Katie Staveley, VP of Marketing at Mautic, discusses the Mautic Open Marketing Cloud marketing automation solution in this installment of the Martech Minute.
Q: Hi Katie, tell me a little bit about Mautic, you have been around for a couple of years and I believe you started off in an open-source model. Can you tell me a little bit about how the company has evolved over the last couple of years?
Katie Staveley: Sure. So the product itself, Mautic, the marketing automation platform was developed about four years ago by our founder David Hurley. David saw a need in the market, saw that the existing vendors – there were many of them out there, but they weren’t really keeping up with modern marketing needs. He had been a big open source community participant in other ways before and decided to build a product and work with open source to bring it to market. So he built the product originally about four years ago, started the open source community, and got to the point where the product was essentially ready for primetime. Then he decided to complement that open source community with a commercial business. So when you look for Mautic, you’ll see Mautic.org which is that original community and then Mautic.com which is our commercial business where we offer hosted Mautic for our customers.
Q: Right, do you have a lot of crossover in between those two communities where somebody starts on Mautic.org, the open source version, and then moves to the commercial version?
Katie Staveley: Absolutely yeah, we definitely do.
Q: So who do you guys consider your target market are you B2B? B2C? A combination?
Katie Staveley: The primary market we’re oriented around is mid- to large-size enterprises, and because Mautic offers a number of different features like multi-channel communications, ABM, and dynamic content, we really see it as being a viable solution for both B2B and B2C organizations. And that’s proving true, so we’re finding that we’re gaining customers in both of those areas.
Q: Are your customers implementing marketing automation for the first time, or do you see a lot of folks switching over from legacy systems?
Katie Staveley: It’s a good question – we see a mix actually. So we see three categories of organizations. Some organizations are total green field; they’ve never used marketing automation before, or maybe somebody on their team has used it at some other company before, but the organizations themselves haven’t been using it.
We see another group where they’ve used the Marketo’s and the Pardot’s and the Eloqua’s of the world and they’re really looking for something that’s more modern, more flexible, easier to use. And that’s where we are being pulled in as an option for them in that way.
The third category we see which is a little bit overlap on the first one, folks that have been using a combination of smaller tools. So they might have MailChimp plus Unbounce plus HootSuite or something like that, where they’re working with point solutions and trying to get to automating or nurturing that way, but really haven’t had what we would traditionally think of as a marketing automation platform.
Q: So Mautic is trying to bring together all of those different components into one unified platform?
Katie Staveley: That’s right, exactly
Q: Maybe we could drill down to account-based marketing. You mentioned that pretty prominently in your solution. What are you doing specifically for ABM?
Katie Staveley: What we’ve done in the tool itself, really the underlying value of Mautic, is that when you think of marketing automation you think of the email marketing and lead nurturing and things like that. So we are taking that to the next level, automating all of those pieces. But we have additional channels that you can automate: text messages, mobile push notifications, and web notifications, all in the same campaign. And the way that we’re leveraging information to do that is a little bit different – and this is where ABM comes in.
We actually within the tool itself operationalize and separate contacts from companies similar to the way that you would see it in Salesforce.com, where you have contacts and accounts and that relationship between those two. We’ve done the same thing on the marketing side within Mautic, so it makes it easier for you to start to do scoring at a company level, to really tailor dynamic content campaigns based on company information versus just the individual contact.
Q: At the Martech Conference you announced a new product called Maestro, aimed at agencies, can you talk a little bit about that?
Katie Staveley: Absolutely, so Mautic’s first product was marketing automation, and that platform allows you to do everything from lead nurturing, landing pages, forms, ABM, all those things. What we’ve done with Maestro is we built a product that enables enterprises and agencies to manage multiple accounts of marketing automation. So the value that that provides is that it gives them the ability to have a single point of access to multiple accounts.
If you’re an enterprise where you have maybe multiple business units or you might have multiple regions and you want them to have their own sort of database or a place for them to isolate their business unit or their region in a separate account, you can do that. You can have an account for the US region, an account for the EMEA region, and maybe for APAC, keep those three things separate. But you would use Maestro to roll all that information up. So you can do rolled-up reporting, you can copy campaigns across accounts, and you can manage your accounts from that point of view as well. For the agency side it’s similar – you would have those different accounts for different clients for example, where you still have each of those different features available.
But the other thing that we’re doing through Maestro is allowing you to customize the branding of those accounts, so if as an agency you’re offering marketing automation as a solution and you’re using Mautic as the underlying technology to do that, you would be able to customize the look and feel of that account to make it either match your brand or match your customer’s brand, and give it a little bit more unique feeling for your end users.
Q: I noticed also on your website you’ve got a new product called Maven?
Katie Staveley: Yes, what Maven is going to do is start to bring more intelligence into the automation piece. We will be bringing it to beta later on this year into early next year, it will enable organizations to think less about the tedious nature of building campaigns and letting you know the data driving those things. What I mean by that is you’ll be able to start to trigger campaigns that are much more informed by things you already know.
A really simple example would be let’s say you wanted to trigger a campaign where all of the emails were being sent at 8 AM to all of your contacts. Today, in order to do at 8 AM Eastern Time, 8 AM Central Time, 8 AM Pacific Time, those would be three different emails that you would have to trigger. What the intelligence will do is say “I know what region you’re in, I know when it’s 8 o’clock for you, and I’m just going to send it to you in your time zone at the right time.” So that’s a really simple example. As the product grows and as things get more sophisticated, we’ll be doing things where “I know what your preferences are, you prefer email over text, or you prefer text over our mobile push notifications. The automation itself will know which channel to deliver the message to your audience and automatically do that for you without the marketer or the end user having to really think that through.
And then when we take it to the really sophisticated level, we’ll start using anonymized aggregated data to start understanding trends overall, so if there are people or if there’s information that we’re collecting in our data center around conversion benchmarks for particular types of emails, or conversion benchmarks across all of the accounts for Mautic, we’ll start to incorporate the AI component, where we’ll incorporate those learnings and that information to further optimize campaigns in an automated way.
Q: What’s the best way for folks to get a look at the Mautic product?
Katie Staveley: There are a couple of different ways, if you really want to just get your hands dirty and get right into it, we do have a free offering on the site. Go to Mautic.com/pricing, you’ll see information about our professional version and then we do have a free version, so it’s a blank slate, so you could go in and set up an email to see how campaigns work, if you’re a self-learner. Or, if you’d rather somebody walk you through the product, of course we’d be happy to do that. If you just want to explore some of the functionality whether or not you have a need right now, we’d be happy to walk you through the product and show you a little bit more information on it.
Thanks Katie! And thank you for viewing this installment of the Martech Minute. If you would like more information about Mautic’s marketing automation solutions, visit their website at www.mautic.com.
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