Each marketing automation platform handles interfaces, logic, and automation differently with visuals, terminology, and interfaces.

There’s a method behind it all, but it’s not always obvious to new automation users. While we think Mautic’s campaign structure is friendly for newbies, there are many ways to reach a specific goal. To effectively deploy campaigns, you might still want to map out the logic and get there as soon as possible.

In the post, we’ll break down three core elements of marketing campaigns: 1. workflow, 2. campaign execution, 3. rules.

Workflow

Drip Campaign

You will understand how to organize campaign and how each option ties in with the sequence. You will also learn how campaign scheduling works.

Here’s a campaign workflow created by the Mautic visual builder.

The campaign goal is track the interest level of our audience. Any contacts that did not interact with the email series, they will be moved to an inactive segment and subsequently removed from campaign in 20 days.

We have created three criteria in the email series such as open email, click email, and reply email. If your contacts have interacted with the email, your contact would be added one or more tags. If they have both interested and engaged, it means that they are very involved in this campaign.

Dynamic Content

You can use campaigns to deliver personalized content on specific sections of the webpage. This is where dynamic content comes into play. An action type can appear as an option within a campaign. If a contact meets the condition, the campaign studio will push the content based on the stated criteria.

While using this campaign action, best practice is to start the name of the event include the slot name you’re pushing. In the ‘Select Dynamic Content’ menu, choose slot from dynamic web content. You may want multiple conditions following the decision on the yes path with a different DWC slot. Here’s how a sample campaign sequence looks like:

In this campaign, any contacts from Germany with first name equals Leon will be pushed tailored content different from the default content. The rest of the contacts in the newsletter #1 segment will receive default web content.

Slot-based dynamic web content

Alternatively, you can use slot-based DWC (also known as filter-based DWC) to display content based on a custom Mautic token and criteria specified in the filter.

Simply insert token names into the DWC editor, then add criteria in the filters and the token you’ve just created on the landing page. When someone visits the page and if the conditions in the filters are met, then the DWC will be displayed.

Campaign Execution

Firing a campaign sounds easy, but execution involves detailed planning. We have two stages: deployment and execution.

As a rule of thumb, campaign managers go through a checklist before firing each campaign:

1. Check segment or contact lists to ensure the campaign will be delivered to right people
2. Make sure conditions and actions in the campaign tree are logical and meet the end goal
3. Check to see if all contacts have been imported to the right segment, mapped to the right record fields, and applied to the target campaign
4. Schedule the campaign at the right hour and in the right time zone
5. Test emails with different email clients to ensure proper rendering in different inbox providers
6. Check email type: For your contacts to only receive email once, set email type to marketing. otherwise if you want your contacts to receive the same email multiple times, set email type to transactional.
7. If your campaign involves a sequence of emails, check to make sure the right email is attached to the right workflow
8. Be sure to remember generating plain text version emails before firing the campaign
9. Check the sending and reply-to email addresses for the campaign
10. Check to make sure the reply-to email in global settings is consistent with the email set in the campaign
11. We recommend re-launch the campaign and troubleshoot manually in case it failed to fire.

Rules in Mautic

Like many software, Mautic has a set of rules for marketers. They are campaign enabling tools that achieves precision in contact management. For instance, Mautic has an option to select the number of times a contact should be contacted. Frequency rules can be set globally on both emails and SMS. Depending on what rules you want to apply, setting the rules globally will override the general settings.

Managing contact preference

Mautic lets you enable/disable contact frequency and channels in the preference center. You can also set one of the channels as preferred channel.

The preference centers gives contacts the option to opt-in or out of receiving communication from one or more channels. Global categories helps us organize contacts based on their preferred channels of communication. These categories can be applied to emails, SMS, and campaigns. You can add/remove contacts based on their subscription preferences in each category.

Segments shares a similar function as categories. You can manually add/remove contacts in the segment for one-off emails. You can also import one or more contact lists into a segment to send campaign emails. If a user has opted out of a segment, they will no longer receive campaign actions and communications sent to that segment. Segment can be a source of one or more campaigns and emails.

Handle unsubscribed contacts

To handle unsubscribe request, first we should make sure they stop receiving more emails or other campaign actions. The best way is go to the contact records and set ‘Do-Not-Contact’ to that user. This is a clean way to respect our users and take care of their contact preferences.

We can create an unsubscribe page in the preference center, so users can opt-out of one or more segments/ categories. If we leave the unsubscribe settings as no preferences shown, Mautic will display a default unsubscribe/re-subscribe message to the users.