Discover Mautic: open source marketing automation for small businesses

Hi there 😁,

Thank you for clicking on this article, as always, I hope you enjoy it 🙂.

Although today is a bit special, we're going to mix a bit of tech and marketing. We're going to talk about Mautic, an Open Source marketing automation platform.

Mautic is particularly interesting for small businesses looking for a flexible, open source and powerful solution to manage their marketing campaigns at lower cost. Let's find out why this tool can be a game-changer for your projects!

Ready to go? We're off!

How I discovered Mautic

In my little freelance life, I work with lots of different tools, in lots of different situations...

One day, as part of a project, we needed a "CRM" (Customer Relationship Management) to manage the customers in a still very young project.

On the market, there's one of the leaders, Hubspot for example, but the prices, how can I put it, aren't very attractive...

I don't doubt that the prices are justified by the power of the tool, but for a project that's just getting off the ground... it's hard to come up with 800 euros every month.

So, what do we do in such cases? Well... we look for a solution 😁.

While searching, I came across Mautic, I asked around a bit and I see that it's based on Symfony, cool, I know Symfony very well.

What is Mautic?

First of all, I'd say it's a contact database for your company, a database, but enriched, your contacts, there's information linked to their profiles, via tags, events or even forms you can have them fill in.

With this base in mind, here are a few of Mautic's features:

• E-mail campaigns: Create and send personalized, segmented e-mail campaigns.
• Lead management: Follow-up and scoring of prospects, segmentation based on their behavior (e-mail opens, site visits, etc.).
• Forms and landing pages: Design of forms and landing pages to capture information.
• User tracking: Follow-up of user interactions on the site, social networks and by e-mail, enabling the personalization of marketing actions.

For each profile, you'll have several interesting pieces of information in addition to the basic ones (last name, first name, e-mail, etc.):

• Tags: You can add tags to your contacts, which will enable segmentation; for example, a contact bought a USB key, add the tag "USB key".
• Points: Mautic lets you store points for your contacts, how you allocate them is up to you, for example, a contact who opens an e-mail, +1 point, a contact who clicks on a link, +5 points.
• Action history: You can see the history of a contact's actions: did they see a URL? Did they fill in a form?
• Data enriched by the contact himself: As I said earlier, you can create a form that contacts can fill in, with data linked to their profile (birthday, for example).

Why choose Mautic?

Now that you know the main features of Mautic, let's see why this tool is an excellent option for your marketing needs.

Mautic boasts a number of strengths that make it particularly suitable for small businesses looking to automate their marketing in an efficient and personalized way. Here are just a few reasons why you should consider Mautic:

• Open Source: Mautic is free and open source, which means you can use it at no cost and customize it to your specific needs. It's an excellent alternative to expensive, pay-as-you-go platforms.
• Stand-alone hosting: Unlike SaaS solutions like HubSpot, you have the option of hosting Mautic on your own servers. This gives you total control over your data and guarantees confidentiality.
• Scalability: Whether you're a small business or a large organization, Mautic can adapt to your needs and grow with you. You can start small and gradually evolve without changing tools.
• Easy integration: Mautic integrates with numerous platforms (CRM, social networks, e-commerce, etc.), making it a versatile tool. You can easily connect it to your existing marketing ecosystem.
• Multi-channel automation: Mautic can handle multiple communication channels, including e-mail, SMS and social networks, making it a complete solution for interacting with your prospects and customers.

In short, Mautic gives you flexibility, control and personalization, all without the high costs associated with proprietary solutions.

The API to integrate with your existing tools

Yeah, we're devs, we like APIs, it's kind of our thing 😛.

Mautic's API is a powerful tool that lets you manage your contacts automatically and integrate Mautic with other systems. Here are some of the most useful features you can exploit:

• Add contacts: you can easily add new contacts to your Mautic database by sending an API request. This automatically creates leads from other platforms or applications.
• Update existing contacts: The API can also be used to update existing contact information, such as contact details, behavior or interactions with your marketing campaigns.
• Segmentation: You can assign contacts to specific segments, based on their behavior or other criteria, to better target your campaigns.
• Campaign automation: Using the API, you can trigger specific campaigns or actions (such as sending e-mails) based on collected or updated contact data.

Mautic's API gives you the flexibility to manage your contacts and automate your marketing actions in an integrated, personalized way. Whether to enrich your contacts or better segment your prospects, the API opens up a host of possibilities for optimizing your marketing workflows.

The tracking code

Mautic's tracking code works in a similar way to the Facebook pixel or tools like Google Analytics, but with a marketing-oriented approach. This code, which you easily integrate into your website via a small JavaScript, tracks your visitors' interactions and collects valuable behavioral data.

Once you've installed the code, here's what you can do:

• Page view tracking: The tracking code records the pages your visitors view, giving you a detailed overview of their journey through your site.
• Personalization: Each interaction is automatically associated with existing contacts in Mautic, or can be used to create new ones. This enables you to further personalize your campaigns according to the precise actions of each user.
• Automatic segmentation: The data collected by the tracking code can be used to segment your contacts according to their behavior, and thus trigger tailored automatic marketing campaigns.

Mautic's tracking code helps you track the behavior of your site's visitors in a similar way to the Facebook pixel, but with greater flexibility. It offers total control over the personalization and automation of your marketing actions, making it an indispensable tool for fine-tuning your marketing strategies. And best of all, it's all hosted on your premises.

How do I install Mautic?

Mautic is available on Docker Hub,

The image is well done, it contains Apache, cron tasks, in short, it's top-notch.

If you'd like to test Mautic locally, I've put together a little test docker-compose.yml for you to modify as you see fit.

Use case: How Mautic can automate your shopping cart abandonment campaigns

Okay, now that we've covered everything, let's take a quick look at a concrete use case...

Let's say you've got an online store, and someone has subscribed to your newsletter and added a laptop to their shopping cart, but they don't actually buy anything.

Well, in Mautic she'll get a tag announcing that she's added a laptop to her shopping cart, from which you can create an e-mail sequence that she'll receive a few weeks later, to remind her that she's added this laptop to her shopping cart.

Conclusion

Mautic is a great tool if you need a cost-effective marketing automation solution. If you've got developers on hand, since it's Symfony, it should be relatively simple to adapt it to your needs.

Have a great day and see you soon for another article 😁.