We’ve discussed the need to build better stories around our automation before. Not only does our data need to tell a compelling story, but the processes and workflow that we use should support it as well.

Mautic 2.12.0 has added features and enhancements in the area of Reporting and Filters (as well as few bonus items) that should assist your business in that effort. Effectively gathering the right data, at the right time, for the right story is an essential part of getting the most out of your marketing automation strategy. Here’s what we’ve added:

Reporting and Filters:

• Scheduled Reports: Mautic users can now schedule reports to run and send those reports to specified email addresses when the reports are generated. This provides better reporting visibility to both Mautic and non-Mautic users.
• Segment Reporting: Users can now report on current segment membership so better tracking of marketing activities is achieved. This tracking is connected to the adding or removing of a contact from a segment.
• Contacts Manually Added to Segment Visibility: Now users can see which contacts were added manually, or through a filter, via a new Segment details page.
• Clickable Stats: A user can now click stat labels to view a list of contacts that are included in that metric for web/mobile push notifications and SMS in addition to emails.
• Email Replies: Users will be able to execute campaign actions based on a contact replying to an email sent through a campaign. (Note: Mautic can only monitor a single imap folder and the contact must reply with the body intact in order to know what to attribute the reply to.)
• Contact Companies: Now users will be able to include companies in contact related data sources for reports.

Integrations:

• Improvements to Connectwise: Users 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.

Other Updates:

• Themes Update: We’ve added 4 new landing page themes and 4 new email themes! Not only that, but we’ve added a viewport meta tag on all legacy themes to ensure responsiveness to screen-width.
• Twitter: Now users can merge Twitter contacts by matching name.

Growth requires a dedicated process that is powered by relevant information that can steer our strategies in the right direction. We are excited to continue growing Mautic into a solution that will help your business be better equipped to gather and interpret your data.

A huge thank you to those in the community who made the effort to load the beta release of 2.12.0 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.

Within the amount of time I’ve been in the Mautic community, I have often seen many questions about best practice for tags; there is no best practice set in stone, you find what works for you in your data structure and test through trial and error if the end-point is functional in the way you require.

For example, a project I currently work on deals with apprenticeships and distance learning courses. When I started this project they segmented their mailing list in 2 different ways:

The first being;

• Professional
• Funded/Apprenticeship
• Employers

And the second;

• Accounting
• Leadership & Management
• Funded/Apprenticeships
• Employers

I setup Mautic and altered the segment structure to look like this;

• Professional (Professional mailing list)
• Accounting (Professional mailing list)
• Leadership & Management (Professional mailing list)
• Funded/Apprenticeships (Funded mailing list)
• Employers (Employer mailing list)

Workflow Using Tags:

This is great when wanting to manually send/schedule broadcast emails, but essentially doesn’t help when you want to use one workflow to manage/send emails to the entire list based on conditions; I’m currently in the process of building a mailing list workflow for the first half of 2018 that will send out emails to the entire mailing list based on tag conditions.

1. Starting with “contact segments” as the source I select all mailing list segments.

2. This is where tags come into play, there is no need to create hundreds of segments to cater to each sector within a specific mailing list so instead I use tags. First, I add a condition to check the segment then I add another condition to specify the tag to check next.

3. The accounting list segments further into areas such as starting an accounting career, promotion/career advancement, bookkeeping, self-employment. I am using tags to prescript the subjects of the email for that segment within that period.

4. I then create two emails, one for bookkeeping and one for all others. Having the knowledge that users on the mailing list are very specific about what they’re interested in helps us select the focal subject and then generalize all other areas.

5. Then it’s just a case of repeating the tag condition for each sector and subject within that segment, then moving on to the next mailing list.

For me this is an optimum way to break down and schedule emails for our mailing list while deciding the subject each monthly email within a list sector (accounting, leadership & management); we also manage to cater to other users on the mailing list that are not interested in that appointed subject.

Working on a 6-month basis you can clone the campaign and at the end of the flow move users to the new campaign that handles the second half of the year.

Are there other best practices that you include in your workflow? Please comment below! Thank you again to Andre Etienne for allowing us to share this valuable content. To find out more information and discover other best practices visit Andre at yourdigital.club.