Configuring marketing automation

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Enterprise license required

Features described on this page require the Kentico Xperience Enterprise license.

Marketing automation helps you automate, optimize and analyze your website’s marketing activities. Typical examples are automatic campaigns promoted by emails, or nurturing of website visitors and leads – represented by contacts in Xperience.

To be able to work with processes and steps in the Marketing automation application, you need to have the permissions for the On-line marketing and Contact management modules.

Setting up marketing automation

First, you need to enable on-line marketing functionality so that the system can track contacts handled in the automation processes:

  1. Open the Settings application.
  2. Navigate to On-line marketing.
  3. Select the Enable on-line marketing checkbox.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Enable tracking of contacts and logging of activities on the side of your MVC application.

Your marketers can then set up the required automation processes.

You can also use marketing automation to configure scenarios that utilize various other features in the system – for example send an automated reminder to customers who leave the website and still have products in their shopping cart: Send an automated reminder of an abandoned shopping cart

Additionally, developers can extend and modify the marketing automation functionality:

Where do marketing automation processes run?

Marketing automation processes are started and kept running by the Xperience administration application, not the MVC live site application (for more information, see MVC development overview).

This means that you also need to ensure the Xperience application remains alive, even though it does not receive regular traffic from website visitors. For example, you can set the Start Mode advanced setting of the used application pool in IIS to AlwaysRunning.

Tracking marketing automation in the Event log

By default, the system logs an event log entry whenever a contact moves to a different step in a marketing automation process. You can view the event log in theEvent log application.

Disabling event logging for marketing automation

When running automation processes for very large numbers of contacts, logging of step transitions may lead to a cluttered event log or even website performance problems.

Administrators with access to the web project’s file system can disable the logging of these events by adding the following key to the appSettings section of the web.config file:




<add key="CMSLogMATransitions" value="false" />