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.

The goal of marketing remains the same

My first takeaway was that the end goal of what marketing as a function is trying to achieve  has not changed at all. People want to buy from companies they trust. The goal of marketing is to build trust with potential customers and maintain that feeling of trust with existing customers.

Before the dawn of the digital age, word of mouth was the most popular method that people used to decide what to buy and from whom. Existing customers served as trusted advisors for potential new customers.  Building trust is the way that companies sell to and keep their customers today as well.

Then what has changed?

What is different today, is that now there is so much information and so many ways to get that information, that it becomes hard for the customer to figure out what is true and who to trust. An interesting statistic that was shared at the event was that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 12 months.

In addition, the buyer could search for information on the Internet or receive information from companies in the forms of emails, SMS messages, notifications through the website, messages on Facebook, Twitter and many other ways. They could also search or receive these messages on their desktops, laptops, iPads, mobile phones or smart watches.

It is the responsibility of companies today to help the buyer cut through the noise and consume the information that is relevant to them and helps them figure out what product or service will best meet their need. The challenge or opportunity, depending on how you look at it, is how do companies leverage all this data and these different technologies to deliver relevant messages to people through their preferred way of receiving them? The focus should be to begin building this trust with potential buyers and existing customers by making them feel like they have a 1 on 1 relationship with the company.

What technology trends can help you do this?

The 5 key technology trends that were the underlying theme of most sessions at the event were:

• Cloud – In the State Of The Cloud report by RightScale, 95% of the enterprise organizations that were surveyed used cloud technologies. What that tells me is that IT organizations are moving away from managing hardware to managing software. The availability of applications in the the cloud has raised the bar for performance, stability and time to market for new functionality. This has leveled the playing field to some extent as similar capabilities could be available to companies to use as they try to sell to, service and keep their customers.
• Mobile – Technology companies have been talking about making their tools available on a mobile device for some time now. What is new is that they are now talking about mobile first and mobile only. Techcrunch predicts that by 2020 there will be 6.1B smart phones in the world. Compare this to the projected population in the world in 2020 at 7.7B people. A large number of the smart phones will be the only devices people use to run their lives and their business. This makes it all the more important to figure out how to build products that are easy to use on a mobile device and also build those relationships with potential buyers and existing customers using this device.
• Social – Human beings are social and want to be part of a community.  Though communities have been around forever – the difference now is that they are online. Social is nothing but an online community – the size of which is controlled by the individual. Social is both an outbound messaging channel so companies can deliver targeted messages using Facebook or Twitter; and it is also a data source to get to better know your buyer. Social is no longer just a marketing channel but it has also become a place where companies can service their customers and sell additional products to existing customers.
• Data Science – Vcloudnews states that every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created online. What does that even mean? The challenge is making sense of this data so that companies can use the data to better understand their buyers.  This  is in fact a science, because if analyzed and leveraged correctly companies can create superior, personalized experiences for their potential buyers and existing customers which will undoubtedly lead to more business for the company.
• IoT – My definition of IoT or the Internet of things is the ability for a device to record an activity and trigger a communication when a certain condition is met. Companies have only started to scratch the surface on the use cases for this. The concept of devices triggering actions has been around for a long time – e.g. a thermostat that turns off the heat when a certain temperature is reached; but what is different about IoT is the ability for the device to trigger a communication that can be accessed on a variety of devices when something happens.

Some companies get excited about the potential that these new technologies offer, others are overwhelmed and not sure how to best leverage these. What is important to keep in mind is the end goal – building trust through a personalized and superior experience. Use only those technologies that help you  achieve that objective. Remember, at the end of the day, these technology trends simply equip us, and it’s really the relationship with your customer that matters.