Mautic Trials Working Group

A regular meeting of the working group building the Mautic trials infrastructure and marketing.

Attendees:

• Ruth Cheesley
• Mike Van Hemelrijck
• Dominique de Cooman
• Milou de Hoon
• Mattias Michaux

Notes:

What went well with the soft-launch?

• An issue was found creating the sample data, fixed before launch. Also a bug with showing the error message.
• Round-robin server capacity was set up and is ready
• Button is live, and menu restructured
• We had 6 trial signups organically already without any public marketing
• Campaign is running and working smoothly so far

What didn't go so well?

•  Stability of the trials infrastructure? There were some errors with the infrastructure spinning up the trials.
• Can we get an assessment of what the issues were / what the resolutions were?
• Preparation of the marketing / comms in the community was not ready
• Separate product/community focused accounts were not yet launched (went live yesterday on Twitter/Mastodon)
• Community needs to setup drip campaign on social media to follow up the trials

Questions:

• There were some questions in the marketing team meeting about why we're focusing on community - the word is a bit confusing because we're not really focusing on the benefits / what the motiviations are 
• We will see how it evolves and solicit feedback from the people who are using it
• Perhaps we need to think more about it - for example discussing why we think we should use the term community v alternatives.
• The website needs to be built more focused on the Product side because right now it's too focused on the Community side. This is a problem because it's hard for us to make changes and update it, and we need to be able to build pages much more easily. It's a separate discussion that we can take up outside this discussion.

Feedback from Dominique:

• Was relatively easy to set up and get the form set up
• When he saw the data coming in about who was visiting the site he felt empowered and ready to buy - even though he didn't know what to do with it. Just set up a newsletter subscription campaign but the data was the important thing, ownership of that data.
• We need to make no assumption at all about the user. We need to make videos to help them every step of the way and point them towards the docs/KB
• Wasn't able to figure out how to theme the form within the website styling - so there's some small gaps missing in the steps/knowledge.
• When the trial was over, the form embed shows the landing page which all instances are directed to. This should have a prominent button.
• The payment process should be smooth so that your trial just continues to work and then you could add a domain? How do we guide people when they do continue to pay so that it's a smooth a process as possible?
• Technically speaking, can we just redirect the trial URL over to the Dropsolid one?

Next steps:

• We need to get the tour tested and deployed to the trials - but this will be secondary to the marketing to launch the trials
• We need to start reaching out to them at day 6/7 to get feedback from them (Dropsolid to follow up on this)
• Launch trials with promo campaign
• Consider how we can better provide product highlights/features on the website working with what we've got right now.

ACTIONS:

   > Mattias will look at page builder in Drupal so its easier to build pages

   > Mike. Create step by step video's in detail

   > Mattias guarantee stability of the infrastructure to scale >> load test will be performed to the trial infra that has been made redundant

   > Identify and report on the resolution for the issues that arose with trials having errors so that there's confidence for a public launch.    

Decisions:

   > We build pages for product on the existing Drupal site

   > We keep one site Mautic.org, one brand, a story for product and community

   > We come to a balance between product and community on the site

   > We keep "Grow your community" as it positions us as for organisations against Hubspot "grow your business" for now, but we will think more because we also want appeal to businesses. And we want to be clear we sell marketing automation for organisations.

   > We keep sending mails after trial that you can activate and you can continue, you must be able to continue