This poses a serious challenge for us in the marketing space. And it’s being realized across the entire industry.

“A Q1 ‘17 survey by CMO Council and Redpoint Global revealed only 3% of respondents felt all of their automation, engagement and deployment tools were fully connected, with data, metrics and insights traveling freely between different technologies.” (Source)

It’s an alarming statistic, but not surprising. With so many solutions, there is an incredible opportunity to be more thoughtful in our approach to the design, organization, and management of our marketing stack. Let’s look at a few realities that will move us from not-so-managed to managed-magic.

Open Strategy: What does your marketing technology strategy look like? Is it focused on doing whatever is necessary to delight the customer? Or is it limited by what your technology allows it to do? If your strategy is not open to allow you to take unique and innovative approaches to connecting with your customer, then you should reconsider your approach.

Narrow Focus: With over 5,000 technology solutions it can feel like a daunting task to take an open strategy then narrow your focus. But this focus is not where you think it might be. The focus should be on your customers and associates. Clearly defining your marketing strategy with an open architecture, will allow your teams to take ownership of their place in the customer journey. This enables them to be hyper-focused on improving their processes and workflows and bringing value at each stage.

Manage Many: Regardless of the size of your business, effectively managing multiple technologies can warrant additional time and/or resources. With literally thousands of technologies to help organizations execute on their marketing strategy, it will require proper management to effectively deliver your brand message and promise.

Every business is at a different stage of marketing stack development. Some have had solutions for years and are currently reviewing how each improves their customer journey. Others are flexible enough to make changes to their stack to prepare it for the future of open marketing. Organizations that are successful will be able to address each of these realities in a way that meets the needs of the business and creates a meaningful brand experience.

Recently, Mautic announced the addition of Maestro. It offers powerful reporting capabilities, gives users more visibility into the success of initiatives across their entire business in a single dashboard. Companies can freely clone campaigns from other internal teams, and agencies can see a rolled-up view of campaign performance across all their clients. Regardless of your business, a holistic view of this data makes all teams and marketing initiatives more effective.

Working with both self-hosted and Mautic Cloud accounts, Maestro enables all Mautic users to clone campaigns across all their Mautic accounts. It also provides a single, unified view of all your campaign metrics, giving users the ability to understand marketing’s full impact on the business.

To get more information on Maestro and to learn how it can help you manage all your Mautic Marketing Automation accounts, click here!

“85% of marketers who use automation tools believe they don’t use them to their full potential.” (Source)

This means that we likely have systems in our business that are helping us achieve specific goals, but not to the degree that leverages their full capability.

Not only are we not using these systems to their full potential, some of these new technologies have not been fully developed. So how do we navigate this digital marketing maze? How do we find our way while leveraging these powerful tools to make more meaningful connections with our customers? The future of digital marketing is being shaped by a variety of tools and capabilities. They will promise a great many things, but preparing for them is just as critical as implementing them.

Here are a few key things to remember when moving forward through the space between existing and future technology:

People are still needed:

Our desire to bring value to customers should never be replaced by a computer. Computers still can’t interpret the innate needs of our customers. Although we are gathering terabytes of data, we need people to help interpret the data in a way that makes meaning.

“But what needs to go is our reliance on using automation to do our jobs. Because at the end of the day, we’re communicators.” (Source)

What this means is that we need to get smarter about how we use digital marketing systems in our business. Where does it make sense to automate? When do your customers value the human element? When do they simply want information? As marketers, our job is to truly understand the journey and the value at each and every touch-point.

Focus on workflow:

One of the most damaging things that any business can do when preparing for new technology is to create rigid, inflexible workflows. As technology continues to develop and add new features, workflows along your customer journey should remain flexible.

We often assume our customer journey’s work in one direction. Rarely do we consider a customer going backward. This thinking limits the view of our processes and workflow. We become rigid in our thinking, making it difficult when new technologies come into view. We should consider our marketing as operating in multiple directions, often skipping steps or moving from one touch-point to another without warning.

Not only will this approach help you be innovative in the way you engage customers, it will provide the flexibility required to add/remove process steps to improve the way you engage everyone along the journey.

Prepare your stack:

Most everyone is familiar with the term “agile”. We use this term when describing software development, manufacturing, construction and even marketing. At its core agile;

“…advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development…and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change.” (Source)

These principles are important to running any business. They should be adaptive, innovative, flexible and continuously improve. If this is true, then your marketing stack should reflect the same. The key is to keep every area of your marketing stack flexible in the way that it communicates with customers, associates, and other systems. This will allow you to respond to the demands of new technology before it arrives in your business.

Digital marketing is constantly changing. As customers continue adopting new technologies and changing their buying habits, our businesses need to be quick to respond. This requires flexibility, not rigid workflows and systems that restrict.

What are other ways your business is navigating the ever-changing digital marketing space? Add them in the comments below!

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.

Have you ever wondered if you could track more than just visits via the Mautic tracking script? I know I did, and in this article I will show you how we can use URL’s to track anything you want.

The Basics

Before we start let’s have a look at these two URL examples. This one is without extra parameter:

https://mydomain.com/page/test/

And here we have the same URL with an extra parameter:

https://mydomain.com/page/test/?email=johndoe@company.com

If you use for example MailChimp or CampaignMonitor to send out marketing emails, consider using this technique. Simply add the email address as a parameter at the end of the URL.

In php one can catch this parameter simply with a:

$email = $_GET[‘email’];

And then proceed to use that parameter for processing. However, there is also a clever way of using the Mautic Javascript to track visitors on your site. Only some slight modifications can make it send off any lead field you want to Mautic.

Get Tracking with Mautic

Here is the default script:

<script>
    (function(w,d,t,u,n,a,m){w&#91;'MauticTrackingObject']=n;
        w&#91;n]=w&#91;n]||function(){(w&#91;n].q=w&#91;n].q||&#91;]).push(arguments)},a=d.createElement(t),
        m=d.getElementsByTagName(t)&#91;0];a.async=1;a.src=u;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','https://mydomain.com/mtc.js','mt');

    mt('send', 'pageview');
</script>

In short, what this does is simply pass along the identification parameters such as IP address and device fingerprint, together with the page the user is visiting. Now have a look at the script below.

<script>
	function getUrlParameter(name) {
		name = name.replace(/[[]/, '\[').replace(/[]]/, '\]');
		var regex = new RegExp('[\?&]' + name + '=([^&#]*)');
		var results = regex.exec(location.search);
		return results === null ? '' : decodeURIComponent(results[1].replace(/+/g, ' '));
	};
	
    (function(w,d,t,u,n,a,m){w['MauticTrackingObject']=n;
        w[n]=w[n]||function(){(w[n].q=w[n].q||[]).push(arguments)},a=d.createElement(t),
        m=d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];a.async=1;a.src=u;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','https://domain.com/mtc.js','mt');

	var email  = getUrlParameter('e');

	if(email !== ''){
		mt('send', 'pageview', {email: email});
	} else {
		mt('send', 'pageview');
	}
</script>

The first function is used to extract a custom parameter from the URL. You can use this function for any parameter you want. Just make sure to pass the correct name to the function. In our case the name is ‘email’.

Below that you can see the default part of the Mautic tracking script. This is not relevant for us. It does what it needs to do, no need to concern us with that for now. Below that you will see a new variable is created with the name ‘email’ and the value it will get is the URL parameter for ‘email’. This means that this variable will hold the content of the URL that comes after ‘?email=’, which should be the email address of the user.

Then we have a short if-statement. This statement simply checks if the email parameter is filled or not. If it is not (which is the case for people that visit your website without a newsletter link) it will simply pass along the usual parameters. But if the email parameter is present it will pass along the usual parameters together with the email address.

Sending a Custom Parameter

You can send this along by adding ‘{email: email}’ to the mt method. Keep in mind that the first string identifies the field you want to pass along. In this case we want to pass along the email, but this could also be any other field like firstname or lastname, or even a custom field you have created. The second string or value is the actual value that needs to be passed along. Since we put the value we got from the URL in the ‘email’ parameter we just write ‘email’ to indicated that we want to pass along the string inside this value.

Lastly, make sure you enable public updating for the fields you want to track using this method. If public updating is not enabled Mautic will simply drop the field. You can do this by going to the ‘Custom fields’ section, then selecting the field you want and changing ‘publicly updatable’ from ‘no’ to ‘yes’.

Congratulations! You can now track custom parameters on your website!

The Possibilities Are Endless

Using the Mautic tracking script this way opens up new ways to identify your contacts. Think about the contact points you have and how you can use them to track different data sets.

If you are using mailing tools like Mailchimp or CampaignMonitor it is super easy to add the add extra parameters to your newsletters. Simply append the extra parameter to all the URL’s in your mail and there you go! In fact, you can use any contact network on point you have and use this methods for the parameters at hand.

Security

We should not forget that we are still handing personal data here. If you are appending sensitive data to a URL make sure you think about handling the data safely. What you could do is hash the parameters and de-hash them in your website before you send them off to Mautic. This way anyone who might come across the link cannot read or use the parameters.

Also make sure to use https, also known as SSL if possible. This is simply an extra layer of security added to the request the user will make. Best practice is to use both SSL for your website as well as the connection between your website and Mautic. You will see in the examples above the I have used https in the code, and not http.

And there you go. Now you know how to track custom parameters with the Mautic tracking script. I cannot wait to see what creative ways you all come up with to use this!

I’ve been in and around technology for nearly 20 years. Everything from IT administration/end-user support, software development and technology marketing/sales. In each one of these lines of work, there has been a consistent theme. Testing.

Why Testing?

If we’re honest, all end user support starts with a lot of questions. What was happening when that issue happened? Were you doing another task when that happened? What led up to the error? What showed up on screen when it happened? These questions are all designed to provide answers that lead to preventing that issue in the future.

Every operating system, mobile application or other software that we may use, operates in an environment that is unique to it. Trying to determine the source of these issues, often means understanding the environment as well as every unique element related to it. Once a possible source is discovered, we test to determine if our hypothesis is correct.

In a similar fashion, whether you are designing digital learning tools, or a robust marketing automation solution, each newly designed feature or added capability requires testing to ensure that it operates in a manner befitting its goal. And likewise with marketing messages, there are companies that primarily work on focus group testing messages with a variety of audiences to ensure that their message is resonating with it’s potential customers.

If we can find testing in so many environments, then it makes logical sense that we equip our own organizations with systems that provide us with the opportunity to test out new software that will impact our business. That’s why we are excited to share that we will be re-launching a beta-release program with the announcement of Mautic 2.9.0!

Beta-Release

For those who don’t adhere to a release management process, in its simplest form there is a test server and a production server. Each of these have their own purpose. The test server provides organizations with the ability to load and test pre-releases of software in an environment that doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day marketing automation (or other business) activities. The production server typically contains the most stable version of the software that enables you to continue gathering data on your audience as well as provide them with value at every interaction.

Mautic makes it simple to access and test beta-releases. To set up a test server, follow a similar process for a production server, with the most significant change occurring in the setup of Mautic. Follow the link below for more configuration details.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do not use beta releases in your production environment. There may be bugs still present in a beta release. Remember to always take a backup of your files and database prior to applying any updates, beta or otherwise.

Mautic 2.9.0 Beta-Release

For more detailed information on how you can access the Mautic 2.9.0 beta-release click here.

Now you are ready to test! Be sure to access Mautic’s Github Pre-release page to determine what features are being released and what issues are being resolved.

As I reflect on that post, we find ourselves meeting and in many cases exceeding our expectations. We are indeed meeting the needs of small businesses, adding incredible features and gaining access to bigger markets. But this has not happened without the incredible support from our community.

With every update, we see individual names of people who are making incredible contributions to Mautic. Every time I survey the forums or Slack, there are passionate, driven people who have dedicated themselves to see this community and solution grow.

But this growth hasn’t been without it’s challenges. Developing a feature rich solution that meets the demands of a growing industry, while tackling the many bugs that gets in the way, can be trying. But we are as committed as ever to listening to you, responding to your needs and exceeding user expectations, every step of the way.

It’s clear to us that real focus is needed in the community. This is simply a reality of our rapid growth. We realize that more resources are needed to bring value, while creating a place where each member is represented and recognized.

To that end, I’ve been asked to lead the community management effort at Mautic. Since I began working at Mautic over a year ago, I’ve been working in a number of capacities, but have developed a real passion for engaging our community and fostering relationships that connect people to value, while equipping them to add their own.

There are a number of key growth areas that we’d like to tackle in the near term. But in order to be successful, it requires input and support from the entire community. To that end, we will be reaching out in a focused way to solicit that feedback regarding these areas soon. They include;

• Forums: One of the ways we engage as a community is by connecting with one another via our forums. Unfortunately the existing forum application limits us from accomplishing other things like recognizing contributors, up-voting specific problems and so much more. We’d like to explore other tools that will bring even more value to the community in this area.
• Onboarding: This continues to be an area we’re excited about further developing. The current onboarding process is challenging at best, and we recognize it needs to be addressed. Our goal is to make every new user to Mautic feel supported while setting up, configuring and running their very first campaign. We’ll be taking steps to assess, review, edit and develop more succinct tools.
• Marketplace: A community’s strength is found in how it brings value to every member. We continue to believe that Mautic’s greatest strength is in it’s people. The ones who contribute value each and every day. Whether it’s answering a question, or solving a technical challenge, we believe that the value chain should be reciprocal. So we’ll be exploring ways to bring the marketplace to life this year.

I have reached out to many of you already in an effort to ensure that everyone that connects with Mautic, feels supported to grow their business. But if I haven’t connected with you, I’d like to say “hello” and please feel free to reach out to me (via Slack: @jseevers or email) and introduce yourself, or provide a comment below. I’ll be working diligently to bring content, process and structure to the work being done in and around our growing community.

I want to personally thank each and every one of you for how you have come alongside us, supporting users, sharing your experiences and adding value. We could not do what we do without the best people in the world in our community.

We’ve just begun. Be on the lookout, there are incredible things ahead!

Are you afraid that your email marketing efforts using Mautic will be affected by spam bots? Wish that there was another alternative that didn’t involve CAPTCHAs? Research shows that CAPTCHAs are having a negative impact on conversions.

The short story is that CAPTCHAs kill conversions. (source)

The pain is even bigger if you have a high traffic website and use external email services like Amazon SES, Sendgrid and Sparkpost. If you don’t control these spam bots, you won’t be in compliance with their spam rules.

You know what? You aren’t alone.

Honeypot Method

There is a way to get past this struggle, even if you are not a developer. The solution is to implement an approach called the Honeypot method, in your Mautic forms.

First, login to your Mautic instance. Go to Settings (cog icon), then Custom Fields. In the Custom Field window, add a new field.

In the Label field lets call this honey, click Save & Close, and continue to the next step.

The Setup

Now, let’s go to the forms we need to protect using the honeypot method. I would suggest going to the forms that are more prone to attack.

Add a new email field in the forms and select call it email2 and map that field to the honey field we created.

Now in Mautic v2.8+ we have a new field type called HTML Area, we’re going to use this field and add the follow code in the HTML area;

This code will make the email2 field invisible to the human eye, but not for the spam bots.

NOTE: You have to replace the formname and fieldlabel with the form name without space and the field label in your honeypot filed you put in your Mautic.

Another approach to hiding the field would be to specify the Field Container Attribute of the email2 field you want to hide as:

style="display:none"

Now let’s start eliminating spam bots.

Eliminate the Spam

Go to all the campaigns you have attached to a Campaign form;

Now adding this condition at the first step of the campaign will check to see if the person that submits the form has information in the field “honey”. If the field is empty it is likely a real person. If it’s not empty, it is a spam-bot and we are going to delete it.

NOTE: If you use a Standalone Form and you have the action to send email to user you MUST disable this and create a campaign associate with this Standalone Form and replicate the step above.

Using the honeypot method will help you stop spam bots and the negative effect they have on your email marketing activities.

Mautic’s Rod Martin developed a short video tutorial to walk through this approach step-by-step;

Because of Mautic’s robust workflow, there are a number of different ways to accomplish any given task. This is simply one approach. Comment below if you know of others.

The Mautic community is filled with incredible individuals with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. We believe that each perspective represents unique value to the broader community. If you’re interested in becoming a contributor to our blog, please contact us.

As training for the Rio Olympics  gets underway, we see the immense work that is done by these athletes in preparation for the games. In a similar manner, each of us works hard to compete in today’s business world. We plan, organize, implement and deploy new ideas. Although our environment may not be an open stadium, it is certainly an open marketplace. And unlike the real Olympics where only a single person is rewarded with a medal, everyone wins when you contribute to an open source project like Mautic.

Who can participate?

According to Olympic records, Cecilia Colledge was the youngest female competitor in the Olympics. She was only 11YO.  The oldest to ever compete? Arthur von Pongracz of Austria, who was 72. We’d like to approach the Mautic Summer Games in a same manner. We believe everyone has worth and value. That you can contribute and participate to this community in some way shape or form. So we’re excited to open up the competition to developers/creators/designers of all ages.

What are the events?

In preparation for the Mautic Summer Games we wanted to give you a rundown of all the different events that we will be offering. Regardless of your skill level or expertise, everyone should be able to participate.

UPDATED: Scoring for events

When do the Mautic Summer Games start/end?

Our Summer Games will run the entire month of August. So as you’re watching the Rio Olympics take some time to contribute to an international phenomenon that is disrupting an entire industry. When you participate in these summer games, you also add value to others.

What’s in it for me?

Our undying gratitude! ? Aside from the knowledge that you receive by helping people move horizons, there will be prizes! Be on the lookout for more detail on mautic.org as we design our scoring system and determine the prizes. Also keep in mind there will be prizes for country participation! Do you have colleagues that are willing and able to participate? Invite them to join in on the games!

By holding this fun-filled event, we hope to show the world that an inspired community, gathered around a common ideal, can change the way we communicate. And that given the proper tools and inspiration, we can create an open space where creative ideas can be  shared and horizons can be moved.

UPDATE: Summer Games Prizes

We’ve created our very own Mautic Summer Games swag bags! Proudly display your contribution to Mautic as you collect points to contribute to one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. There will be a different set of swag for gold, silver and bronze, so do your best!

UPDATE: Rules of the Games

We’d like to request that all content produced or developed be done during the timing of the games (the month of August). Please no recycling of content that has already been created. We encourage everyone who is participating do use creativity and innovation when applying their talents to each of these events.

Marketing and IT often have different objectives. Typically the Marketing group cares about getting more leads, more customers and growing revenue. The IT group is measured on whether they’ve implemented the right technologies, kept costs down and served the business. To be successful, there must be a high level commitment to the vision of what project will accomplish. This includes transcending the metrics the teams are measured on. In order to do this properly, roles and areas of responsibility for all members of the project team must be clearly defined.

Defining Relationship Roles and Responsibilities

The RACI model helps organizations define roles & responsibilities during a change process. The ‘A” stands for who is ultimately accountable for the success of the task, at a high level. The Marketing department should be responsible for defining the problem. They should also determine the vision for the business process. The IT department should be responsible for providing guidance on technologies. Implementation and ongoing support is IT’s responsibility. It is not enough to just define high level ownership, as the devil is always in the details – accountability for each step must be clearly defined.

What are the steps to implementing a new technology and who does what?

1. Defining the problem – This is typically the first step. Marketing needs to clearly define and communicate what the current challenge or opportunity is that they are trying to solve.
2. Defining desired outcomes – Next, Marketing must create a proposal to explain the problem or opportunity and get internal teams to buy in to try and solve it. For large enough projects it is important to have sponsors, preferably the CMO and the CIO to ensure alignment from the top down.
3. Defining the requirements – This stage of the project is an interesting one as either Marketing or IT could be accountable for this step. Keep in mind, whoever is writing the detailed requirements should have an understanding of the Marketing goals and a good idea of what can be achieved with technology.
4. Offering up technologies – The first decision that needs to be made is whether to build or buy. If the decision is to buy, or at least start by looking at what technologies are out there, this is usually a joint effort between the Marketing and IT teams. Though IT is ultimately accountable, it is critical to get buy in from the Marketing business folks as they will the the users of this technology.
5. Choosing a vendor – The next step is to choose a vendor and this is one where truly IT and Marketing have equal footing. Sometimes the owner of the budget has a little more say in the end decision, but at the end of the day the chosen solution must solve the business need and also meet IT standards.
6. Building and integrating the solution – This is where the handoff to IT begins. Depending on the decision that has been made, they build the solution or buy one and integrate it into the existing technology stack.
7. Project management – For any large project to be successful, you need a strong project manager. Since IT leads the implementation process, it makes sense for the IT team to be ultimately responsible for ensuring timeliness and quality.
8. Testing – Initial testing is usually owned by the IT team. Once they have determined the system is stable, they will hand over testing to the Marketing team. The Marketing team then validates that the requested functionality meets their need as defined in the requirements.
9. Launch – Once the new technology is ready, it should be treated like a product launch. The Marketing team needs to position the benefits of this new technology, train users and ensure adoption. Celebrating successes together is also important once the project has launched.
10. Ongoing maintenance – At the end of the day, the IT team is the team that supports all technical issues for the Marketing team. It is important for IT to have a good handle on what has been built, have resources to support it and also a relationship with the vendor to escalate issues if necessary.

Eliminating Breakups

Relationships are never easy, they take an immense amount of effort to maintain. To that end, if the relationship with your ‘work spouse’ is on rocky terrain, here is some wise counsel to encourage you to get back on the right track.

• The first, of course, is to follow a similar process to the one above. Lack of clarity around roles, areas of ownership and goals can cause a rift between Marketing and IT.
• Don’t go it alone. When the Marketing and IT leadership is not aligned, it sometimes results in either group managing to secure the budget and purchasing a rogue tool that may or may not meet Marketing’s needs or IT’s requirements. This serves no one well, ultimately making it a business management nightmare.
• Make critical decisions with the end in mind. When technology decisions are made for the sake of implementing shiny new technologies v.s. to enable a business need. If the technology does not solve a business problem, chances are adoption will be low and cause turmoil between the two teams.

Like a marriage, the relationship between IT and Marketing must be one of accountability, compromise and teamwork. Aligning these teams will ensure successful implementation of the technologies that solve business problems. And as you all work toward the success of your company, don’t forget to enjoy the ride!