Configuring marketing automation
Kentico EMS required
Features described on this page require the Kentico EMS license.
Marketing automation helps you automate, optimize and analyze your campaigns that are promoted by emails. Moreover, Marketing automation allows you to nurture your website visitors and leads – represented by contacts in Kentico.
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.
First, you need to enable on-line marketing functionality so that you can track contacts handled in the automation processes:
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:
- Develop custom marketing automation actions – create custom action steps, which users can then incorporate into automation processes.
- Handle marketing automation triggers – implement custom handlers to influence the processing of triggers in automation processes.
Enabling on-line marketing
You need to track contacts in order to leverage the functionality of the automation processes. To track contacts, enable on-line marketing:
- Open the Settings application.
- Navigate to On-line marketing.
- Select the Enable on-line marketing checkbox.
- Click Save.
Marketing automation on MVC sites
You can use the marketing automation features of Kentico with websites that are presented by a separate MVC application. To ensure that the marketing automation features work correctly, you need to enable tracking of contacts and logging of activities on your MVC sites.
On MVC sites, marketing automation processes are started and kept running by the Kentico administration application. This means that you also need to ensure the Kentico 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 the Event 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.
Administrations 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" />