Engage by Mixpanel

#1

Post by frankdenbow » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#2

Post by edhallen » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 4:58 PM UTC

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.

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#3

Post by acgourley » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

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.

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#4

Post by duiker101 » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#5

Post by andymatuschak » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:07 PM UTC

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

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#6

Post by dkokelley » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:17 PM UTC

duiker101 wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#7

Post by suhail » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

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

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

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#8

Post by donnfelker » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

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. :)

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#9

Post by roam » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: Engage by Mixpanel

#10

Post by jhuckestein » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

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? :)