The client

Inagro provides science-based practical research and transfers knowledge to stakeholders in the agricultural sector. They are mainly active in arable farming, and vegetable growing, but organic farming, animal husbandry, aquaculture, and insect farming are also part of their field of action.

Background

Inagro provides information to farmers and interested parties in a variety of ways. One of the most efficient channels is email. Through a fully personalized newsletter, they provide weekly updates to their target audience.

The newsletter in short:

• 1 newsletter each week
• 400 articles per year
• +7,000 recipients  

Aims

Inagro used to send out their newsletter through a completely self-built system. When looking for a new setup, they wanted a marketing platform that offered more extensive capabilities. Integrations with, for example, Microsoft Dynamics for synchronizing contacts and the CMS for retrieving personalized content also needed to be easily possible. In the custom solution, this all came at a cost and with limitations. 

Outcomes

We came up with an extension to Mautic: a powerful combination of customization combined with the flexibility of open source. There was no need for an email editor; that comes out of the box with Mautic. In addition, Inagro now gets a clear report in Mautic with interesting insights such as: how many mails bounce, the time when the mails are opened ... This way Inagro provides its members even better with the right information.

Why Mautic?

Mautic and Inagro, a perfect match

Dropsolid wants maximum flexibility for data and tools for all its customers. This is also why we prefer to choose open-source solutions.

Why we chose open source?

For 5 good reasons. 

Together with Inagro, we chose the combination of an open-source platform for marketing automation (Mautic) and an open-source platform for content management (Drupal).

1. Endless flexibility
   Plugins are easy to write or modify.
    
2. Supporting innovation
   Open standards and fewer bugs.
    
3. Scalability
   The previous system was custom-built. Plugging in new components, scaling, and other changes had an additional cost. The current solution scales in the cloud, with an ecosystem of plugins. There is no additional cost with this, unless we want it customized.
    
4. No vendor lock-in
   Your entire data remains yours, and you export it whenever you want.
    
5. Optimal security
   Mautic is very active in security. There is even a dedicated security team. 

Why not just Drupal, but also Mautic? 

We could also rebuild the entire system in Drupal, or choose to interface with a closed sourced, and therefore less flexible, marketing automation tool. To ensure long-term success, we deliberately choose to implement Drupal with Mautic. And there are a lot of good reasons for that. Six to be exact:

1. Easy connection
   Easily interfaces with Drupal and other open data.
    
2. Visual email builder
   Handy for staff members who need to set up emails.
    
3. Comprehensive reporting
   You get a mass of information about the emails you send.
    
4. Detailed information
   Mautic automatically generates graphs about your sent campaigns such as emails read, failed messages...
    
5. Graphical campaign builder
   Through a tree structure system, you can build your campaigns very clearly.
    
6. Easy contact management
   Mautic contacts sync with the Dynamics CRM via an out-of-the-box Dynamics plugin.

Specific features of the newsletter

1. Agenda section: Gepersonalized on your interests 
2. Personalized news section: News completely tailored to your profile
3. Generic news section: Generic news, relevant for all users

The real magic?

Inagro's content editors don't do any manual work on newsletters at all. They create content in the CMS and the newsletter is automatically generated for each unique user.

The tech behind the scenes

1. API
   Through the Mautic API, we created the link between Drupal and Mautic.
    
2. Sending emails
   All campaigns have a start and end date. The Mautic Cron job is triggered and starts sending out the newsletter automatically.
    
3. Personalized content
   The moment an email is created for a specific person, the personalized content for this user is retrieved from the CMS API with the contact's preferences as parameters. This way, each email is uniquely tailored to your preferences.
    
4. User + contact
   Every Drupal user has a linked Mautic contact.
    
5. Campaigns
   Drupal automatically generates campaigns in Mautic for each newsletter.
    
6. Taxonomy tree
   The taxonomy tree stores all the categories that users are interested in. Through the CMS, the editor easily creates, rearranges and deletes them. Everything syncs automatically with Mautic.
    
7. Mautic preferences
   A Drupal user has a taxonomy reference field to store preferences. This is synched with the contact preferences in Mautic.

The final result?

A fully autonomous personalized email system with Drupal and Mautic, where content editors lose no time setting up all the unique emails. With full automation, each user receives a hyper-personalized weekly newsletter relevant to their profile.