Read more about how you can set your own rules to handle bounces and lead scoring, in addition to contacting customers based on their behavior, without the need to create campaigns or segments.

Marketing automation requires up-to-date contacts and the integration between Mautic and n8n is the missing link to get data from the most diverse systems and enrich Mautic. 

In this article, I will detail how n8n version 0.165.0 brings new features so you can manipulate Mautic in a simple and easy way.

This is my second contribution to Mautic node improvements in n8n and I am very happy to be able to collaborate with both Mautic and n8n communities. You can learn more about how to contribute in our Community and Get Involved sections.

Send emails directly to your leads

How many times have you thought about sending a specific email to a contact through some external action like an e-commerce order, subscription expiry or an alert using Mautic?

On n8n’s Mautic node you will find the action “Send e-mail”, which requests the contact ID and the email ID (campaign type). As soon as you run node, your contact will be sent the email, without using a campaign or broadcast.

In this way, the submission and engagement are recorded in the contact’s timeline.

Create your own rules to handle bounces

Mautic takes hard-bounces and applies the “Do Not Contact” flag to the corresponding contacts, but many companies take soft-bounce with a slightly different approach.

With n8n, all you need to do is receive bounce notifications for a webhook, perform some processing or validations in alignment with your policies, add notes and choose the most appropriate “Do not Contact” level.

You are free to choose the best way to handle hard-bounces, soft-bounces and complaints.

Lead Score like you’ve never seen

n8n also allows you to add or subtract points from a contact, opening doors to the most diverse external situations that can contribute to your Lead Score strategy.

Imagine that every time a contact makes a purchase on your e-commerce website, you can add a point to them – in addition to adding a comment, making it easier to identify them on the timeline

Handle your contacts with the n8n

The integration of Mautic within the n8n platform allows you to perform the most diverse actions:

• Create or Update Contacts
• Add Tags to Contacts
• Add or Remove a Contact from a Segment
• Add or Remove a Contact from a Campaign
• Add or Remove “Do Not Contact” from a contact
• Directly send a Campaign-type email to a contact
• Add or Subtract Points from a Contact

n8n is Mautic’s best open source partner for connecting external systems that can perform actions inside your Mautic.

You can plug Mautic into major CRM, email validation systems, contact enrichment, spreadsheets, SQL and NoSQL databases, receive data via webhooks or API and much more.

If you are thinking of connecting your Mautic to an external system, be sure to look for the n8n. It’s a free and open source system that you can run on your own server.

Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira Fonseca is a Devops and cofounder of Powertic. He is also with the Mautic Meetup São Paulo (Brazil) and the n8n Meetup São Paulo (Brasil). You can follow him on Twitter: @luizeof.

Read more about the difference between email marketing and marketing automation, and how both marketing tactics can earn value for your business.

Email marketing has been around for over 40 years and continues to be one of the most effective forms of marketing. In 1978, the first email marketing blast was sent to 400 recipients and it generated $13 million in sales — that’s equivalent to $78 million today! The revenue generated from email marketing in comparison to the investment continues to be significant. Campaign Monitor notes that every $1 investment in email marketing can give a return of $44 in revenue.

Email is a powerful marketing tool and as technology continues to evolve, email marketing is becoming more automated. Let’s look at how that change has happened over time and what it means for traditional email marketing.

Although email marketing started in the late 70s, it wasn’t until the 90s that it really started gaining traction. If you remember the 90s, that’s when the Internet was born. The first smartphone was introduced and Hotmail launched its first web-based service. For marketers, this was known as the decade of “spray and pray” email marketing.

For those not familiar with the term, “spray and pray”, also known as “batch and blast”, refers to sending the same generic email message to many people via a static contact list. The “spray and pray” approach required minimal effort because there’s little strategy involved and no targeting. The message is generic and the distribution list is static, so you create one email and send it to everyone. This approach is equated to yelling “Hey, Bob” in the middle of a crowded place and expecting that someone in the crowd will be named “Bob” — that is, you “pray” that your message will hit the mark with some customers but in reality it falls short for most. Instead of shouting into a random crowd, knowing what they look like and where they’re likely to be at a certain time means they’re more likely to respond — and you’re more likely to be getting the right person, rather than just some random person who happens to share the same name.

This type of batch emailing quickly became coined as “spam” and anti-spam laws were introduced in the US by 2003, forcing marketers to rethink their email marketing approach and get more targeted. In the early 2000s, marketers started creating their own email databases, allowing them to create targeted email lists based on basic information they knew about their contacts.

These targeted distribution lists helped marketers get away from the “spay and pray” approach, but the emails were still generic and the strategy focused on a single campaign. Marketers would create an offer, schedule out the campaign and then blast emails to their own distribution lists. Although those lists may have been more targeted, they still leveraged a one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing.

The marketing landscape began to drastically change with the explosion of digital channels, devices and touchpoints beyond the web.The number of channels marketers now had to manage divided their time and made it necessary to automate manual processes, including email marketing. And as the number of marketing channels increased, so did the demand for a cross-channel marketing strategy.

That’s when marketing automation was born.

Benefits of multichannel marketing automation

Marketing automation is the process of automating repetitive marketing activities across multiple channels. In 2006, marketing automation software was introduced. Essentially, these were tools designed to help automate marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posting and ad campaigns. But the marketing automation vendor landscape really picked up between 2010-2015 with revenue going from $225 million in 2010 to $1.65 billion by 2015.

Marketing automation leverages technology to turn manual processes and campaigns into automated workflows. And these tools aren’t just used for email marketing, they can target customers with automated messages across email, social media, web and mobile to orchestrate the omnichannel experiences that customers demand by delivering the right message, at the right time, through the right channel.

Key features for marketing automation

Marketing automation tools introduced a lot of new features that allowed marketers to do more with their marketing campaigns in less time. They required an investment of time to set the campaign and workflows up initially, but then they would run automatically based on the parameters or triggers established. Here are some common business requirements of marketing automation:

• Dynamic segments: In the past, marketers could segment their databases manually. With marketing automation, rules could be set to move contacts from one email distribution list to another based on actions they take. One example is moving contacts through various steps in the sales funnel. If a contact clicked on a link to request a demo, a trigger could be established to move them to the next stage of the funnel.
• Auto-response for email and text: Marketers can establish rules for when contacts should be sent an auto-response based on specific actions. For example, if a customer puts an item in their cart but never checks out, an email can be automatically sent to remind the customer of the items they still have in their cart. Or if a contact booked an appointment, a text message could be set up to send an appointment reminder 1-2 days prior to the appointment.
• Drip campaigns: A drip campaign allows marketers to establish a series of actions to take place over a period of time for a targeted group. For example, a marketer can create a series of lead nurture emails that would be sent out to prospects in a given timeframe. To create the drip campaign, the marketer needs to establish what actions should happen, the order of those actions and the triggers that would cause the next in the series to be sent. Then the drip campaign runs automatically for all contacts in the targeted list.

Marketing automation tools allow marketers to move beyond a one-size-fits-all mindset, and begin to put the customers at the center of all campaigns. With these marketing automation tools, it’s easier than ever to provide consistent messaging from email and social to the website and text messaging. And with the rise of personalization, marketers are able to provide not just consistent experiences across channels, but very targeted and personalized experiences as well.

Marketing automation tools are just the software that helps automate the process. It’s still up to the marketer to define the strategy and create the campaigns. This requires marketers to understand their customers better by collecting valuable data, identifying key insights, building customer profiles, and evaluating what’s working and what’s not. It’s still up to the marketer to identify the key touchpoints and design the connected experience for their customers.

Equipped with the right tools and a data-driven strategy, marketing automation can help businesses design customer-centric experiences that support their specific goals and drive marketing ROI.

Theresa Anderson is a Senior Digital Experience Strategist at Acquia and has kindly authorised that we reproduce this post, originally posted at the Acquia blog.

Many businesses use the word free as a lure. They will offer their solution to us without initial cost, then convince us to pay after seeing the value of their solution. But is that truly free? We would argue these are trials, not free solutions.

“Free” Marketing Automation

Lately, we’ve seen many businesses offer “free marketing automation software”. But are they? Mautic is free and will be forever. But this is not a marketing concept. This is a philosophy.

When we set out to produce marketing software, we were compelled by our mission. To empower organizations by providing powerful communication tools to anyone who needed them. Free speech is a freedom we often take for granted. To provide a solution that empowers free speech is an incredibly powerful concept.

GNU Free Software Definition says:

We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don’t control the program, we call it a “nonfree” or “proprietary” program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.

So while others offer “free” marketing automation tools, read the fine print. Because free for a month isn’t free. It’s bad marketing.

Authentic Marketing

We believe in the concept of authentic marketing. Authentic marketing is about value and values, it’s not about trickery. When we have something of value, we don’t need shady marketing to communicate it. Marketing should be the artful way we convey and connect individuals to that value. So for our marketing efforts to be effective, we must consider trust as a key element for connection. If we continue to use trickery, we diminish not only our brand, but our value proposition.

As marketers, let’s strive to be authentic in the way we communicate with buyers. We can’t be lured into traditional marketing schemas. Our values AND value must shine at every step of the customer journey. The Young Entrepreneur Council encourages us:

Don’t get trapped by marketing dogma. Think outside the box and be willing to take risks, so long as it’s in line with your philosophy. For instance, blog openly about the problems your company seeks to solve in the world and how you’re working to overcome them by fulfilling your mission.

Honesty, truth and conviction. When we communicate our values using these principles, it is authentic marketing. And the data shows it’s what customers are seeking. Let’s not disappoint them. It’s time we start using our creative voice to engage buyers in authentic conversations and communicate with our vision, not archaic marketing tricks that convey false promises.

“… human nature dictates that people have a hard time genuinely connecting with, being close to, or really trusting other humans who (pretend to) have no weaknesses, flaws, or mistakes.’ This is not only true of human connections; it’s true of our relationships with brands.

We encourage you to join our community. Because free is free. Forever.

We can also become too mired in the details of our journey. And if you have children, you know exactly what I’m talking about. “How many hours will it take to get here?” “I have to go to the bathroom.” “Why are we stopping?” “I’m hungry.” And on, and on it goes. These are indicators that they our precious cargo are more interested in the destination than the importance of the journey. Seeing the big picture can offer us a view that is holistic, and gives us insight that we might not otherwise consider. That is why this final post in our big picture series is focused on starting your marketing automation journey.

Big Picture

As marketers we can become so hyper-focused on specific goals, campaigns or initiatives, we forget the broader context with which they fall into. This big picture view is critical as we begin to understand how marketing automation fits within our business. It’s important to remember that our understanding of this view will enable us to make the right decisions on how to automate our processes and marketing tools.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve highlighted broader systems that your organization needs to consider as you evaluate the big picture view of marketing. It begins at the business strategy level, then works it’s way down to your marketing scorecard and goals. As you determine the metrics you would like to impact, it is imperative that these blend into your customer touch-points and not override them. If our customer journey becomes secondary to your goals, we are missing the point. The customers’ journey to your business is the windshield of your marketing efforts. It should be clear and unobstructed.

The Roadmap

With that, let’s climb to a higher altitude and see the big picture landscape of our marketing automation journey. First and foremost, marketing automation is not a bolt-on solution. For automation to be truly successful, you must consider all of your marketing efforts en masse. Some think that a landing page with a compelling call-to-action is all their organization needs to integrate automation. But this is a shortsighted view. Consider our road trip. Let’s say it will require multiple days to get to get to our destination. If we plot our course without considering the climate, construction and traffic at each stop, we may miss alternative paths to help us get there in a more effective and efficient manner. What if it is quicker to go around the big city? What if construction is slowing traffic down?

This is true of your marketing automation journey. If we consider our customer touch-points and lay that context beside the omni channel approach, we will begin to see paths and connections that we may not have considered before. This is one of the key approaches to automation that often gets overlooked. The layering of channels and touch points is as vital to the creation of automated processes as content creation itself. If we don’t evaluate the intersections of the customer journey in connection with the channels we communicate through, our efforts will fall flat.

Start Your Marketing Automation Journey

So now that we have a map of our marketing automation journey, where do we go from here? This is a conversation that will be entirely unique to each organization. We are extremely excited to have assembled a community of developers, users and marketers that have plotted their own journey’s and have committed themselves to share what they’ve learned with you. Mautic is unique in that this community cares about your success. This is not a profit game. This is a journey of connection. You see, when you win, we all win. Here are a few thoughts to get your marketing automation journey started.

• Assemble your team: As we’ve noted in previous posts, your marketing efforts involve a number of teams. As Macy’s discovered, Macys.com was having a significant impact on in-store purchases. The online team learned they had to work with brick & mortar and understand how the customer searches and purchases.
  

  “We used have 2 separate silo’d budgets, we really now have one Marketing budget. And we look at the best way to spend that, what’s the best allocation, what’s the best media mix, whether it’s digital, offline, how do they work together to deliver…yeah of course the most sales, but really, that best customer experience.”

  For more information on Macy’s teamwork, click here.

• Understand your customer: This goes without saying. When you understand your customers needs, you will be more in tune to their purchase cadence. You will know more about their buying habits, how they seek your product or service out and what tools/communities they use to evaluate. This will help you deliver the right value at the right touchpoint.
• Determine the channels: The channels which you communicate and connect with your audience, will be incredibly important. If your customers are online, than connect with them there. If they are in your stores, connect with them there. If they are in both places at the same time, make the connection seamless. Don’t tackle every channel if your customers aren’t there and don’t automate what you don’t have the structure for.
• Automate with a goal: You should never automate without a set of goals you are seeking to achieve. Automation should further assist your audience/customer in meeting their need. It should never be self-serving. When you deliver value, your customers will remember. They will follow you because you care more about meeting their need than meeting their bottom line.
• Review and verify: This is as critical to the process of automation itself. Always be testing. Always be analyzing your audiences’ behavior and purchase cadence. This is an area that, as marketers, we need to become more adept at understanding the information that is being gathered with every click, every visit and every purchase.
• Adjust course if needed: Marketing automation is not a “set-it and forget it” proposition. It is a complex digital conversation that grants you access to the voice and cadence of your customer. Your customers change. They are constantly looking for value in every area of their life.

Remember, your marketing automation journey is more about relationship building than it is about channels, touch-points and data. With every piece of information you learn more about who your customers are, what their likes and dislikes are, and how they desire to be connected with. Our job is to listen, and trust that we’ve provided value at the right touch-point, through the right channel and at the right time.

For a full-size PDF of “Your Marketing Automation Journey” visual represented above, click here.

Last time we discussed the importance of starting with outlining the customer journey. It is critical that your business starts here. Your business and marketing goals should be always be aligned to understanding, and ultimately meeting, their needs.

As noted above, although you may find yourself in the marketing function, it goes without saying that the function of marketing should be to engage customers while supporting and driving the overall business objectives. Marketing should never sit on an island. Your marketing goals should be aligned to this “north star”.

The Marketing Scorecard

All of these goals will ultimately be incorporated into your marketing scorecard. The tasks and goals that you’ve researched, discussed and aligned on, will be the foundation for how your business keeps track of success. We would like to provide you with a quick overview for how you can develop your own marketing scorecard. This combined with your customer journey will be used to develop your marketing automation strategy.

• Improve Awareness: As you assess your current place in the market against competitors, what are the strengths of your solution should you be sharing? What are the value gaps you can expose in your competitors, that your product or service offers? What are some relevant content areas that you can explore? How do you begin telling the marketplace about them? What new and unique channels can you use to share these stories?
• Generate Leads: Every business needs customers. Although we in the industry calls these leads, they are people. People that have needs that you would like to fill. As you review the customer journey, where can you connect with them? Generating leads is about meeting your customers needs. Meet them where they are at. Assess their journey and provide value and the “leads” will follow.
• Increase Sales: This is where engagement becomes relationship. It’s when the customer decides that the value they sought out, is worth the money you’re asking for in return. If your solution truly brings about a value exchange, then you have an incredible opportunity to extend that relationship into something much more valuable.
• Drive Loyalty: This is the brass ring of any business. When a sale becomes something more. Apple, Nike, Starbucks. These organizations have delivered value AND an experience that enriches our lives. They are adding value after the sale. As you craft your scorecard, don’t simply stop at the sale, find opportunities to delight the customer long after the sale is done.

Bear in mind that these are high-level scorecard metrics and are designed to be a starting point for you and your team. Each one is a broad category that encompasses other more specific measures that will ultimately focus on individual goals that, if developed well, are SMART.

Marketing is not an Island

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, this should not be an exercise you accomplish on your own. There is value in reaching outside of your function to ensure that you are creating a holistic scorecard. Consider the functions that impact each and every area of your strategy. There could be a new scorecard metric that is waiting to be revealed, that will have a significant impact on your business!

Later this week we will drill down even further and start to assess all the communication channels that will help you drive your strategy and connect to your customers and impact your metrics. As you begin to unpack these high-level metrics, what are some underlying measurements that you are tracking? Share them in the comments below.

You Need to Friend & Follow!

The other thing we notice is that when the technology is the hottest trend everyone wants to be a part. This leads to some of the craziest use-cases you will see. Let me give you an example: I noticed recently that the chain gas station down the road from my house has a giant sign asking me to like their Facebook page and to follow them on twitter. I think this perfectly typifies this technology-colored glasses. Why would I need to friend a gas station franchise on Facebook or follow their tweets? Now perhaps they have a very good reason for creating this social media presence and there is a real target audience they have created a marketing strategy around capturing. But my first thought is they have simply latched on to something they see as “trendy” tech and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Ironically so I think since Facebook is over a decade old now and Twitter also is no longer the latest and greatest. But the pervasive nature of attempting to be fashionable in tech is clearly evident.

The Need For Marketing Automation

What does any of this have to do with marketing automation? While the previous two paragraphs may feel a bit like two separate issues or topics what you will soon come to realize is how each plays a critical role in the current state of marketing automation and what I consider to be the technology trap.

Marketing automation at one point around 10 years ago was the hot new software technology. It had features and abilities that went far beyond anything else available at the time. Everything from email campaigns (sending emails over a specific time period), to lead nurturing and lead profiling were features found in this new and exciting area of technology. And customers jumped at the opportunity to try and implement this software in their business. Many were admittedly enamored by new and shiny technology and willing to suffer through the occasional bug or struggle with a hard-to-use lackluster UI. Fast-forward 10 years and you now see the overwhelming interest in marketing automation by all companies and organizations. Everyone sees marketing automation as technology they need. This is how marketing automation touches on both of the introductory two paragraphs. But what does this mean? Where does the problem lie and how does this lead to a marketing automation trap?

The Marketing Automation Trap

In the first paragraph we discussed the trendiness of the software and how forgiving we were of new techology. But there’s a key word in that sentence. New. When software is new and when the company providing the software is active, listening and fixing issues then we are content to continue to use the software. The minute that progress fails to continue or the bugs in the software become persistent rather than fixable we begin to lose interest and become disgruntled users. Marketing automation has begun to reach that point. The existing software is now old, overwhelmed with bolt-on features and generally slow. Bugs exist for months without being fixed and users are becoming less and less tolerant of issues. This is the first marketing automation tech trap.

The Marketing Automation Magic Tool?

The second side of the trap relates to market saturation and a belief which tends to surround technology in marketing automation. Marketing automation technology can appear to be a glamorous and quick solution to increasing leads and sales. The idea that this software can be a magic bullet for increased revenue is overwhelmingly compelling. Every company at every size wants this technology to instantly turnaround their sales. But here is the trap. Many believe marketing automation is a fantastic technology that solves all their problems. The truth is much different. Marketing automation is a powerful tool to be used by skilled marketing experts. Please let me repeat that sentiment: Marketing automation is technology and a tool to be used by a business to accomplish a goal.

The Mechanics of A Hammer

Here’s a simple analogy: think of marketing automation as a hammer. You wouldn’t buy a hammer and then expect a house to magically be built. You would expect to pick up the hammer and use the tool to accomplish your goal of building a house. But you would have to understand the mechanics of the hammer (duh, that’s easy!) as well as how to use the hammer most effectively to build a house.

Marketing automation is a tool to be used. If the technology struggles or falters than an alternate solution will be created and the market will shift to the new and the shiny new thing, in this case, that new thing is Mautic, a revolutionary marketing automation platform built on open source technology, powered by a global community, and available for everyone to use at no cost. Bugs are fixed quickly, improvements are constantly being made and the open source community means a democratized approach to new features and quick, successful, iterations.

Secondly this Mautic community is actively working to build an ecosystem of learning and education around the best practices for using marketing automation. You can use this community to quickly become knowledgable about how to use the marketing automation “hammer” and build your business. Never forget, software and great technology is only a tool to be used to accomplish your goals. Don’t fall into the marketing automation tech trap.

Pointless because you drive people away, obnoxious because you make your organization something people don’t just passively ignore but actively dislike; and obviously this is extremely harmful to your future success. This is not marketing automation. This is not marketing done right. This is applying old techniques to new technology. Your marketing automation is much more than a one-way blasting of information. You should not organize your marketing campaign to be constantly shouting at your audience. You must do more with your marketing automation software.

Marketing automation when done correctly can be a tool to engage and interact with your potential customers. You can encourage, support, and respond to their needs based on their action or even inaction. “But how?” you ask. Here are three quick suggestions to make sure you do marketing automation right.

1. Send Future Emails Based on Previous Interest

One of the most common mistakes when organizations start to use marketing automation is the ability to send unlimited emails automatically to potential customers. This is a bit like handing the keys to a high-end sports car to a first-time driver. The sheer power and awesomeness of this shiny new toy is too much to handle and things can quickly get out of control. Sending repeated emails based on too sensitive of triggers is the main and most obvious way that marketing automation gets abused. This is talking without listening epitomized. This behavior is obnoxious and potentially harmful. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use marketing automation effectively and even for email delivery.

Properly sent and timely emails based on well-defined triggers are critical parts of a good marketing campaign. Just be sure to listen and build your campaigns based on user interaction. Did they open the previous email you sent? Did the click a link you shared in the email? Use these triggers as ways to determine interest for future emails. Be smart in your marketing.

2. Be Consistent Without Being Obnoxious

The second problem that can frequently arise with new marketing automation users is the over usage of lead touch points. This means contacting your leads to frequently. Don’t inundate your new leads with too much information too quickly. Remember that you want to implement a drip campaign not a flood campaign. If you bury your new leads in a torrential amount of welcome emails, request for feedback, product suggestions and more you will drown your potential customer. Don’t be obnoxious.

Instead be timely and be consistent. Set a marketing plan that properly touches your leads and shares information at appropriate times. This might mean a monthly newsletter with relevant information, or maybe this means a bi-weekly email with completely different content each time. This is consistent, friendly interactions instead of obnoxious and overbearing information dumps. This step also requires that you listen to your potential leads. (See Suggestion 1 above)

3. Don’t Hover

The last suggestion for building a successful marketing automation campaign involves trust. You need to trust your campaign workflows, you need to trust your personas you’ve built, you need to trust the process. If you don’t trust in what you’ve built and organized you will find yourself hovering over every potential lead and new site visitor. You’ll find yourself obsessing on what they are doing, and jumping in to provide more information and push a decision. This is the used-car-salesman approach to marketing and it’s ugly. No one likes to be hard sold like this; your marketing automation prevents you from doing this…if you trust what you’ve created. Listen to what comes back.

Marketing automation when done right will bring your best leads to the surface when they are ready to be contacted. They will be nurtured by your marketing funnel; adding points, giving weight, improving their readiness, until the time comes when they are turned over to you for direct engagement. Your marketing should handle everything else so you don’t need to hover.

These three suggestions will help you cut through the marketing automation madness and help you build a powerful marketing campaign strategy that will keep you from sabotaging your own progress. Be smart, Be consistent, Be trusting. And watch your marketing automation do what you intend for it to do.

Mautic is an open source marketing automation platform built for you. Mautic will help you organize your marketing campaigns, build successful marketing strategies, and nurture your leads effectively. Mautic helps you listen to your customers.