Mautic Email Campaigns & Broadcasts: Complete Guide

Why Mautic Is Worth the Setup Effort

Mautic is one of those tools that rewards patience. It's a completely self-hosted marketing automation platform, which means you own your data, you control your infrastructure, and — best of all — you can send emails through Amazon SES for roughly 10 cents per thousand sends. That's a fraction of what platforms like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign charge at scale.

The trade-off is setup. You'll need to install Mautic on your own server, configure it to work with an email sending service like Amazon SES, and handle a few technical details like cron jobs. But once that initial legwork is done, the day-to-day experience of building campaigns and sending emails is surprisingly straightforward.

If you haven't installed Mautic yet, Dave has a dedicated installation guide that walks through the entire process. It's worth getting that foundation right before diving into campaign building.

Setting Up Segments to Organize Your Contacts

Before you can send a single email in Mautic, your contacts need to belong to a segment. Segments are how Mautic groups your audience, and contacts can belong to multiple segments simultaneously — so you have plenty of flexibility in how you organize things.

To create a segment, head to the left sidebar, click Segments, and hit "Add New." Give it a descriptive name that makes sense for your workflow. For example, if you're offering a free PDF download on your website, you might create a "PDF Downloaders" segment.

The real power is in segment filters. These determine which contacts automatically get added. You can filter by tags, form submissions, page visits, and more. In a typical lead magnet scenario, you'd tag someone when they download your PDF, then set the segment filter to include anyone with that specific tag. Once saved, Mautic handles the rest — any contact matching your filter criteria gets pulled into the segment automatically.

Creating Template Emails for Drip Campaigns

Mautic uses some confusing terminology when it comes to email types. When you go to Channels > Emails and click "Add New," you're offered two choices: Template Email or Segment Email. Ignore the names for a moment. Think of template emails as autoresponders — these are the emails that live inside your automated campaigns. Segment emails are broadcasts — one-time sends to a group of contacts.

For building a drip sequence, you want template emails. Start by selecting a theme. Mautic ships with several built-in options, and you can upload custom themes through the gear icon in the upper right corner. One important caveat: choose your theme before you start writing. Switching themes later wipes out your content, which is a painful lesson to learn the hard way.

Plain text emails tend to convert better for most use cases, so the blank theme is a solid default. Each email needs a subject line and an internal name. A useful habit is numbering your emails (Email 1, Email 2, etc.) so they're easy to identify when you're wiring up the campaign later.

The email builder itself is functional but not Mautic's strong suit. You get basic formatting tools, link creation, image uploads, and personalization tokens like `{contactfield=firstname}` for dynamic content. If you need more design control, external tools like BEE Free let you build polished email templates that you can paste directly into Mautic.

Building an Automated Campaign with Conditional Logic

This is where Mautic really shines. Head over to Campaigns, hit New, give it a name, and launch the campaign builder. The first thing you'll set is the source — which segment feeds contacts into this campaign. Select the segment you created earlier and you're ready to start building.

The campaign builder uses a visual flowchart with three building blocks: actions (things you do to a contact), decisions (branching based on contact behavior), and conditions (branching based on contact data). Click the plus button beneath your segment source to start adding steps.

For a basic drip sequence, your first step is an action: send an email. You'll pick which template email to send and set the timing. Mautic lets you schedule relative to when the contact entered the campaign — so "3 hours after" means three hours after they joined your segment. You can also restrict delivery to specific hours (say 9 AM to 5 PM) and weekdays only, which is a thoughtful touch for keeping your emails out of off-hours inboxes.

Using Decisions to Create Smart Email Sequences

A straightforward drip sequence is fine, but Mautic's decision nodes let you build something much more intelligent. After your first email, instead of blindly sending email two, you can add an "Opens Email" decision. This creates a fork in your campaign: one path for contacts who opened the email (green side) and another for those who didn't (red side).

For contacts who didn't open, you might resend the same email after a couple of days. One thing to watch here is the email type setting. Marketing emails can only be delivered once, while transactional emails can be sent multiple times. If you're resending an unopened email, you'll want transactional.

For contacts who did open, you can continue the sequence with email two, then add another decision node. If they've opened multiple emails, that's a strong engagement signal. At that point, you might use a "Modify Contact Tags" action to label them as a hot lead — which could automatically enroll them in a completely different campaign.

The potential for complexity is enormous. You can build deeply branched sequences that respond to exactly how each contact engages with your content. Or you can keep it simple — ten emails over ten days with no conditional logic at all. Mautic gives you the choice.

Sending One-Time Broadcast Emails

Not every email belongs in an automated sequence. Weekly newsletters, announcements, and one-time promotions are better suited to Mautic's broadcast functionality — what the platform calls "segment emails."

To create a broadcast, go to Channels > Emails, click Add New, and choose Segment Email. Pick a template (you can get more creative with design here since broadcasts often benefit from visual polish), write your subject line, set an internal name, and select the segment you want to target.

Once your email is ready, you have two sending options. The immediate route is simple: open the email and hit the Send button. Mautic will ask how many emails to send per batch, and off it goes.

For scheduled sends, you'll set a publish date and time on the email's edit screen — say Monday at 9 AM. However, scheduled broadcasts require a specific cron job running on your server. You only need to set this up once: SSH into your server, open the crontab editor with `sudo crontab -e`, and add a job that runs the `mautic:broadcasts:send` command every minute. Once that's in place, all future scheduled emails will fire automatically at their designated times.

Mautic's Rough Edges and Workarounds

Mautic is powerful, but it's not without its quirks. The email builder, form builder, and landing page builder are all functional but clunky — Dave describes them diplomatically as "not a great experience." For email design specifically, using an external builder like BEE Free and importing the HTML is a solid workaround.

There's also an intermittent UI bug in the campaign builder where notification messages stick on the screen and won't dismiss. The fix is straightforward: save your work with the Apply button, refresh the page, and reopen the builder. It happens roughly once an hour during active editing, so it's more of an annoyance than a blocker.

Despite these rough edges, the analytics built into Mautic are genuinely useful. Even at a glance on the email list screen, you can see send counts, read counts, and open percentages for each template. Deeper reporting is available for those who want to dig in. For a free, self-hosted platform that lets you send emails at pennies per thousand, the trade-offs are easy to accept.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.