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.

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