

Mixpanel Lets Devs Deliver Targeted Messages Through New In-App Notifications - garry
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/mixpanel-in-app-notifications/

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username223
Just the other day, I was lamenting the fact that there weren't enough
targeted ads on my phone. Thankfully these brave and selfless people have
provided the answer.

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suhail
These aren't ads. They're app specific notifications.

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rhizome
Noted.

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prlambert
How does this compare with what Intercom is offering? Is this a move to
compete directly?

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suhail
Intercom offers a way to directly communicate with your customers and have a
conversation with them but this does not. In-app notifications are a one-way
message to broadcast information in a beautiful way.

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te_chris
Don't take this the wrong way as I really like Mixpanel the product, but with
the amount of buzzwords in those two sentences I have no idea what you just
said.

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pgopalan
I use both Mixpanel and Intercom.

Mixpanel has been excellent at showing marketing metrics in a typical SaaS
funnel (Attention - e.g. visitors/locn./browser a consumable Google Analytics,
Acquisition - e.g. did the visitor click the sign up button and become a new
user, Retention - how often did the user come back). Mixpanel also has cohort
analysis - users that signed up on a certain day, how long have they have been
active/inactive and by extension you can calculate the churn. Depending on how
you instrument your Mixpanel you can track user activity and understand
product engagement. So if you release a new feature and there is no clicks on
it, Mixpanel will show you that and you can remove it.

Intercom overlaps with Mixpanel in providing Acquisition information and
Activity information (number of sign ins, last sign in etc). What is awesome
about Intercom is the messaging feature. You can simply select one or more
users and compose your responsive email (and you'll be shown a window on how
the email looks in a mobile device) and send the email and track email
metrics. To a product manager or customer success person at a SaaS business
this is a great way to communicate with users. Intercom also has auto
responders. So you can send welcome emails after a sign up (Mailchimp!).

In my opinion, Intercom is heading towards combining Mixpanel, Zendesk and
Mailchimp all in one in the most elegant and practical way I can think of.
Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are very similar.

(a self-plug: at kanban2go, we open sourced our mixpanel rails engine here:
[https://github.com/kanban2go/mixpanel-
rails](https://github.com/kanban2go/mixpanel-rails))

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KaoruAoiShiho
I thought / had hoped that this would be intercom competition. What are the
chances of mixpanel adding that? I love Mixpanel and would really like to
centralize my analytics / customer communications.

