Marketing
Reach the people in your CRM with mailings and social posts, and know what worked. Marketing lives in the Marketing group of the Pipelinq navigation and works on the clients, contacts and leads you already have. You keep your own subscriber data, your own unsubscribe list and your own click data, whichever mail server or network carries the message.
This page describes what you can do today and what is planned. The technical design is on the marketing architecture page. The step-by-step guide for sending a blast is the marketing blasts user guide.
What you can do today
Segments. Define an audience as rules over your contacts and clients, with AND and OR groups. A segment is live: it is evaluated again at every send, so new matching contacts are included and deleted ones drop out.
Templates. Write an email or SMS body with variables. An email template is only saved when it carries the unsubscribe link and your postal address.
Articles. Write a title, a summary, a hero image and a markdown body once. Embed it in a template's {{articles}} block. An article moves through a draft, review, published and archived lifecycle, and each article page shows where it has been used. See the articles user guide.
Blasts. Pick a segment, a template, a channel and a moment. Pipelinq checks consent for every contact before it sends and shows you who is missing. Split the audience in two to test a variant. Watch the send progress live and cancel it if you must.
Tracking and results. Clicks are recorded by Pipelinq itself, with signed links that carry no personal data. The performance page lists open and click rates per blast, tells you whether an A/B difference is statistically meaningful, and sums the deal value attributed to each blast.
Consent. Every contact has a consent record per channel. An unsubscribe or a hard bounce withdraws it within minutes and skips any queued delivery.
Campaigns. Group mailings, posts and a landing page into one campaign. Everything in it carries one campaign value, so a mailing and a post report as one campaign instead of two. Ask portaliq to publish the landing page with a sign-up form, and every submission becomes a lead that remembers which mailing and which post brought it in. See the campaigns guide.
Attribution. The campaign report divides value three ways: first touch, last touch and linear. You pick which one you read. A lead whose customer has a paid invoice in shillinq closes on that invoice; a lead without one closes on its own value, and the report says which of the two it used, so booked money and a forecast never get added up as if they were the same thing.
SMS and WhatsApp. Send one-to-one messages from a client or contact page, with per-channel consent, approved WhatsApp templates and a spend budget. See outbound messaging.
Social publishing. Connect a company page or a colleague's own profile, write one post with a variant per network, have a person approve it, and let it go out at its moment to every account it names. Where no application may post at all, the owner gets the prepared text and confirms when they have posted it. The next morning the performance page ranks what you published by engagement rate per network. See the social publishing user guide.
Search and competitor intelligence. The Keywords page turns the Search Console data into four answers: where you rank, which queries sit one push from page one, which of your pages compete with each other, and which questions nothing of yours answers. Every finding is a proposal you confirm, so nothing appears in your keyword list that you did not put there. The Competitors page follows feeds, sitemaps, page fragments and public timelines, and says per watch whether it could read anything, so a quiet week and a broken watch never look the same. The Connection audit says per client whether you follow each other, and says plainly where the network will not answer. See the search and competitor intelligence guide.
Sending
Every blast sends through a transport you choose. A fresh install already has one ready: the instance's own mail server, no setup required. Add your own Mail account for occasional low-volume sends, or connect a bulk provider (Amazon SES, Brevo, Mailjet, SendGrid, Mailgun or Postmark) through OpenConnector once volume grows. Set a default transport in admin settings, or pick one per blast in the wizard.
The deliverability panel checks each transport's sender domain against SPF, DKIM and DMARC, so you know before you send whether Gmail and Yahoo will accept your mail in bulk.
The six phases
The programme ran in six phases, ordered by value. Each phase is a set of openspec changes; the architecture page lists them. All six have shipped, with the limits each row names.
| Phase | You will be able to | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Lists and mailings | Run mailing lists people subscribe to, with double opt-in and a preference centre. Compose a newsletter from articles. Record work, private and mobile numbers, several email addresses and social handles per contact. Sending through your own mail server, your own Mail account, or a bulk provider is already live, see Sending. | Live |
| 2 · Content hub and AI | Write an article once and reuse it in a newsletter, a social post and a portaliq page. Ask hermiq for a draft, a shorter subject line or a LinkedIn variant, in your organisation's voice. Every AI draft is marked and needs your approval before anything leaves. | The content hub is live. Asking hermiq for a draft is not built yet: nothing can write into Pipelinq as an agent, so the mark exists and no agent sets it |
| 3 · Social publishing | Connect your company pages on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky, X, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, and let colleagues connect their own profiles. Schedule and approve posts in one calendar. Where a network does not allow posting on someone's behalf, they receive the prepared post and share it themselves. See which posts perform. | Live for Mastodon; the other networks wait on their developer applications |
| 4 · Campaigns and attribution | Group a mailing, posts and a landing page into one campaign. Create the landing page with a form in portaliq from Pipelinq. A form submission becomes a lead that remembers which mailing and which post brought it in. See attributed revenue per campaign, closed on paid invoices in shillinq. | Live |
| 5 · Search and competitors | Connect Google Search Console and Matomo. See which keywords you rank for, which are within reach, which pages compete with each other, and which terms to use more or less. Follow competitors through their feeds, sitemaps and public social timelines. Check which clients follow you and whom you follow. | Live. The keyword analysis needs a connected Search Console property; the watches and the Matomo reports need an OpenConnector source each |
| 6 · Integrated campaigns | Build audiences from bookkeeping: lapsed customers, top-tier customers, buyers of one product without another. Run journeys that start from a stage change or a renewal window. Get a weekly review from hermiq with what moved and what to try. | Live. The two CRM audiences work everywhere; the four bookkeeping ones need shillinq installed and a client linked to a shillinq organisation, and say so when they cannot answer |
How it stays yours
- Unsubscribes and clicks are always recorded by Pipelinq, even when Amazon SES, Brevo or another provider sends the mail. A provider's unsubscribe is mirrored back, never relied on.
- Double opt-in is the default for anyone who subscribes through a form. Existing customers can be added under the legal soft opt-in, and the record says so.
- Click tracking is on and the open pixel is off by default. Both are switches per organisation.
- Tokens and keys never sit on a Pipelinq object. Connected accounts and provider credentials live in keepiq behind OpenRegister's credential broker.
- AI never sends or publishes. Hermiq drafts and analyses. A person clicks Send and Publish, and the record shows who.
What the networks allow
Some limits come from the networks themselves and no tool can work around them.
- Personal Facebook and Instagram accounts cannot be posted to by any application. Colleagues on those networks receive the prepared post and share it from their own app.
- LinkedIn company page posting requires LinkedIn's partner approval, which takes months. Posting from a personal LinkedIn profile is available at once.
- X charges per post and per read. A spend budget per organisation keeps this in check.
- WhatsApp is opt-in messaging with approved templates, not a feed. Snapchat has no publishing interface.
- LinkedIn and Meta do not offer legitimate access to other organisations' posts. Competitor monitoring uses feeds, sitemaps, page changes and the open fediverse.
Standards
| Standard | Relevance |
|---|---|
| GEMMA Sociale mediacomponent | Social publishing and engagement, phase 3 |
| GEMMA Mediamonitor- en webcarecomponent | Competitor and mention monitoring, inbox, phase 3 and 5 |
| TEC CRM: Marketing Automation (2) | Lists, campaigns, segmentation, attribution |
| Telecommunicatiewet article 11.7 and AVG | Opt-in, soft opt-in, consent proof, erasure |
| RFC 8058 | One-click unsubscribe header on every mailing |
| Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, one-click unsubscribe, complaint rate |