
Engage by Mixpanel - frankdenbow
https://mixpanel.com/engage/
======
flyosity
This looks pretty great, just one thing I wanted to share is that advanced
segmentation and re-marketing in the enterprise email world has been the norm
for more than a few years. I used to work at Bronto (one of many enterprise
email marketing software companies) and one of our key features was an
advanced segmentation/workflow engine to let customers easily set up things
like this:

1) Automatically send a 10% off coupon to people 5 days after they put an item
in their shopping cart but didn't buy it

2) If they convert from that coupon and buy what they initially planned to buy
5 days ago we add them to a list of "win-back buyers"

3) If they convert from that coupon and add additional items we add them to a
list of "win-back buyers plus"

4) Wait 3 days and then kick-off a multi-month custom email marketing campaign
with various deals, offers and products tailored to what they've bought in the
past, their average purchase price, geographic location, sex, age and any of
dozens of other metrics we'd have for that user

5) Ask if they want to opt-in to coupons via SMS, send those coupons out the
next time they log into the e-commerce website, browsing around before
purchase

...and it just goes on from there. This type of long-term marketing/re-
marketing, segmentation and advanced campaign management is precisely what
email marketers do every day. Most people running email marketing campaigns
for ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers have been doing customer
lifecycle management across various channels (email, direct mail, online
advertising, social and more) for awhile and they're very good at it. When you
get an email in your inbox from a big retailer you've shopped at before, you
may not know why you got the email but there's a good chance you were targeted
via specific segmentation and targeting engines across over a dozen datapoints
about your past behavior.

And one scary thing most people may not be aware of is that at the very high-
end of enterprise email marketing systems, they have "data augmentation"
features so that if you only know someone's email address you can pay other
companies to give you the rest of their marketing profile, like name, address,
age, ethnicity, purchasing behavior (like when you scan VIP cards at
supermarkets or use gift cards), and even your full credit profile including
credit scores, credit card types, previous addresses, loans you have, what
type of car you drive, how big your mortgage is, etc. In fact, CheetahMail,
which is the Rolls Royce of email marketing software used by all the largest
companies in the world, is actually _owned by Experian_ the company that has
all your credit information. <http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/index.html>

~~~
drumdance
A friend of mine founded a company that does email augmentation. Went from
zero to acquisition in a year. Data is valuable.

~~~
mtrimpe
What are they called?

I'm only aware of FullContact but would love to learn about some more
companies that do this.

Searching for it on Google doesn't really seem to work well...

~~~
drumdance
[http://www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/datalogix-buys-
con...](http://www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/datalogix-buys-connection-
engine-offline-to-online-data-platform/)

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roam
Off-topic, but a heads up to the Mixpanel team: your announcement email
_sucked_. A single big image containing all text? Come on. You guys can do
better than that.

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edash
Intercom is a company specifically focused on user visualization,
communication, and engagement. Worth noting for anyone interested in this
product who isn't a current Mixpanel user.

<https://www.intercom.io/>

~~~
tolas
We use intercom and have been very happy with it. I must admit though being
able to combine those features with the power of mixpanel is intriguing.

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jhuckestein
I love this. In fact, I love everything Mixpanel recently did. They introduced
Flow which made Google Analytics obsolete for us. Then they introduced People
tracking which replaced our admin dashboard with various tables and graphs
about

They also did something that wasn't really announced: you can now drill down
into every single event a user has ever triggered and look at all the
properties. It always baffled me that this wasn't possible in the stream view
or when segmenting down to individual events. I use mixpanel not only for
reporting but also as a first aid resource when something breaks for a user.
It's great to be able to see what they did when exactly and under what
circumstances.

I think it's brilliant that Mixpanel lets you measure the impact of email
campaigns without having to track opens and send them to mixpanel as events.
If there was a way to send emails in response to certain events (such as
purchased item X) and then to refer back to those events from within the
email, I'd remove all lifecycle emails from my code and just use Mixpanel for
that. Can we get that, Suhail? Please? :)

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gorkemcetin
Very nice - I've been following Mixpanel closely for a few months and like
what they have done so far. While mobile analytics, customer engagement and
retention calculation is very hot nowadays, technology is in its infancy (as
opposed to web analytics).

FYI - Countly (<http://count.ly>) is a real-time mobile analytics platform
which is open source, which makes it possible to install it on your servers.
It can track events (eg ARPU, revenues, levels passed etc), together with any
data that can be collected from iOS & Android devices.

I'm pretty sure we have many things to learn from each other, and come up with
a standard definition of how to track mobile devices and a consistent
terminology - which is something lacking. There are also unsolved issues like
how to import and export data, to migrate from one provider to another.

Wish you best of luck! :)

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andymatuschak
Using push notifications for marketing purposes or to send unsolicited
promotional information is a violation of the App Store guidelines.

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duiker101
Wow... this is EXACTLY(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177548>) the
thing I have been planning to work on in the last 4/5 months... Time to think
of something else... I hope they will make a good job, I like Mixpanel.

~~~
dkokelley
A new entrant to the market is not actually a bad thing. It validates the
usefulness of the offering, and draws attention to the market. There is lots
of room for segmentation and specialization in this space. Find something that
the competitors are doing poorly and beat them on that. For a certain subset
of the market, that feature is vital, and you are the only one doing it right.

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suhail
Hey HN, you can watch this video to see it in action right here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RaFex-
Kr4UQ)

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acgourley
Very cool. Immediately I can think of flexible customer service, user research
and message testing applications. It's something a product team can do without
spinning up a server side engineering task, which is great.

What I don't quite understand is some of the messaging on the page suggesting
you might use this to power your auction application. If you're building that
app, you're going to need a whole backend good at this kind of thing. Engage
is more like duct-tape... a way to try a new message timing, new wording, or
maybe even cover for a broken system somewhere.

I bring this up in case someone at mixpanel is listening. I suggest you make
the price for low message rates high, so you can properly monetize the above
cases in proportion to the value created.

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edhallen
It's good to see Mixpanel building out its people analytics offering, but more
broadly good to see momentum in the trend towards measuring the impact of
email and other communications on customer behavior. To this point in time, to
many companies send emails in a spray and pray fashion - not knowing if they
really impacted customer behavior on feature usage, purchases, etc.

We're working on the some similar problems at Klaviyo (customer lifecycle
management / targeting customers and measuring the impact). One of the most
interesting related things we've seen is that measuring the impact of emails
goes along way towards eliminating debate about email frequency or whether to
send campaigns - because you can always just send the campaign to a subset and
actually know if it works.

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donnfelker
Been wondering if something like this existed. Looks like they found a new
customer if it works like I think it does. :) Now.. they'll get my fees once I
hit 10K users. :)

