

Making emails better: the MixPanel for email - jylamont
http://blog.getvero.com/making-email-better-building-the-mixpanel-for-email/

======
twakefield
Wow. I've been working on a presentation[1] for a conference in Tokyo[2] that
uses this exact same image/diagram to visualize this concept. While it's
fairly obvious to use a ven diagram to visualize this, it's still strange to
see the exact same visualization that I used coming from someone else's brain
too. It's a nice validation.

Showing the open rates makes it even more effective.

[1][http://prezi.com/ipuykc88vvfg/how-to-leverage-email-and-
its-...](http://prezi.com/ipuykc88vvfg/how-to-leverage-email-and-its-data-to-
engage-your-users-and-profit/)

[2][http://onlab.jp/blog/archives/2012/05/onlab-data-
conference-...](http://onlab.jp/blog/archives/2012/05/onlab-data-conference-
english.html)

~~~
chexton
I had not seen your presentation but it's got a lot of really detailed, useful
information. I will certainly revisit it.

Likewise, very interesting to see the same diagram come out of someone else's
brain. 'Great minds think alike' as they say.

~~~
twakefield
I should have mentioned that I enjoyed the post. Sorry - I rushed the comment
as I was running out the door.

You guys get it and it's great to see you working on this. Definitely, ping me
if you'd like to discuss some more.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
<http://intercom.io>

<http://customer.io>

Good luck.

~~~
alexatkeplar
Is intercom.io legal? It requires publishers to send customer PII (email
address) in a JavaScript to a third-party. It would be trivial for Intercom to
join that PII to an ad network tracking cookie, for example. Seems like a huge
no-no.

~~~
suhail
Completely legal - in California all you have to do is post a privacy policy
on your page if you collect this information. Almost everyone is collecting
this and it applies to everyone regardless of whether they are a 3rd party or
not.

Though, by the looks of it, intercom.io may benefit from a privacy policy =)

~~~
eoghan
Here you go:

<http://docs.intercom.io/privacy.html>

------
PStamatiou
Related post on user retention/lifecycle email marketing as a service for
those interested in the space: [http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-
retention-lifecycle-em...](http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-
lifecycle-email) (and HN commentary on that post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378583> )

Basically a call to action for more companies to tackle this .. and it looks
like a bunch are. Exciting times for a big problem.

~~~
eoghan
+1

Here's another post on the topic:

<http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/>

------
edhallen
As the comments show, there's a clear need for this that lots of great folks
are going after (Vero, Intercom, etc) - but it all treads the fine line
between usefulness and annoying for the end customer. If I look at some of the
key examples on the Vero site, some seem to fit the obviously non-annoying
bucket (email people if they haven't logged in in two weeks) while others are
more dubious (send a user an email when they buy ten widgets).

Two solutions to this: \- Doing some meaningful analysis that compares
successes/failures within the same cohorts to identify really important
inflection points (i.e. a user needs to complete setup within 48 hours or they
never will)

\- Talking to customers to really understand the onboarding process so that
you can use these event triggers to provide even better customer service.

These tools are definitely better than nothing, but I'm left thinking that we
(as a community online) might be able to do better. Is the answer to better
customer service on the web really more sophisticated automated emails? Or is
it actual personalization + meaningful analysis?

~~~
eoghan
The stock answer to this is that "actual personalization" doesn't scale. But I
think that's BS. It comes from people who think of web business customers as
datapoints—heartless automatons traversing A/B test optimized sign-up funnels.

Today's and tomorrow's high-margin businesses do and will invest in real
humans. It's truly mind-blowing that Apple can find and very comfortably pay
nice, smart, real people who can understand the problems of any customer who
walks in off the street and fix them, one by one. But they do.

I think that the future of support / customer service / customer development /
marketing involves more humans and less automation. I'm part of the Intercom
team and we've designed the first version of our product to fill the gap
between now and that future—we have a great amount of automation and a great
amount of one-to-one communication features, integrated tightly together. By
design, we don't allow our customers to send automated messages that can't be
responded to because we know that the real value happens when real people get
involved.

------
alexatkeplar
This has definitely got legs - well done to the Vero guys.

If you take shopping cart abandonment emails (which I'm most familiar with),
you see a set of quite tired, overpriced providers (see e.g.
<https://www.barilliance.com/pricing>) - so there's definitely a big
opportunity to shake the transactional CRM market up.

Question: as a generator of customer events (I run SnowPlow, an open-source
alternative to MixPanel, <https://github.com/snowplow>) how can I integrate
SnowPlow events into Vero - do you have an API or similar?

~~~
rfergie
A bit off topic - how are you finding SnowPlow?

I love the idea but I worry that it is no where near ready for the mainstream
(more because of a lack of skill amongst web analysts then anything to do with
the product)

~~~
alexatkeplar
Hi rfergie, you're right, on the analytics side, there's a lot to do to
educate analysts on how to perform customer-level analyses at web-scale.
Hadoop and Hive are a new toolkit for sure - we're writing a load of Hive
analysis tutorials (<https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Analysts-
cookbook>), but ultimately we're going to need to "go up the stack" and start
building some UIs. Web analysts in particular expect GUIs (general business
analysts in BigCos are more comfortable with SQL, R etc).

At the moment our early adopters are more on the technical side - people who
want to embed SnowPlow into their adserver/social game/analytics
tool/whatever. SnowPlow is kind of the only game in town for this (because
it's webscale and costs scale predictably - they're just AWS costs).

If you have any other questions, feel free to shoot me an email -
alex@snowplowanalytics.com

------
runako
This looks very interesting; I've requested an invite.

One meta question: why not link the Vero logo to the main Vero site?

~~~
mgkimsal
I saw it was 'fixed' below, but it's an annoying side-effect of everyone using
"blog.*" as a blog address, and all default blog software assuming that 'home'
is /

WP4 will probably have a step in the install software saying 'should we link
the default home to /, or if not, where should we link to?' and everyone will
praise it as innovative, and sadly, given the state of blog software, it will
be. :/

~~~
chexton
You hit the nail on the head...that is exactly why it was heading to "/".

------
smit
I know these two guys for a few years. They know how to hustle and the problem
they are solving is huge. Its a no brainer for companies who want conversions
to use their system and utilize user triggered emails.

------
chrisrickard
Great idea, I have been thinking of something similar for a while.

------
ams6110
Quit annoying your users with unsolicited email.

~~~
chexton
We actually agree with you. There is fine line between sending emails that are
an annoyance and emails that hold value.

Email is an extremely effective tool for both marketing to and communicating
with your users. Our aim is to make event-based emails as targeted and
personal as possible. If a user receives an email pertinent to their personal
situation it's much less likely to be received as an annoyance or spam.

You need to respect the inbox but that doesn't mean you can't use it at all!

------
nicoslepicos
This type of user engagement is what Sailthru, one of the fastest growing NYC
startups, powers for several well known startups and larger companies - check
the client list:<https://www.sailthru.com/clients> (Disclaimer: I work on
product there). Our idea is to focus on user retention rather than user
acquisition - and we help people do this by making their messages actually
meaningful, and on the users' terms.

Part of this is triggers, which seems to be the focus of a lot of the
discussion here, but an even bigger piece is personalization. The idea with
personalization is to show the user content that is relevant to them. That
involves a big analytics and prediction component in terms of figuring out
their context, and their interests. We've seen some pretty crazy results in
terms of jumps in engagement that emerge from personalizing emails to users,
and also engaging users at the right points in time, in the right ways. This
is relevant to the triggers conversation as well, in terms of being able to
identify and personalize the triggers for each user. We haven't run explicit
experiments on that aspect in terms of magnitude, but a trigger system in a
vacuum won't give you the same type of power as a personalized/automated one.

Even things like personalizing WHEN you send an email to a user have a
dramatic effect on open/click rates. One of our clients experienced a 10%
increase in revenue (they were already making substantial revenue) by
leveraging Horizon Send Time (Our product that sends an email to a user when
they are most likely to open based on that users previous open habits).

The right combination of personalization to users, and appropriate event-based
triggers, can really improve the perception of users (oh wow the content being
sent to me is actually valuable!), and increase their happiness, and
subsequently their life-time value.

