Mautic email marketing: how it works and how to set it up

Choosing between Mautic email marketing on your own servers and an all-in-one platform comes down to who owns the maintenance, who owns deliverability and how closely email needs to sit next to your sales pipeline. This article answers that decision for a company of 10 to 250 people. If you decide to move, it then walks through migrating contacts, consent records, segments and live campaigns into the levelpartner.ai platform without losing a send or emailing someone who opted out.

The real decision: who carries the work

A self-hosted open-source stack gives you control. You choose the server, the sending service and the code. In return, someone on your team has to keep it patched, backed up and connected to everything else. For a firm with an in-house developer who enjoys that work, it can make sense.

Most firms with flat revenue do not have that person. Email marketing is one job among many for a marketing manager or an operations lead. In that setting, three costs show up.

Maintenance. Updates, plugins, cron jobs and server monitoring take hours every month, and they arrive at awkward times.

Deliverability ownership. With self-hosting, your team configures the sending service, warms domains and diagnoses why emails land in spam. Nobody else is looking at it.

CRM connection. If the CRM lives in another tool, contacts, stages and activity have to be synced. Every sync is a place where data goes stale or duplicates.

An all-in-one platform trades some control for less of all three. The email builder, contacts, pipelines and workflows share one database, so a deal moving stage can trigger an email directly.

When self-hosting is still the right call

Keep the self-hosted stack if you have a developer who owns it, strict requirements to host data on your own infrastructure, or deeply custom integrations that would be costly to rebuild. The trade-off of moving is real: you give up direct code access and some configuration freedom.

Before you start the migration

You need an export of all contacts with their custom fields, a record of consent and unsubscribe status per contact, a list of segments and the rules behind them, and a list of every campaign that is currently live. Verify your sending domain in Settings before you import anything.

How to set it up

1. Go to Settings, Custom Fields, and create each field you need.
2. In Contacts, click Import Contacts and upload your CSV.
3. Map every column to a field, then start the import.
4. Bring unsubscribed contacts across too, marked so they are never emailed.
5. Rebuild each segment with + Add smart list.
6. In Automation, recreate each live campaign as a workflow.
7. Use the Contact Tag trigger that matches the old segment.
8. Rebuild or select each email in its Send Email action.
9. Run Test Workflow on every workflow before publishing.
10. Pause the old campaigns the day the new ones publish.

What changes week to week

After the move, the weekly work shifts from keeping the system running to running campaigns. Reporting on opens, clicks and the deals they influenced sits in Reporting next to pipeline data, so you can see which emails lead to booked calls. Expect a weekly routine of about an hour: check bounces, review the active workflows and plan the next send.

If you are moving individual templates rather than whole campaigns, the companion guide on moving Mautic emails into the builder covers the template audit in detail. For building the nurture flows themselves, see how to plan an email nurture campaign and automated email campaigns.

Troubleshooting

Segment counts do not match

Rules that relied on activity history, such as "opened in the last 90 days", cannot be rebuilt from an export. Recreate the segment using a tag applied at import, then let new activity rules take over.

Duplicate contacts after import

The same person exists with two email addresses or different capitalisation. Run the platform's duplicate check in Contacts and merge before your first send.

Emails land in spam after the switch

New sending setups need a short warm-up. Start with your most engaged contacts and widen the audience over two to three weeks.

A workflow emails people twice

The contact matched two entry triggers. Add a condition so contacts already in one workflow are skipped by the other.

Frequently asked questions

Is Mautic email marketing cheaper than an all-in-one platform?

The software can cost less, but the hosting, sending service and staff time are real costs. Count the hours your team spends maintaining it before comparing.

Will we lose our email history?

The new platform starts its own history. Export reports and engagement data from the old tool and store them, and tag highly engaged contacts at import so you can target them first.

How long does the migration take?

For most firms, two to four weeks from export to cut-over, with most of the effort in rebuilding segments and live campaigns.

Can we keep using our own sending domain?

Yes. Verify the domain in Settings before importing and sending, so your existing reputation carries over.

The journey this guide describes