In this article, I want to show you how to have an email marketing platform, build your contact list, and send many emails without spending a fortune and without limits, using the open source platform called mautic.
Email marketing is essential in all areas of the Internet. If you intend to work with the internet, you will need to build a contact list and send email to these people, but unfortunately these services are expensive.
There are free services like MailChimp, but the limit is very low. Most of the famous email marketing platforms tend to charge dearly for a limited number of contacts or for outgoing emails.
The most absurd thing is to limit the number of contacts in a list. If you want to maintain a list with 100,000 people you will pay fortunes monthly. Fortunately mautic's open source is there to help you.
What is Mautic? What does it offer?
Mautic is an open source in PHP (a CMS, script, site) that you install on your server and have full control over the tool that works with lists, segmentations, landing pages, forms, and everything that an email marketing platform offers.
Mautic offers numerous features using plugins, in addition to natively providing social monitoring, triggers, assets, landing pages, downloads, scoring system, and an amazing campaign system to automate your leads.
Working with Mautic can be a bit complicated and requires training and patience. It also needs a good cloud server like Digital Ocean. Additionally, knowledge of website hosting is necessary to troubleshoot potential issues.
What do you need besides mautic?
One of the biggest problems with having an email tool on your own server is that outgoing emails can fall into your contacts' spam or junk folder. Fortunately this can be easily worked around using an external email server.
Exactly, mautic allows you to use external SMTP servers and APIs to send emails. Thus, the person responsible for the email may be a large company and recognized by Google, making your email not be considered Spam.
I use a free service called Sparkpost and it offers me up to 100,000 free emails per month. Unfortunately, the free plan for new registrations dropped from 100,000 to 10,000 monthly emails.
Sparkpost is a reliable email service and is used by paypal, twitter, oracle, pinterest, hubspot, the new work times and others. Another popular and cheaper alternative is Amazon AWS, but I never got to test it.
How do I use mautic?
Unfortunately I don't like using campaigns, because it requires CRON services and I haven't had good experiences, no matter how much I have enabled these cronjob. Then I make a registration form and confirm with another registration form sent by email.
I think this is even better, because the e-mail reaches the person immediately without relying on cronjob, not to mention that if the person is too lazy to write his e-mail the second time, which guarantees that he will read your e- mails?
I do 2 segmentations for each site, an initial that refers to the first form (initiated) and another that refers to the second (confirmed). So I send e-mail even to people who have not confirmed their registration.
On the downloads page after the second confirmation, I offer several ebooks and bonuses for those registered on my list. It is always good to offer as much content as possible to your readers.
I've been using mautic for years and never spent a penny on email marketing. If you want to save as much as possible and do not want to pay abusive monthly fees, we recommend you to use the mautic tool that is unlimited.
One of the advantages of mautic is that it is entirely in Portuguese. Below we will leave a super cheap course from Udemy that can teach you everything you need to install mautic on your server: