Acquia acquires Mautic

Recently, Acquia has acquired Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. With this acquisition, Acquia is planning on disrupting the market and its closed technology stack competitors in the automation market. Acquia is a leading provider of digital experience solutions based on open source software Drupal. Now, Acquia product offering will be complemented by the newly acquired automation and campaign management platform, further adding more value proposition to the solutions offered by Acquia. This will provide marketers with a seamless experience, from designing and managing websites, to managing and tweaking communication campaigns across different platforms and digital channels. It seems that Acquia is dead set on making the future of marketing open source.

Here at Sooperthemes we're very excited about this move, because we've been interested in Mautic's development from the beginning and are looking forward to a closer Drupal integration.

Marketing automation is an emerging term in the marketing community. It promises solutions to age-old challenges that marketers face in their daily jobs. But what exactly is marketing automation?

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to software that aims to automate repetitive tasks. For example marketing involves a lot of repetitive tasks such as qualifying leads, emailing, social media posting and other editorial actions. Marketing automation helps to reduce the workload and makes it easier to bring those tasks to completion in a fast and efficient way.

Reasons for using marketing automation

Marketers can use automation paired with inbound marketing to increase the amount of qualified leads. Furthermore, it is easier to drive qualified leads through the sales funnel. Qualified leads have a lower churn rate than unqualified ones. Moreover, when it comes to nurturing these leads, it can involve loads of mundane tasks, which takes time and is inefficient. However, by using marketing automation, it frees precious time for the marketer to be able to undertake more strategic tasks.

Comparison of marketing automation software

HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and Mautic are major players in the marketing automation market. In this article, there is going to be presented a comparison between the 4 automation platforms.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a sales and marketing automation platform that is an all-rounder right out of the box. Out of the box, HubSpot is checking all the requirements for the most common tasks. Furthermore, it has unrivaled training, support and content. It also offers an easy to use interface for marketers, which is easy to use for even the most non-tech savvy of employees. A drawback of using HubSpot is that the contract is for at least 12 months, essentially locking up the customers to use the product. Furthermore, the pricing is also based on contacts, which can increase steeply. On top of that it also has some social media limitation when posting or tagging.

Marketo

Marketo is the marketing automation solution from Adobe. It was acquired by Adobe in October 2019. Marketo has a starting price of $895 per month. It is a great mid-range solution for companies which require a robust solution but don’t want to spend more than necessary. As its drawbacks, it has a poor landing page and form builder. On top of that, it has limited reporting and analysis functionality. Furthermore, there are steep increases in prices for just some added features.

Pardot

Pardot is the marketing automation and lead management solution from Salesforce. It has a starting price of $1250 for the most basic package. It allows marketing and sales teams to create and deploy online marketing campaigns in an easy and intuitive way. On top of that, Pardot brings the power to visually test the campaigns that are built, from the perspective of the client. On top of that, with the power of automation and segmentation, Pardot brings the power of smart lead management and generation to the table. Essentially giving the user the capability to nurture a lead based on different triggers that are activated during his customer journey on your website. Drawbacks of the platform include the fact that it lacks the tools for social media management. Furthermore, for A/B testing, user have to get the PRO subscription starting at 2000$ per month that is billed annually.

Mautic

Mautic has recently been acquired by Aqcuia. The goal here is to deliver the first ever open source marketing cloud to the market. Mautic is an open source software with that has self hosting capabilities. What this means is that companies that are using it, will not have to outsource the servers from the software providing company. This gives the users an increased sense of security, since the data will not be stored on different servers other than their own. On top of that, being open source, the code is available for everyone to see. This means that people have the flexibility to contribute and adapt the code to best suit their business or personal needs. On top of that, Mautic has a great degree of integration, making it easy to integrate with different content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, TYPO3, etc.

One drawback that Mautic encounters is the fact that the installation process can be tricky for a person that is not working in the IT department. This coupled with the fact that Mautic does not have the best available documentation to guide the user to the process, can result in a frustrating experience.

Here is a visual comparison of the features provided by each platform:

Features

HubSpot

Marketo

Pardot

Mautic

Starting price

$200/month

$895/month

$1000/month

Free

Lead scoring

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Lead segmentation

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

SMS marketing

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Personalize web content

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Predictive analytics

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Event management

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Sales reports

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Bi-directional CRM syncing

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Create invoices

Yes

No

No

No

Split testing

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Social CRM

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Future-proofing Marketing

Given the fact that the forecast for the marketing automation market is going to grow and reach $32.6 billion by 2024, it’s safe to say that marketing automation is a growing trend. What this means is that more and more companies will start adopting marketing automation means in order to better and more efficiently fulfill daunting marketing task. Now, with the knowledge of the most important players in the field, you have taken the first step towards an automated future.