Hey Guys,

It is time for another review and this time it is Mautic

Mautic is an open source marketing automation tool. Is it free? YES and NO.

I will be going through the main features and will do a comparison at the end.

Dashboard:

Mautic dashboard is minimalistic, meaning less clutter and easy access to contacts created, contact map, top lists, visits and email sent/open rates. It does provide data filtering functionality can be filtered using dates.

Calendar: Well, I don’t think this should be a feature at all because there are tons of good online Calendar tools to keep yourself organized and manage the content. You can use this feature to check on upcoming tasks/activity schedule.

Contacts:

This section is used to manage all your contacts, the “create new” contact feature is robust and provides all the necessary features to capture complete lead information.

I liked the way Mautic have distinguished the “Core” information comprising name, email etc from the “Social” information consisting twitter/facebook handle details.

This helps to quick extract the required information and avoid too much data in one place.

Segments:

It is a fancy name for “Lists”. Segments provide ways to easily organize contacts, leads etc and can be configured from a range of fields.

You can create a new segment(List) and add filters for e.g. Address, city, company etc.

Components

Components is where you store/manage and create all the lead generating contents. This section has three parts – Assets, Forms and Landing pages.

Asset: This is where you add new files, docs, images and any downloadable/viewable content. Files can be categories, published at a certain date/time and can have additonal meta information such as title/description/Alias.

Assets can become a part of your drip campaings, landing pages and emails, and you can easily see the metrics associated with each of them.

Forms:

Similar to any other marketing automation tool, Mautic provides a way to design custom forms and use them in your email / online marketing campaigns. The best part of this tool is, you can set the form to publish or unpublish at a set date and time. Now that’s AUTOMATION!

After form submission you can choose any of the actions e.g. Download an asset, send email modify certain parameters etc.

Landing pages

The page editor it good in terms of formatting and styling options, there is an option to design the page via HTML using source code editor, the WYSIWYG editor is clean and provides appropriate media addition button.

All pages can ben categories, provides node association(if it is a translation of some other page), publish and un-publish date/time.

Campaigns

This is where you combine all the assets, emails, landing pages and forms to create a fool-proof marketing campaign. The campaign builder is solid and provides fantastic options to integrate different components such as – forms, lists(segments), download assets, provide conditions etc

Channels:

This is where you design/create/ manage emails and perform social media monitoring. Mautic provides two options while creating a new email:

New template email – This is when you want an email to be sent automatically by campaigns, forms, triggers etc. they can edited but cannot be send to a list.

New Segment email – this is used when you want to send the email manually to a list.

Email Editor – the editor functionality is similar to landing page editor.

Social Monitoring – Not the best feature but still useful incase you quickly check twitter mentions and hashtags.

Mpowertools:

This is a cool feature to grab attention of your visitors/leads.mpowertools provides nifty features to collect data, display a notice or emphasize a particular link to get visitors attention and increase click through rate.

There are multiple ways by which you can arrange this information – Bar, Modal window, Notification or Full Page. You can even customize the colors, and modify its contents.

Points:

Mautic has not really automated the process of providing score to lead based on their interaction with the content that you have created. Mautic gives you the power to assign points to actions taken by a user. I honestly think that Mautic can automate this process and preconfigure the scoring system.

Reports

Analytics and reports are the backbone of any marketing automation system and I can say that Mautic has done a decent job in developing a strong reporting system.

You can either use the pre-defined report templates or create your own.

Conclusion:

For an open source tool, Mautic is a very well designed and robust marketing automation tool. I highly recommend using this tool to learn more about actions and triggers, lead capturing “mpower” features and the way Mautic integrates assets with emails and landing pages.

You can download or sign up for FREE version here:

What is next?

Please add your feedback/suggestions or if you have any question using the comment box below.