Howto

Matching part of a string

There are 5 filters you can use for matching part of a string

• starts with
• ends with
• contains
• like
• regexp

The first three filters (starts with, ends with, contains) match strings as you enter it. The ‘like’ filter is for advanced users – you can specify which type you want to use with % character:

• My string% is the same as starts with filter with My string value.
• %My string is the same as ends with filter with My string value.
• %My string% is the same as contains filter with My string value.
• My string is the same as contains filter with My string value.

A few notes for text filters:

• A % character in the middle of the string has no special meaning. When using the ‘contains’ filter with my % string Lead Ninja will search for a string with % in the middle. The same is true for the ‘like’ filter with %my % string% value. There is no need to escape this character.
• Lead Ninja searches for % character in a value for the like filter and no modification is performed if at least 1 % is found.

You can use regular expressions in a regexp filter. Lead Ninja recognises all common operators like | for OR (first string|second string), character sets ([0-9], [a-z0-9] etc.), repetitions (+, *, ?) and more. You have to escape special characters with \ if you want to use them as matching characters.

For more information about Regex: Learn more about regex here!

This article describes how to set up the integration between Salesforce and Lead Ninja, including how to configure the integration to pass Lead Ninja Activities into SalesForce and some Recommendations & Best Practices. This integration leverages the REST API and the only Salesforce editions that enable APIs are:

• Enterprise Edition
• Unlimited Edition
• Developer Edition
• Performance Edition

If your Salesforce account is not one of the above, please contact your Salesforce rep to learn about upgrade options. If you have one of the Salesforce Editions listed above, please follow the steps below to enable the plugin

Steps on how to enable the Lead Ninja Salesforce plugin

1. Get the Salesforce credentials

Here is the official documentation about how to get the key and secret.

• Go to: Setup (top right corner) / Build (bottom left corner) – Create / Apps / Connected Apps / New

• Create a new app to look like this:

Make sure the Selected OAuth Scopes are Access and manage your data (API) and Perform requests on your behalf at any time (refresh_token, offline_access).

• Copy the Consumer Key and Secret.

• Configure the LEad Ninja Salesforce plugin

• Insert the keys to the Lead Ninja Salesforce plugin and authorize it.

• Configure the field mapping. All the required fields in the SalesForce Contact Object and Lead Object should map to Lead Ninja Core Email, Last Name and Company Fields, as shown below:

• Any custom lead fields in Salesforce must be created in Lead Ninja as custom fields in the contact object.

Features Tab within the plugin

• Enabled features: You can pull leads and/or push leads to and from the integration.
• Triggered action push to integration: This can only be done through a form or a campaign.
• Pull leads: This can is done via API.
• Push contacts to this integration: This is done through API sync that takes place every 8-10 minutes.
• Feature specific settings: Select the objects you wish to pull or push records from. You can push contacts to the Leads object in salesforce. You can also push activities (contact’s timeline records) to a custom object in salesforce
• Pulling records: Will be done from Leads and/or Contacts objects in Salesforce.

Setting up Lead Ninja’s Activities in Salesforce

You have two options with the Salesforce integration to push Lead Ninja activities into Salesforce. One option is to pass the activities into a custom object that allows the activities to be reportable. The other way is to set up a custom URL field in Salesforce and then Lead Ninja will insert a contact’s timeline link.

Option 1: Make activities reportable – you first need to set up a custom object in your Salesforce instance. Please set up the object as it is described below

Step 1: On the initial screen of creating a custom object, make sure the Label field is populated with the value Timeline and the Object Name is mautic_timeline. This will auto-populate a few fields and then you have the option to populate other fields that haven’t pre-populated with values that relate to your business or this object. These additional fields do not impact the activities.

Step 2: When you save this initial screen, you will be taken to the custom objects screen where you can set up the custom fields. Create the 7 custom fields that match the below format exactly:

• ActivityDate: Date/Time
• contact_id : Lookup(Contact)
• Description : Long Text Area(131072)
• WhoId : Lookup(Lead)
• MauticLead : Number(18, 0) (External ID)
• Mautic_url : URL(255)
• ReferenceId : Text(255)

• This is the only one that needs to be set up as a unique – select do not allow duplicate values in Salesforce (API names for these will be auto populated)

Step 3: When enabling the activity object, you need to tick the Activity checkbox in the Lead Ninja plugin configuration and also specify the namespace prefix if it’s available in Salesforce.

Step 4: On the Lead Ninja side, make sure Activity is checked in the Features tab of the Salesforce plugin.

Step 5 (repeat for both leads and contacts): Edit the layout, and scroll to the related list for the Lead Ninja timeline. Click the wrench to edit, and select Activity Date from Available Fields and add it to the Selected Fields. Save the layout.

For more help with editing related lists in Salesforce, visit the Salesforce help center

Step 6: Unpublish your plugin then re-publish. Save and close

Once you re-publish the plugin, Lead Ninja will look at all of your contacts from the last 7 days then update those corresponding contacts or leads in Salesforce with the correct activities. The activity sync API takes about 8-10 minutes to push activities over from Lead Ninja to Salesforce.

Option 2: Contact’s timeline link – you need to create a custom URL field within Salesforce. On the Lead Ninja plugin page, go to the Contact Mapping tab and search for the newly created URL field in the list of Salesforce fields. Map this field to the Lead Ninja, Contact’s timeline link field. This will display a link in Salesforce that, when clicked on, will open a new window, displaying all activities related to the contact. This is the same view that you have within Lead Ninja’s timeline history on individual contact records.

Note – these items will not be reportable within Salesforce.

Since you’ll need to determine the direction of the update, within the mapping, choose the arrow that points from Lead Ninja to Salesforce. In order for your sales reps to click on the link and view the contact’s history, they will need to be set up as users within Lead Ninja.

Test the plugin

If you want to test an integration plugin to ensure that it is configured properly, you have 3 options on how to do that. A contact can be pushed to integration via these places:

• The Campaign Builder has the Push contact to integration action which can be used in the Campaign drip flow.
• The Standalone Form has the Push contact to integration action which can be used after a standalone form is submitted.
• The Point Trigger has the Push contact to integration action which can be triggered when a contact achieves some point limit.

Use any of those triggers to test the plugin and see if the contact appears in the integration.

Recommendations and Best Practices

• Mautic does not display the Salesforce contact or lead ID in the UI. The best practice is to create a custom field for the Salesforce ID within Mautic and map it to the Salesforce ID under contact mapping in the plugin. This will allow you to build reports that include contacts with a Salesforce ID within Mautic.
• Test the plugin by only turning on the Triggered action push contacts to integration because this will safely allow you to test the mapping of your custom field with a select number of contacts.
• In order to test, create a test segment and a test campaign with an action to Push contacts to Integration, so you can make sure the fields mapped appropriately.
• If setting up a Select list custom field in Mautic, we recommend matching the values in Mautic that you have in your Salesforce picklist. If you choose to not match the lists then Mautic can push values into Salesforce picklists only when the picklist custom field in Salesforce is set as unrestricted. Mautic’s select fields, by default, are unrestricted.
• Within the Features tab, in order to pull contacts in from Activity, you need to have a namespace prefix entered. This field is right below the Activity field on the Features tab.
• Salesforce requires values on certain fields being passed in, such as Last Name and Company Name. If Mautic has those fields set as blank then Mautic will push the value, Unknown into Salesforce. If you have the Pull contacts from integration turned on to pull those fields into Mautic then Mautic will not populate those fields with Unknown. They will be left blank.
• If you use Salesforce campaigns, you can set up a segment to pull in members of a specific Salesforce campaign
  • Create a new segment then use a filter for Integration Campaign Members then select the campaign you’d like to use

In this article we will cover how to correctly schedule Emails to be sent out at a specific time and date, as well as other smaller things to watch out for when planning and setting up scheduled mails.

Setting up the scheduled Emails

The whole setup revolves around the “Publish / Unpublish” option when creating an Email. If you want to take a deeper look into the capabilities of “Publish / Unpublish”, we have a Knowledgebase article that explains how to use the feature in detail.

First of all, create the Email you want to send out, i.e. a newsletter that you are planning to send out next week. After you are finished with the content, go to the editing page of your Email where all the configuration is done. There you find the option to set a publish date as well as an unpublish date.

In this example our date is exactly one week in the future at 8 pm. Here is the first smaller piece of advice when it comes to setting up the time. The time settings you define in your system configuration are responsible for the timing your email will be sent out. If you have your system running on UTC, the email will be sent at 8 pm UTC time.

If you have different newsletters for different countries in different time zones, you need to convert 8 pm to 8 pm MST or 8 pm HST, so all of your contacts will receive the email at the appropriate time.

What is a drip campaign

Drip marketing campaigns are basically email campaigns, which sends out different emails either based on time or on user decisions. The whole idea behind a drip email campaign is that you’re going to be sending out targeted emails automatically on predefined schedules or conditions.

With an email blast, you send to many people at one time. With a drip campaign, users receive a series of emails based on when they enter the campaign.

Drip campaigns are useful on many different occasions, such as informing a potential customer about your product or reaching out to reactivate contacts who have been inactive for a while, but of course there are many more use cases.

Planning a Drip Campaign

First of all, you need to think about what kind of campaign your drip campaign should be and for which reason you need a drip campaign. Then you should write the emails you want to use in your drip campaign, based on the reason you defined in step one.

As these emails are the backbone of your campaign, they should be well thought out and precisely written. The campaigns just define the order and timeframes in which the emails will be sent, but the content itself is what defines the other half of the quality a drip campaign has.

How to create a drip campaign in Mautic

Time-based Campaign

Here is an example of basic time based drip campaign. This form of a drip campaign is the “easiest” to build campaign wise. The emails will be sent to everybody in our “Drip Campaign Segment”. We have no user-based conditions here, just a timeframe, so the 1st email will be sent immediately, the 2nd after 7 days and the 3rd email after 14 days. For better understanding here is an example:

Consider a user onboarding campaign. Someone signs up for a service, they get a welcome email. 2 days later, they get the first email explaining benefit A. 2 days later, another, and so on.

User condition based Campaign

User condition based campaigns are a bit more complex but don’t worry, they are super easy to understand and recreate as well.

This campaign starts on the left branch by sending out the email called “Email 1.1”. The next step is a condition that determines whether the contact did open the email or didn’t. If The contact opened email 1.1, then email 1.2 will be sent. But if the contact did not open email 1.1 within one day, email 1.3 will be sent instead.

After seven days the next campaign branch will start with sending out email 2.1 and the next drip campaign branch will be sending out emails based on decisions and conditions made by the contact. You can see that this drip campaign is built around decisions made by the contact and conditions met preemptively. Here is an example use-case:

A user signed up for a service, but didn’t complete the first action (upload their first video, make a profile, etc). The user action campaign will account for this and send an appropriate email prompting them for the action

It is a very wise choice to test your emails before you send them out with any email software you use. The test can cover deliverability test but also visual tests. You might just want to know if all tokens are at the right place. In this article I’ll cover both, and some tricks you have to watch out for.

Once you created your email you’ll given the option of sending an example to yourself. This is done by clicking on the following button:

You can choose any email address to send to without limitations. You can also add multiple email addresses by clicking on the yellow button:

Note: It is really important for you to know, that this email won't be a 100% copy of the emails you will send out.

Here are the major points:

Tracking links

When an email is sent out with Lead Ninja, all links are overwritten (unless otherwise instructed in settings) by a so called tracking link. This is most likely the URL you use for hosting Lead Ninja. In the ‘send example’ test, these links are not overwritten, all original links are preserved. If you want to test for deliverability, then it might give you false results. Deliverability can be impacted by masked / overwritten links, as the more hops lead to a final destination the worst spam score you get. Normally you shouldn’t notice this, but you need to understand the risks.

Tokens not working

The tokens in the email will be represented by placeholders. If you want to say Hello, {contactfield=firstname}, then you’ll probably see Hello, [First Name].
Lead Ninja doesn’t process the tokens with real leads from the database, because you are sending the test to an email address of your choice. This emal might be in your Lead Ninja DB as well, but since it might also not, Lead Ninja disregards it. However by replacing the token with the field names gives you a heads up, that “I know this is a token, I’ll instert the right information when it comes to a real send.” If you don’t see any text inserted where the token should be, then your insertion didn’t work.

Unsubscribe is not working

This is the same issue as the previous topic. If we don’t have a lead in the database connected to this email, how can we unsubscribe them? If you are testing unsubscribe on early Lead Ninja 4.x versions, you will see an error after clicking on unsubscribe. It’s okay, the real send will work.

Webview is not working

If you send out an example email with a webview link inside, it only works if you are logged in with the same browser as logged in into your Lead Ninja instance. If you try to see the webview from another browser, you’ll see the sad Mautibot.

This is particularly bad if you want to send a test to your colleague and they think your preview doesn’t work. It does, but only for Lead Ninja admins.

Opens are not tracked

Obviously opens and clicks are also not tracked if you send an email as test, because the lead you test with is not in Lead Ninja‘s database, so no further actions can be tied to anyone.

Links fail in spam tester

If you are using mail-tester.com for understanding spam score, you will get errors for the unsubscribe link and for webview link:

This score deduction won’t happen in your real email sending, because these links will be working.

How to make a proper test Email?

The best way to do so is to simulate an email sending is to do a real sending.

1. Create your test segment
   There are many ways to do this. A simple way is by creating a test tag and adding it to your test leads in the system. You can create a segment for anyone who has the test tag.
2. Send the email to the test segment
   All tokens should be filled out properly, unsubscribe and webview should work.
3. Duplicate the email after sent
   This is really important. The same email segment can only be sent once to the same contact. If you want to test a campaign email, you should still test it as a segment email and duplicate it as a campaign email later.
4. If you tested unsubscribe, make sure you resubscribe with that contact again, otherwise your next email will never arrive.

Validation is a method to constantly check, verify, authenticate and prove the accuracy of something. Email Validation is a method to check, authenticate and prove the accuracy and validity of emails. Emails is one of the most convenient and popular means of communication used by a lot of people – the need to validate emails is very important as it is:

1. Improve the quality of data: By validating emails, you can ascertain the accuracy of data as only accurate and valid emails are collected, a large amount of invalid email addresses means there is a lot to improve.
2. Improves email marketing: Validation of emails improves email marketing as only deliverable emails are being targeted when sending emails out.
3. Leads to increased deliverability: When emails are validated you don’t get to deal with issues that arise with sending out incorrect or invalid emails such as high spam complaint rate.
4. Prevents email hard bounce: Email bounces occur when the recipient email address is not correct or the email does not exist. Email validation cleans up the list of emails and removes invalid or incorrect emails.
5. Improves sender’s reputation: Validating emails eliminate roadblocks such as incorrect or mistyped emails that may hinder great sender reputations.
6. Saves money: Sending emails out cost money, email validation eliminates unwanted emails leaving only relevant emails and thereby reducing expenses.

Emails can be validated using different methods such as sending emails using java, using Lead Ninja Campaign to validate email addresses etc. For this article, we would look into how we can set up javascript to validate email addresses on the client-side, it is very fast and a preferred choice by most people, we would see how this can be done in the following sections.

What are the guidelines that should be observed by email validation?

When performing email validation it is very important you take into consideration the email structure. This is an important rule that should be observed. Emails have two parts that are separated by this _@_ symbol. The two parts are called local and domain parts respectively. The first part which is the local part usually consists of:

• Capital letters (A-Z) and small (a-z) letters
• Numerals (0-9)
• Some special characters which are:! # $ % & ‘ * + – / = ? ^ _ ` { | ~
• . ( period, dot or full stop) which cannot be the first or last character and cannot be repeated

The second part which is the domain part consists of:

• Capital letters (A-Z) and small (a-z) letters
• Numerals (0-9)
• “.” and “-” dot and hyphens

How to use Regex

When validating emails on the client-side with javascript the most preferred means is to use Regular Expression also known as Regex.

Note: There is no universal or general approved regex expression that is used for email validation. Most people use different regex expressions that satisfy different use cases when validating emails. Before we jump right into using any regex, we would have to test it with some email address (both correct and incorrect) to be sure it throws an error when a fake or an incorrect address is used. The regex example below has been tested to validate up to 99% email addresses.

To quickly test our regex expression with some email address we would use this function

Here is the output when testing with these two email addresses.

• testRegex(jane@.example.com) //true
• testRegex(jane..smith@example.com) //false

Using Javascript with Regex

The code example below shows regex implementation in javascript, the code is not hard to understand, from the code if the email value matches the regex then it returns (This is a valid email address) pop up alert if it does not match, it returns(This is not a valid email address) pop up alert.

index.js

Now let’s apply this javascript code to a form.

Validating emails in a form using javascript

We are going to create a form which has the email input and use javascript to validate emails inputted in the form when submitted. Let’s see how this works.

First, we will create a file and call it index.html and place the code below in it. The index.html will use the javascript code created earlier to validate the emails on the client-side.

index.html

Next, we create a file called index.css and place the code below in it which is the stylesheet to beautify the form.

index.css

Run the code and view the output on your browser Here is the expected output of the code.

Now to test our code with some emails – testing with this email jane.doe@gmail.com will work and give a pop up of “Valid email address!” as seen below.

Inputting this email jane..smith@example.com won’t work and would give a pop up of “You have entered an invalid email address!”. Here is the output below.

You can try testing with more emails, to see which is valid or invalid

• jane@.example.com
• Jane.example.com
• john12@gmail.com
• smith+consult@hotmail.com
• peter@example.com
• jake@example.co.in
• peter.wash@example.com
• john_smith@example.com
• jane@example.company.in
• .jake@example.com
• peter@example.com.
• jane@example.c
• smith@example.company

Other Considerations

Validating email addresses on the client-side with JavaScript using regex is fun to set up and try out as illustrated with the examples above although not everyone can grab the concept of regex as it can be a bit difficult to understand sometimes and there is no general or universal regex used for validating emails, people tend to write the regex according to their needs and some regex expressions may get rid of some valid email addresses.

To avoid the use of some difficult regex expressions when validating emails and also test and debug your emails to fix issues your emails may encounter before you send them out, you can use Mailtrap.

With Mailtrap, you can check if your emails are properly formatted and are not sent to the spam folder. Also, you won’t get rid of valid email addresses which may be eliminated when using regex.

Stay happy sending emails!

Date Option

This is for more advanced user, who may need to specify a certain date or time frame. The first option is to use the vanilla “date picker”

However, you can specify much more here. Mautic recognizes relative date formats too (these strings are not translatable):

• +1 day (you can also use 1 day)
• -2 days (you can also use 2 days ago)
• +1 week / -2 weeks / 3 weeks ago
• +5 months / -6 months / 7months ago
• +1 year / -2 years / 3 years ago

Example (Consider that today is 2018-03-02):

• Date identified equals -1 week returns all contacts identified on 2018-02-23.
• Date identified less than -1 week returns all contacts identified before 2018-02-23.
• Date identified equals -1 months returns all contacts identified on 2018-02-02.
• Date identified greater or equal -1 year returns all contacts identified on 2017-03-02 and after.
• Date identified greater than -1 year returns all contacts identified after 2017-03-02.

Beside this, you can also specify your date with text. These formulae are translatable, so make sure you use them in the correct format corresponding to the language your Mautic instance is configured to use.

• birthday / anniversary
• birthday -7 days / anniversary -7 days
• today / tomorrow / yesterday
• this week / last week / next week
• this month / last month / next month
• this year / last year / next year

Example (Consider that today is 2018-03-02):

• Date identified equals last week returns all contacts identified between 2018-02-26 and 2018-03-04 (Monday to Sunday).
• Date identified less than last week returns all contacts identified before 2018-02-19.
• Date identified equals last month returns all contacts identified between 2018-02-01 and 2018-02-28.
• Date identified greater or equal last year returns all contacts identified 2017-01-01 and after.
• Date identified greater than last year returns all contacts identified after 2017-12-31.
• Custom contact date field equal birthday -1 day returns all contacts identified every year on 03-01 (1st March).
• Custom contact date field equal anniversary -1 month returns all contacts identified every year on 02-01 (1st February)

Create the parent

Before you can create an A/B test, you’ll first need to create the parent (A) email as you would create any normal email. Then, once you have saved this base email, you will find the A/B testing section in the general options to the right.

Subject The subject line for your email

Internal Name The internal name for your email (not shown to the customer, used for internal organisation)

Traffic Weight: This is the percentage of the total audience you’d like to receive this variant of the email. For example, if your total audience for this email is 50,000 contacts 20 in this box, Lead Ninja will initially send an email to 10,000 contacts (20% of your total audience). You’ll determine the percentage to receive each variant when you create the variants.

A/B test winner criteria: This is the metric you’d like to use to determine the winner of your A/B test. You can choose from:

• Asset download rate
• Email read rate
• Email clickthrough rate
• Form submission rate

Create additional variants

With A/B testing it’s important to only change one thing at a time, otherwise it’s difficult to prove with statistical significance that the change you made resulted in the differences you see in the results. Variants allow you to experiment with changing different parts of your email and make a decision based on the outcomes.

Make any edits you’d like to the email – whatever changes you’d like to test for performance.

While you can create as many variants as you’d like, keep in mind that sum of the traffic weights across all variants must be equal to or less than 100%. To split the variants evenly, you’ll also want to leave a percentage for sending the parent. Lead Ninja will send the parent to any percentage remaining after the percentage for all variants has been added.

Working with variants

Variant emails won’t appear in your emails list. You’ll only see the parent email, with an icon indicating that the email has variants.

Emails With Variants

The icon in the list of emails which looks like an organizational chart indicates that the email has A/B variants.