i’ve been at it trying to use Mautic for the past 3 weeks and it works 20% of the time. I understand this is open source and it’s fairly new. I don’t feel this should even be released as version 1.0. it’s really version 0.1 beta.
Some of the workflow is very counter intuitive. Importing emails into lists is cumbersome with 3 additional steps compared to other email software.
Here’s some background on my system. Im currently using sendgrid as smtp. my limit is over 100,000 emails. Several issues i’ve run into:
When trying to send emails, the stats are not working properly. first time i tried it, i kept seeing # pending with full list number and # sent at 0. So i kept trying to send several times as it kept on saying 0 sent. Guess what? I ended up sending it 10 times to 5,000 on that particular list.
you can imagine with shit hole you guys put me in?
What’s the purpose of campaigns?
Created a campaign and “published” it. thought it would send. Check back 6 hours later and nothing went out. Checked the campaign and shows 0 page views.
what’s the purpose of it if emails are sent out? There’s no where i can send it out. Do I need to create another email to send out? if so that still doesn’t work.
but i had to do some digging to find out that i had to create a cron job to execute it.
We run a web host and offer softaculous which as your software on it. A lot of our clients are small business owners that are not really savvy with technology. I don’t know what market youre trying to hit but assuming that you have it on Softaculous you’re trying to hit a mass market with small to mid size business.
but i’ll give you my honest opinion. I dont know if you keep track of how many installs you get of softaculous but my user experience (i’m tech savvy) I can quantify that the majority of people will abandon your software. It’s one thing to have a steep learning curve which i don’t think your software is hard to learn. It’s another thing to have a learning curve with no tools to help you.
The most basic user experience of any software is a link to documentation. i may be blind in my old age but i don’t see any .links to documentation or to this forum. I had to search for it. how many small biz owners would know how to do that or even take the time to do that?
Well you’re probably wondering why i’m even telling you this or took this long to learn it. i think is a good tool. I also need to learn it because if my clients calling me asking how to use it; which they have. I need to know how to explain it to them. Unfortunately I can’t even tell them to contact you guys because they would end up shooting me.
i’ve been at it trying to use Mautic for the past 3 weeks and it works 20% of the time. I understand this is open source and it’s fairly new. I don’t feel this should even be released as version 1.0. it’s really version 0.1 beta.
Some of the workflow is very counter intuitive. Importing emails into lists is cumbersome with 3 additional steps compared to other email software.
Here’s some background on my system. Im currently using sendgrid as smtp. my limit is over 100,000 emails. Several issues i’ve run into:
When trying to send emails, the stats are not working properly. first time i tried it, i kept seeing # pending with full list number and # sent at 0. So i kept trying to send several times as it kept on saying 0 sent. Guess what? I ended up sending it 10 times to 5,000 on that particular list.
you can imagine with shit hole you guys put me in?
What’s the purpose of campaigns?
Created a campaign and “published” it. thought it would send. Check back 6 hours later and nothing went out. Checked the campaign and shows 0 page views.
what’s the purpose of it if emails are sent out? There’s no where i can send it out. Do I need to create another email to send out? if so that still doesn’t work.
but i had to do some digging to find out that i had to create a cron job to execute it.
We run a web host and offer softaculous which as your software on it. A lot of our clients are small business owners that are not really savvy with technology. I don’t know what market youre trying to hit but assuming that you have it on Softaculous you’re trying to hit a mass market with small to mid size business.
but i’ll give you my honest opinion. I dont know if you keep track of how many installs you get of softaculous but my user experience (i’m tech savvy) I can quantify that the majority of people will abandon your software. It’s one thing to have a steep learning curve which i don’t think your software is hard to learn. It’s another thing to have a learning curve with no tools to help you.
The most basic user experience of any software is a link to documentation. i may be blind in my old age but i don’t see any .links to documentation or to this forum. I had to search for it. how many small biz owners would know how to do that or even take the time to do that?
Well you’re probably wondering why i’m even telling you this or took this long to learn it. i think is a good tool. I also need to learn it because if my clients calling me asking how to use it; which they have. I need to know how to explain it to them. Unfortunately I can’t even tell them to contact you guys because they would end up shooting me.
First off thank you for your very candid post. Mautic has gotten a lot of very positive feedback, so while it does take the wind out of our sails to hear about your frustrations, we understand that not everyone will have a great first experience. We definitely are looking to take the criticism to heart and make the appropriate changes where we can.
I’ll try to address each of your ‘points’ and provide as much help as I can.
Email Sending
Mautic is actually designed to not allow this to happen. Once an email is sent to a lead, that action is recorded, and a lead shouldn’t ever receive a duplicate email. But, if you were sending to a list of 5,000 people its possible that the script actually timed out, and the database action to make sure that duplicates aren’t sent never got hit.
We’re changing this right now - we’re going to set it up so that the database is updated as each email is sent, so no matter what duplicates will never get sent! We understand how frustrating this probably was / is, so thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Purpose of Campaigns:
Campaigns are designed to allow you to set up an automated flow of events for the lead. A use case here might be you acquire a lead through a form, and then send them an email, they click through the email and download a pdf. A campaign will track each of those events and can assign a ‘point value’ to that lead. At the end of the day you should have a curated list of ‘hot leads’ who’ve shown the most engagement in your content or web presence.
Campaigns are really quite powerful and they’re actually one of the cornerstones of marketing automation software. So, I would encourage you to dig into this feature and try to make use of it - hopefully you’ll grow to like it!
The cron job change was one we didn’t really want to have to do, but we realized that it was going to be a necessary evil for large datasets (especially if you have 5,000 leads!). Any software would struggle trying to process that dataset all at once. So we added a cron job because that was the best way to control the resources (CPU and ram) on the server. Our thinking was to make Mautic as accessible as possible, even on lower-cost server spaces without reducing functionality.
Unfortunately, we’ve had to choose between allowing mautic be usable for large datasets, or force users to run on high-dollar hardware.
That said - we’ve got our thinking caps on to try to find a better solution in the middle, and definitely improve the way we notify users about the need for the cron. We realize it’s a bit of a technical block, but we were willing to commit to helping those users when they ran into issues.
Access to documentation
You’re totally right here - we’re going to make our docs far more accessible in terms of links on the mautic.org site. Thanks for this note.
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Hopefully I’ve helped resolve some of your pains here. Mautic is a community built piece of software, we really want to grow this project as a community and have people enjoy working with it, and on it. Thus, we welcome positive criticism to help improve Mautic for everyone.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and addressing these issues. I completely understand that campaigns can be a powerful thing. I created a cron per your documentation to run every hour. I created a campaign at 2PM to announce a short term sale that ends in 24 hours. The campaign didn’t get sent out until midnight that night.
as you can imagine, the short term sale was a bust.
I’m not sure why that would have happened unless something was configured incorrectly on your server. Its possible something with the date time settings are off. A cron run every hour should have started working immediately if you scheduled it for a future time. Did the cron send you any emails that it was running with output? What about the cron log? anything there to help see what time it actually started and explain what went wrong?
The tool has a lot of potential but right now it’s simply not there yet.
After struggling to make things work on self-hosted I even turned to mautic.com in the hopes of getting a stable platform.
Turns out, it doesn’t seem to be. I have a set of 15 lists each with different conditional fields determining which kind of lead should be in it. The first test I made with an opt-in form, and suddenly this one test lead appears in all lists at the same time.
Then I think “hey, maybe I did something wrong”… so I tried removing the conditional field “email is not empty” from one of the lists, figuring that this could be the one field connecting all lists together (it shouldn’t, since there are other conditions that should have been met for each list, but anyway it was a shot in the dark). So I try that, and suddenly this specific list, a list that has as condition the necessity for the lead to have specific tags, has hundreds of IP leads in it. Bear in mind these are IP leads that do not meet all the conditions to be in this list, they do not have the required tags, but anyway they are being added to it.
Support is pretty erratic also. They say it’s dedicated but it’s more like “we’ll answer when we feel like it”. I sent a message 9 hours ago, support was online 2 hours ago and nothing.
But then again, I realized they sell really dedicated support on allyde.com for monthly payments so it makes sense.
@Lourenco Thanks for the constructive criticism. It is very helpful.
Mautic is new, fast-evolving open source software. Every software has bugs. In case of Mautic, developers do their best to catch bugs on every pull request. The process is that at least 2 other core developers has to test the feature or bug fix before merging. There is no testing team which would evolve from Mautic community yet. It would be great if you or anyone else would start it and catch even more bugs before each release because it would save developers some time which they could spent developing other features/bug fixes and it would increase quality (if testers would done it right).
Anyway, if you find a bug, report it with steps to reproduce to https://github.com/mautic/mautic. That way developers can track it, recreate it and fix it.
@escopecz I turned to mautic.com due to believing it to be a more stable platform with proper support (it’s payed, after all). Turns out support seems faster here than there.
I actually would not mind paying for the dedicated support allyde.com offers if it would mean the system will be up and running as soon as possible, but if smart lists with a set of conditional fields configured as “and” do not segment the leads properly, wouldn’t I be paying to report a bug?
All in all it’s very upsetting and I don’t think allyde should be offering a paid version of mautic if it’s not really functioning in one of it’s most basic features.
And if deciding to do so, at least have someone in the chat answering messages promptly. You’re dealing with businesses in a monthly subscription basis… one lost client means years of lost revenue in direct payments and recommendations.
I realize this is not the right arena for this, and I apologize for that, but it only comes to show that if you don’t have the proper support area covered customers will leak to other not so proper ones.
This is not support for mautic.com, so let’s focus on that problem you have with Mautic in general. If we solve it here it will be fixed on Allyde’s service as well. Also, it will make our conversation productive.
Because you didn’t write a steps to recreate the bug, I tested this:
Added 2 leads tag “aa”
Created a list with filter:
2.1 Tags including tag “aa”
2.2 Name like “Dana” (who has only one lead of the two)
Result:
One lead was added to the list, the one with name Dana who has tag “aa”. That is correct result.
I tested it on my local installation of Mautic and with Mautic hosted on mautic.com.
I really don’t want to talk about mautic.com on this forum, but you started the conversation on Sunday. Do you realize most companies are closed on Sunday? They are US based so they are probably eating breakfast right now and they’ll get back to you in few minutes.
I was actually having trouble getting answers since Friday afternoon on other issue, but it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, the support answered and it seems to be a problem with mautic itself, not mautic.com.
The leads were being added to all lists at once because the smart lists with filtering based on tags were not working. Basically all leads were being added despite not having any tags.
The filtering was also based on “list membership” and that was not preventing the problem either.
I’m switching back to filtering smart lists only on lead fields, as this seems to be working.
Anyway I do apologize again for bringing the issue here. It can be really exasperating to have a whole marketing strategy created and built upon a system and have the system fail when you’re about to launch.
I understand your frustration. But seriously, let’s do something about it. If you don’t help us catch that bug, others will experience it as well. I tested tag filter and it worked for me. I’d really like to fix it, but if I cannot recreate the problem, I cannot fix it. All you have to do is to describe steps to recreate the bug as I asked few times already.
On my end, the tag filters worked well, too. And I found them amazing.
My problem is with the campaigns…
For some reason, there are emails triggered, scheduled, but that are never sent.
I created a first test campaigns with 3 emails. The prospect subscribe in a campaign form and get into it (tested). From that first step, I send them to the first email. That was sent correctly. Them, I get another branch from the first step again, to a second email some minutes later (will be 1 day on real life campaign, some minutes to test).
I made the same with a third email…
Both, 2nd and 3rd were TRIGGERED and SCHEDULED correctly, but were never sent.
PS: I didn’t use the “open email”, yes or no aproach because I want the 2nd email 24hs after the 1st, despite the users open or don’t open previous email.
