How To Run Multiple Instances Of Mautic For Marketing Automation Needs

Introduction

Mautic is the world's largest free, open-source marketing software that automates marketing tasks like segmentation, lead scoring, campaigns & journey builders, and contact list management. It supports integration with all popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and has integrations to connect with other marketing automation tools.

Mautic provides businesses with complete control over marketing activities. Mautic can also be configured and set up to allow businesses to run multiple Mautic instances for internal usage or customers. This is achieved through a multi-client architectural approach.

Read more about this multi-client Mautic architectural approach and how to set it up.

What Is Multi-Client Mautic Setup

Multi-client Mautic setup allows multiple clients to access and use the same software, data, and resources simultaneously. It offers several benefits for marketers, including ease of:

• Managing multiple campaigns
• Segmenting customers
• Launching highly personalized campaigns for brands, business units, teams, and franchises

Mautic also provides deeper insights into customer behavior to improve scalability by integrating existing marketing and sales tools. It offers additional flexibility for customizing campaigns, personalizing customer support, and tailoring reporting capabilities.

What Makes Multi-Client Mautic Setup Great

Multi-tenant and multi-client marketing automation platforms like Mautic benefit businesses that manage marketing efforts for multiple clients or brands, including marketing agencies, retailers, and e-commerce businesses. These platforms allow businesses to manage all clients or brands from a single dashboard.

It streamlines processes, saves time, and boosts productivity. Additionally, these platforms provide businesses with the tools required to create customized campaigns. Investing in a multi-tenant or multi-client marketing automation platform like Mautic can be a game-changer for businesses looking to take their marketing efforts to the next level.

Limitations Of Complete Multi-Tenant Mautic Setup

Though Mautic is a powerful customer marketing automation solution that offers multi-tenant setup capabilities, it is not recommended for setting up a standard multi-tenant architecture.

Adding multiple clients to one instance of Mautic can have several potential drawbacks.

• It increases the risk of data breaches, as only one user's credentials and access settings exist.
• Personalizing campaigns for every client can be challenging as there might be issues with tracking which campaigns and customer segments belong to which client.
• Combining multiple clients into one instance can lead to decreased performance and scalability as the instance will deal with more significant amounts of data than anticipated.

This is why it is recommended to set up separate instances for all clients to achieve maximum security, personalization, and scalability.

Acquia Campaign Factory For Multi-Client & Multi-Instance Setup

Acquia Campaign Factory is a fully multi-tenant solution for distributed marketing teams. It makes it easier to create and deploy campaign templates across multiple instances. To further strengthen Acquia’s previous marketing and campaign management solution Maestro, they acquired Mautic, Inc in 2019.

This was later branded into two solutions, including Acquia Campaign Studio and Acquia Campaign Factory. Acquia Campaign Factory is designed to have separate campaign management instances for each business unit or brand.

Acquia Campaign Factory is a fully multi-tenant solution for distributed marketing teams. The platform makes creating and deploying campaign templates easier across multiple instances.

It has powerful features to administer programs and campaign performance centrally. Acquia Campaign Factory allows businesses to set up new instances for clients or units in minutes.

A Short Tale

Immediately after the 2019 Mautic acquisition, Axelerant engineered Mautic plugins for Campaign Studio and Campaign Factory. This was done to help Acquia migrate from Marketo to Mautic. Read more to find out about the plugins created.

Scalable & Highly Available Multi-Client & Multi-Instance Custom Mautic Setup With Kubernetes

Custom marketing automation solutions can offer a set of advantages over existing SaaS platforms, such as:

• Greater flexibility for customizing campaigns
• Personalizing customer support
• Deeper insights into customer behavior
• Improved scalability
• Potential cost savings
  

There are also certain scenarios where a custom solution might be better.

Scenario 1: Marketing Automation For An Ecommerce SaaS Platform

Recently, Axelerant had an opportunity to work with an organization building an ecommerce SaaS platform for small businesses. One of the critical requirements of the project was to provide marketing automation capabilities to multiple customers. 

The experts at Axelerant began by comparing various open-source marketing automation platforms like ListMonk, SendPortal.io, Mailtrain, and Mautic. Apart from evaluating on the basis of the features provided, the ease of multi-client capabilities was a primary consideration.

Mautic was quickly evaluated as the winner among several open-source platforms as it is powerful enough to handle and scale the client's business. But, Mautic out-of-the-box was a bit much for the end customers.

As a solution, the interface was customized, including 'hiding' some features to keep the UI simple. Ready-to-use campaign templates and transactional emails for orders and shipping were included.

Deep integration with the SaaS ecommerce platform was also set to run hyper-personalized abandoned carts, wishlist notifications, and post-sale product review marketing campaigns. The end clients could also customize, configure, and manage individual instances from a centralized ecommerce dashboard.

Scenario 2: Marketing Automation For 200+ Public Libraries

At the time of writing this blog, the experts at Axelerant were also ideating an extensive marketing automation project for around 220 public libraries in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The project included building and migrating the existing marketing automation platform to a Mautic-based scalable multi-client platform.

The client wanted a separate Mautic instance to send more than 30 million monthly emails across ~16 million contacts. There was also a requirement to comply with GDPR, PIPEDA, ADA, and other local data protection laws according to the location of the libraries. A few other requirements were:

• Single Sign On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory
• Mautic instance to be pre-configured with email templates and campaign workflows to give a head start to libraries
• White-labeled and branded Mautic instance for each library
• Centralized admin dashboard to manage onboarding, offboarding, and custom reports at libraries

Usually, the Mautic setup has an application tier where Mautic and Nginx run together on a set of servers front-ended by a load balancer, MySQL database, and a messaging queue. A set of cron jobs are configured along with the application on the app tier servers.

The following approach was recommended to make the Mautic application Enterprise-ready, highly available, and scalable.

• Dockerize the application in line with the twelve-factor app methodology
• Deploy the application with helm, which is a package manager for Kubernetes
• Set up CI/CD pipeline using GitlabCi to create an environment per branch

The web and application tiers should be decoupled with containerization best practices. Nginx and Mautic run on respective containers and share a standard volume containing the application code. A few other considerations are:

• Database: The database for each Mautic instance can either be a local MySQL service (running as Pods on Kubernetes) or a managed database service like RDS or Azure SQL. The Mautic helm chart can be configured to support both. 

• Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD): Containerization will make the application cloud-native. An efficient CI/CD pipeline that supports multi-dev deployments makes deploying applications and testing in multiple environments with varied configurations easy.

• Emails: Solutions like Mailjet provide an easy-to-use interface for designing and sending campaigns, newsletters, and automated emails. Mailjet also offers custom enterprise plans for sending emails. It supports MJML, which is an open-source response email framework. Other options include Brick Builder.

Email delivery is one of the most common bottlenecks of a digital marketing platform. Decoupling email delivery by introducing a highly efficient email relay (like postfix) running as a sidecar is recommended. Postfix will help efficiently set up and manage active or deferred queues to achieve high throughputs.

Following is a high-level overview of the architecture of this setup.

Learn more about containerizing and orchestrating Mautic on Kubernetes here.

Conclusion

Depending on the marketing automation requirement, opting for a SaaS solution like Acquia Campaign Factory or building custom software can be a good idea. For marketers looking for quick implementation, purchasing a SaaS platform may be the best choice. But a custom solution may be the better option if an integrated, tailored solution with marketing and sales tools is needed.

Still unsure if you should buy a SaaS solution like Acquia Campaign Factory, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Pardot or build a custom solution?

Reach out to Axelerant's expert DXP consultants to know more.