist and GoToTraining. You can now automatically create contacts in Mautic when individuals register for your events in the Citrix tools from form data in Mautic. In addition, you can pull registrant and attendee data back from the Citrix tools into Mautic and trigger campaigns based on this information. The registration and attendance data is also stored as part of the contact’s timeline in Mautic, giving you more information at a glance.
• Data Enhancement: Data enhancement tools like FullContact and ClearBit can now be integrated with Mautic. Users of these services can enhance their contact and company data in Mautic by clicking buttons on the contact (or company) and bringing data in from those services.
• Accounts Integration: Data from Salesforce Accounts can now be synched with Companies in Mautic. In addition we have optimized the API to minimize the number of API calls Mautic makes. Data from a new field type – formula fields – is also now available for mapping data between Salesforce and Mautic. Lastly Salesforce users can now access the timeline for the contact in Mautic by clicking on a link on the page in Salesforce.

Campaign Management:

• Preference Center: You can now collect preferences for your contacts in Mautic including preferred channels, categories, timings and segments. This will help you manage delivery of more relevant messages, using channels the contact prefers.
• Account Based Marketing Update: We have added a number of new features to Account Based Marketing. Companies in Mautic can now be merged; you now easily change the primary company on a contact; and you can apply a lead score at the company level. These features are in addition to a new set of reports that are available to measure performance at the company level.
• Global Categories: You can specify global categories across emails, landing pages, stages etc to categorize groups of entities in Mautic. You no longer need to define categories individually for each entity in Mautic, helping you stay organized and save you time.
• Email/Landing Page Builder: We’ve created an all new view for those who want to go under the hood and adjust HTML when developing emails and landing pages. The Content tab has been replaced with the new Code Mode view. This view will provide users with 2 panes in the Builder, one to edit the HTML directly and another to preview. Simply select Code Mode to start building, or to convert your existing communications into this view.

Each of these enhancements is another step toward smarter marketing. But with these tools come a greater responsibility to not only know our audience, but know their preferences and their needs as well.

The Mautic 2.3 update has been made available to our Mautic Cloud and Self-hosted users. 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 we will do our best to help.