During the Mauticon and on other meetings I multiple times expressed my disbelieve about campaign blueprints in Mautic. This would be a feature where you can pull in ready campaigns into your Mautic instance.
A nurture campaign / double optin / double optout / lead magnet / birthday campaign etc.
My argument was always, that if you can’t build the campaign, you can’t troubleshoot it either. There are so many moving parts, that propaby it’s easier to make a video…
But if ever anyone would make a campaign library, what type of campaign would you (or maybe your clients) like to see there?
Thx in advance.
Joey
I’m not sure if I understood correct but I think blueprints are like templates for new campaigns?
We are currently working on that. We call it a campaign wizard. It works with the mautic api.
The basic idea is that you could read campaigns / forms / assets … etc from a kind of “template” mautic (just a mautic which you like to read campaigns from or forms or assets or anything ) and save it as a single “marketing campaign” package.
The package could be everything: a single form, a campaign, a form with campaign and custom fields … etc.
During the package building we build a dependency map of the different assets and try to fetch them as well (like: you find a campaign which got a form as source, we will get the form as well)
You could then replay this package in other mautics. Before you replay it, you can configure your campaign (set other urls, names … etc).
When we replay the different assets into mautic we take care of the different relations and id’s and replace them with the new id’s.
Our first campaigns are some kind of feedback and survey campaigns. I would also see whitepaper campaigns.
Right now I have a solution where a campaign crafted by me will create the whole package and can be installed with all dependencies. I have a double optin campaign, which creates a custom field, subscription form, confirmation email, confirmation page and the whole campaign.
The other option is that the marketer can specify the id of each element (page, email, form, custom field) and the campaign will be created based on that.
My only worry is: will people actually understand how to troubleshoot and use these campaigns?
J
My biggest
Your solution seems lot better - will you open source this? Will it be in core or plugin?
Well we have not really think about it. I‘m now in the debugging and testing phase which needs some time to test every variant / setting.
Like dumping campaigns into packages and check for problems and do it again …
At the Moment it is more like an external tool. Maybe with a mautic plugin using this as an external service and sending the api credentials to the service to initiate the import via the api.
But it could be also just a cli tool in the beginning.
The vision is to have a campaign marketplace with marketing campaigns to use. Like you download a theme.
Regarding your worries:
Every campaign must be well documented and explained for the people to use I think.
The documentation and the marketing strategie behind it would be the key i think
We are also working on a similar tool external to Mautic allowing to control N instances of Mautic at the same time, from a single interface.
The idea is to have easy to use interfaces with a logical order for a user not familiar with marketing automation workflows.
The goal is to be able to easily deploy campaigns on several dozen instances. What changes from one instance to another is the configuration of the campaign (copyright in the footer changes, logo in the landing page changes).
Eventually we could imagine a plugin in Mautic directly that would do the same thing in the form of a tutorial to start learning Mautic. Something that is a bit hard to do today, given the many possibilities offered by the software.
Sounds amazing! I think Joey working on similar topics with his plugin.
Joey made a video about his plugin:
Regarding our development work:
Our vision is to have a campaign marketplace with marketing campaigns to use. Like you download a theme, you can download a campaign.
The idea is to have easy to use interfaces with a logical order for a user not familiar with marketing automation workflows.
My huge fear is to give marketers a tool, that creates a bunch of campaigns and amplifies their mistakes turning a small problem into a huge disaster. If someone can’t build the campaign in Mautic, they also won’t be able to troubleshoot it.
But I also understand the need to make the first steps easier, thatswhy maybe small campaign blueprint library could be beneficial.
In my workflow you’d be able to select elements of the campaign or have it created for you
(This is the WIP UI for double optin campaign with form, email, landing, custom fields):
I’m not sure what other campaigns will be needed for start, this is why I started this thread. A lead magnet? A simple nurture campaign? Maybe it’s easier to explain those in a video?
Eventually we could imagine a plugin in Mautic directly that would do the same thing in the form of a tutorial to start learning Mautic. Something that is a bit hard to do today, given the many possibilities offered by the software.
I saw the plugin and the video.
If I understand correctly it is a set of tutorials, it is a good idea.
I would like to see a simplified interface for beginners to set up simple campaigns such as autoresponders or newsletters.
At this stage I think Mautic is still too little used for a theme and marketing campaign marketplace to find its use and some profitability (to cover development, maintenance and moderation costs).
Who would fund this project?
I understand your fear.
If you make a parallel with Wordpress, many people don’t make good use of it (in the sense that their site never comes online and they are blocked). I think it’s up to the Mautic community to help beginners get started.
The case of the centralized interface allowing to manage N Mautic is of course to be put in the hands of specialists. This is only intended for the mass deployment of campaigns. You need to think about marketing before you do it.
The beginners of today will become the seasoned marketers of tomorrow.
For testing purposes I just created a campaign that updates a contacts custom field (“salutation”) based on if the contact entered first or last name (otpional fields) in a newsletter form.
I wanted to test, if I can use dynamic fields in this salutation field to create a custom salutation based on the following conditions:
First Name & Last Name filled: “Hello [First Name] [Last Name],”
Only First Name filled: “Hello [First Name],”
Only Last Name filled: “Hello,”
Neither Name filled: “Hello,”
This way I can ensure the empty space between [First Name] and [Last Name] is not an issue anymore.
I will probably (if there is interest) do a writeup in the Knowledgebase (esp. in German) because the German “Guten Tag” as a salutation made this happen, as a client I work for had this need.
I was positively flabbergasted that I can use “Hello {contactfield=firstname},” in the “Update Contact” action in the campaign builder in said custom salutation field. This enables quite a few interesting things. Thanks Mautic for that. Made my day.
