Success Stories | Multi-Tenant Mautic to Scale Email Marketing

Optimizing Email Marketing Capabilities For The Clients Of A Marketing Solution Provider

The customer is a group of motivated business leaders and entrepreneurs who offer business strategy, implementation, and solutions to sellers. They have a subsidiary venture, a full-service ecommerce SaaS solution for marketplace sellers. They were looking for a single system to automate marketing for their ecommerce SaaS solution.

After a thorough discovery phase, Axelerant recommended Mautic as the software of choice. These recommendations made a solid foundation for how Mautic can help them achieve the desired results.

We recommended and delivered an MVP that:

Was hosted on a multi-tenancy Mautic environment setup (development and production)
Enabled single sign-on functionality for multi-device sign-in
Offered smooth client onboarding for as many users as the customer would like

We’re now working towards building all the functionalities recommended during our discovery phase.

About the Customer

Led by two business maestros, the customer company is a group of business enthusiasts and experts. It helps entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground to build roadmaps and to iterate until they launch successfully.

A subsidiary venture of theirs is an ecommerce solution for brands that need to start and scale their own ecommerce platforms.

The Challenge

The customer wanted to provide their customers with a tailored email marketing tool that integrates with their custom ecommerce solution and its processes. Together, we needed to create a system that manages ecommerce operations and email marketing in one place.

In addition to this, we needed to:

Achieve high scalability to cater to thousands of users
Provide high performance for customers sending out thousands of emails
Create a quick MVP solution to test the usability of the proposed solution

The Solution

We began with an in-depth discovery spanning across multiple sessions. The outcome was a foundational recommendation list comprised of:

Feature lists
System and technical architecture recommendations
Hosting/infrastructure requirements
Implementation roadmap

As a result, Mautic emerged as the best solution among contenders such as ListMonk, SendPortal.io, Mailtrain, and Acquia Campaign Factory.

We decided to take care of the infrastructure setup as the First Phase of implementation. As a follow-up plan, we will customize each instance in the Second Phase to simplify usage.

Then to achieve the desired outcomes for the MVP we built Mautic based multi-tenant marketing automation.

We also leveraged:

Kubernetes platform for auto-scaling
Argo CI/CD tool
Python API for onboarding customers to the Mautic application

The Result

The customer now has an in-house mass email marketing tool that our customer can use at scale in the future. The tool complements their already existing ecommerce solutions. Additionally, the Mautic installation in multi-tenancy architecture has already reduced the costs of maintenance for our customer’s clients.

Onboarding new clients is accomplished by running a simple script. The Onboarding API seamlessly onboards customers to their platform. It also creates Mautic instances on Kubernetes with the required settings within minutes. This helps them scale, regardless of the number of customers they are required to serve.

Discovery & Recommendations
Mastering Mautic to Work with Kubernetes
PHP to Enable Redis Engine Usage
Launch Script for Client Onboarding
Platform Customization
SSO Implementation for Secure Sign-in

Discovery & Recommendations

The business analysis and tech teams at Axelerant conducted a series of discovery sessions. The aim was to capture the vision of our customer’s team. Then we came up with the best recommendations regarding the following:

Hosting and multi-tenancy setup
Client onboarding and offboarding
Mautic dashboard for clients
UI and UX, Setting up roles and users
RBAC (role-based access control)
Hiding admin panel items
Contacts, Segments, Campaigns
Email templates/ themes, Reporting
API integrations, Single Sign-on
Security upgrade and maintenance

Mastering Mautic to Work with Kubernetes

Mautic + Kubernetes is not a common combination. Neither is Mautic typically used in multi-tenancy setup. We configured some system-level operations to make it compatible with our approach.

Our involvement in the core development of Mautic for public adoption, post its acquisition by Acquia, gave us the edge.

So, we went ahead and made a proof of concept for Kubernetes.

PHP to Enable Redis Engine Usage

We had initially planned to use Redis Session Caching since it is ideal for both cache and session store use cases. It offers both the high availability and the durability required for user session management.

But Mautic Core does not support Redis. So, we used it on a PHP layer and then configured PHP. This helped us use the Redis engine for user session management.

Launch Script for Client Onboarding

We needed a plug-and-play system to onboard new customers and set up the tool for them. The solution was the Onboarding API. We created a launch script to set up a Mautic account for the client along with customizations.

And for faster API development for onboarding customers to the Mautic application and configuring Kubernetes infra for them, we used Python. It provided stability and interoperability with the Kubernetes platform and Mautic.

Platform Customization

As a part of the MVP, we made a few customizations.

Each Mautic instance now has three default roles set. More roles can be added to the default list if required. The default roles are:
- Super Admin
- Client Admin
- Campaign Manager (same permissions as Client Admin)
We created custom email templates with the customer’s design for newsletters.
A default "Subscribe" was made available that will capture:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Email
We activated the default segment for the monthly newsletter subscription.

SSO Implementation for Secure Sign-in

The customer had not been using an in-house SSO server. But being a SaaS for ecommerce businesses, it was important to have a secure authentication method in place.

On recommendation, the customer deployed an SAML-based SSO setup with Mautic per industry standards.

We enabled access to the Mautic admin panel (client level) as per the predefined roles assigned
User accounts can be created through the script in Mautic
Users were able to directly log in to Music through this SaaS Account

It now enables users to securely authenticate through a single set of credentials on multiple applications and websites.

Taking The MVP’s Success Forward

With this custom MVP, the customer’s SaaS solution has witnessed considerable progress in operations. And there is more we’ll be able to achieve together. With a holistic recommendation plan in place, together with our customer, we are now beginning to customize the workflow of their SaaS product.

We’re looking forward to:

More platform customization patches
Additional modifications API integrations
Mautic upgrade for security updates
Client offboarding process
Feature renaming
Client branding

Scaling Email Marketing With Multi-Tenant Mautic For An Ecommerce SaaS Solution