Customer:

Acquia

Industry:
High Tech

Services: 
Mautic Plugin Development | Marketing Automation

Technologies:
Mautic

Tools:
Campaign Studio | Campaign Factory

Platform:
Acquia Marketing Cloud

Developing Campaign Studio (Mautic) Plugins

Acquia acquired Mautic (rebranded in Acquia as Campaign Studio), an Open Source marketing automation platform, in May 2019. After the acquisition, Acquia wanted to move off Marketo and migrate to Mautic for their Marketing Automation needs. The community version of Mautic didn't have enough ready-to-use plugins that would satisfy the needs of Acquia's Marketing team. The Axelerant team helped the Acquia Marketing team by understanding their needs and developing Mautic (Campaign Studio) plugins to extend functionality.

 

Further, Acquia wanted to commercialize the framework to offer it to its customers as part of its Marketing Cloud offering. The plugins that Axelerant engineered became part of Acquia Campaign Studio’s offering. These plugins helped Campaign Studio to be ready for mass adoption by its diverse customer base.

Axelerant and Acquia have a strong partnership built on many years of trust and engineering excellence—which is why to help with this plugin engineering, Acquia turned to our team for help.

About The Customer

Acquia is an Open Source digital experience company. They provide the world's most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation. Acquia’s Marketing Cloud offering includes several products such as Campaign Studio, Campaign Factory, Digital Asset Management, Personalization, and others, enabling users to deliver personalized content experiences across various channels. Acquia’s suite of Drupal Cloud products, including its Cloud Platform, Site Factory, Site Studio, among others, allows developers to rapidly build, launch, and run Drupal sites at scale.

$201M

revenue

30+

Brands

1000+

Investors

 

 

Business Challenge

Acquia was looking to offer Campaign Studio as a holistic marketing automation platform to its customers. Instead of forcing users to adopt multiple disparate apps to extend Campaign Studio’s functionality with plugins, Acquia wanted to create integrations that would allow Campaign Studio to work with other industry leading tools, allowing users to optimize their marketing efforts as well as costs.

 

 

Solution

Our team was brought in to collaborate jointly with Acquia's marketing and engineering teams to develop the plugins needed to extend Campaign Studio’s capabilities, leveraging on API first approach to connect with few other top legacy customer data systems like BrightTALK, Drift, Insideview, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ringlead, Zoho, etc. With these plugins, Axelerant is facilitating an integration and flow of key customer data into a central repository within Campaign Studio (Mautic) and the cleaning up and elimination of data redundancies, creating room for extra intel and personalized marketing.

Axelerant’s engineering team worked alongside Acquia’s to help expand Campaign Studio’s capabilities, beginning with a joint discovery phase.

Members of the engineering teams invested time educating themselves about marketing trends in order to understand context and business use-cases. This learning curve improved as they spent more time with Acquia's marketing team to understand the marketing technology landscape. User acceptance testing (UAT) cycles were extremely useful in providing engineers with valuable feedback and helping them identify additional requirements.

 

The project delivery spanned two phases.

Phase 1: Personalized Touchpoints in the Buyer Journey

[March-May 2020]

 

Marketing collateral like webinars, blogs, case studies, and customized chatbots are featured on Acquia's media channels, where their customer base can interact. By monitoring consumer behavior, which blogs or webcasts they enjoyed, where they're at in their buying process, the marketing team will better understand their mindset. Mautic can enable Acquia’s customers to build a rich and functional database for running campaigns based on the information provided and each contact's behavior individually and personally.

 

Personalized Drift Chatbot

Chatbots are reshaping the online experience based on existing conversational data, and real-time interaction with the audience is valuable for business. Consumers’ most common questions can be incorporated into a chatbot like Drift, allowing them quick access to answers.

 


Axelerant and Acquia worked together to facilitate the smooth flow of data between Drift and Campaign Studio. This would enable the customers using Site Studio to control the buyer’s journey while delivering the desired outcomes. Information such as the user's full name, email address, designation, etc., was captured in the chatbot and stored in Campaign Studio's contact segment, so that later phases of the buyer's journey could be personalized. Based on the interactions of the buyer, the lead score was updated as well.

 

BrightTALK

BrightTALK is used for lead generation and management. A lead score is calculated based on the engagement of the leads with the website interface, such as participating in webcasts, interacting with the hosts, reaching out via comments, continual participation in events, etc. The lead score is updated based on these interactions.

The Axelerant engineering team developed a plugin that collects users' behavior with the various webcast hosts on the BrightTALK. This information is stored in Campaign Studio. The BrightTALK plugin will let the user configure the specific webinar as part of the action to which the user will be registered on BrightTALK.

 

 

Infrastructure-Automation

Automated marketing operations

Extending Site Studio with plugins paved the way for Acquia Campaign Studio. With the ability to produce more dynamic and creative content across all channels, organizations gain all the tools needed to build stronger relationships with their target audiences. The reporting tools give valuable insights to marketing teams about their potential customers and maximize their efforts to gain their business.

 

Drill-Deeper

Frictionless, personalized customer journeys

With personalized chatbots and buyer journeys, Acquia implemented personalization software optimized for frontend so that it was inherent with their offerings. With one-click functionality, these low-code applications let anyone personalize marketing content. This allows marketers to learn from customers, gaining the insight they need to create a sequence of personalized touchpoints.

 

Product-Architecture

Integration-friendly architecture

Enhancing the architecture was easy since it supported REST and SOAP APIs. Despite the unavailability of complete documentation, collaborating with the Acquia team, Axelerant’s engineering team built the platform such that it can be extended easily. The Axelerant team also documented the new features.

 

Phase 2: Optimizing Lead Management Mechanism

[July 2020-Present]


In phase 2 of the project, Axelerant and Acquia worked to strengthen the platform's marketing capabilities by building the necessary integrations.

 

InsideView

InsideView is a database that maintains highly accurate information about contacts and companies.  They consistently revise their database for accuracy across critical data fields. These details come in handy for marketers while finding and curating a list with the right people as target accounts.

Acquia wanted to ensure that new leads would be pushed to InsideView so that the blank contact fields could be mapped and filled in Site Studio using an email match.

Using the Enrich API, Axelerant’ engineers created a provision for the enrichment of old contacts and cleanups for campaigns so that the data was always accurate. For example, when the customer got a new lead on their website, they would get an email address. InsideView will retrieve information based on this email address and store it in Site Studio, and other apps can use this information too.

 

Facebook Lead Generation (via Lead Ads)

Campaigns carried out by organizations are deemed successful when there is increased lead generation, increased conversion rates, a more significant sales pipeline, etc. Social media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn play a substantial role in influencing buyers, and more businesses have started running campaigns on these channels since the pandemic hit.

For customers who want to boost sales, retrieving lead information from Facebook forms after their submission helps get access to new lead audiences on Facebook. Acquia was looking to enable triggers, tags, and form actions in Site Studio when a lead fills the contact/campaign form on Facebook, and this flow of customer information from Facebook to Site Studio needed to be automated.

Axelerant developed this integration, and testing was done in parallel with the development of the tool.

 

Facebook Audience Segmentation

When there are multiple channels, organizing leads can be a complicated task. Filtering leads based on their buyer journey phase and relevance is vital to ensure conversion.

This integration was needed to import static lists from Campaign Studio into Facebook Ad campaigns directly to sync up marketing and Facebook audiences. Revising these lists was also necessary since customers would want to keep their most important audiences constantly updated.

The Axelerant team developed the integration to meet this need. Because of this plugin, customers would be able to run the campaigns and gather insights on the results, also known as audience segmentation and targeted marketing.

One example of this would be running a 15-day campaign for media channels, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The user sets for both channels were different, i.e., audience segmentation was done based on the channel. All this data is aggregated into Campaign Studio. One can now consolidate these segments of audience data and run far better campaigns based on user interest details gathered from these sources.

Similar to the Facebook lead generation and audience segmentation plugins, the engineering team is currently also working on LinkedIn plugins.

 

 

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