Engage by Mixpanel

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

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.

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/

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? :)

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! :)

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

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.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...

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.

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.

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. :)