“Where do I start?” This is the most common question I get from Mineful users. Today I understand better why this question arises so often. After using another company’s software for the first time, I felt a similar way.

It was a software to AB test things on your site. So many things I can test, should I put a video or image, should I use header A or B, the possibilities are endless. So I saw myself asking the account manager whether he had a few ideas or could pass on the most common AB tests.

Yesterday I talked to group of small businesses about business intelligence and how it can be applied to their business. I mentioned my 7 key metrics and at the end of the talk one person asked: “I’m not tracking any of those metrics, and I already see many complications arising in computing some of these, where do I start? My answer was clear, start small. Track one metric I told her and if all goes well, tackle the second one.

That’s what I did with this AB test software. I started small. I changed my homepage header. That seemed simple and had I accomplished that I would’ve kept delving into more. Unfortunately, there’s a javascript conflict and the page does not display well. My first baby first step failed, now I’m looking for alternatives.

When using Mineful, think the same way. Take one email trigger that you think will have the most impact or it seems like the easiest to implement and get it up and running. Start small. We have a client that started triggering emails based on when customers last purchased and today he has welcome series, post-purchase feedback, re-engagement, a rewards program, alerts when patterns change, and others. It took him two months to get to the point where he is today, but a few quick successes at the beginning led him to his (and our) success. Start small and grow fast.

Jaime Brugueras, Ph.D.
Co-founder, Mineful
@brugueras

BigCommerce customers can drive repeat purchases and better target shoppers with the newest BigCommerce app, Mineful. Mineful uses analytics and email triggers to bring users back to your online store using smart, data-driven and respectful campaigns. Mineful expands email, analytics and marketing functionalities not previously available to BigCommerce stores.

Mass marketing is dead. Event-driven and data-driven marketing not only provide greater results but it is a more respectful way to market to shoppers. Technology nowadays can help a company control the frequency, content, and offers that a shopper receives based on their historical behavior. Unfortunately, that technology is only available to bigger organizations. “Mineful’s goal is to level the marketing playing field with the likes of Target” says Jaime Brugueras, Ph.D. CEO of Mineful.

Using Mineful’s powerful and analytical email trigger app to segment and target more efficiently, BigCommerce clients can get more repeat sales from their current customers. Email someone too often or with irrelevant offer and they’ll quickly unsubscribe. By timing campaigns intelligently and using each shopper’s past behavior, one can create a system that markets your product automatically. It is a like a sales force working for you 24/7.

The integration seamlessly sends customer, product, and sales data into Mineful. The software then quickly displays a retail customer dashboard with metrics and trends regarding purchase behavior. Users then can configure rules to start triggering emails. Finally, Mineful makes it very easy to vary content, A|B test, and measure all the interaction to optimize each marketing campaign.

For more information visit Mineful’s product page or visit BigCommerce.com.

ReturnCustomer.com recently published one of our articles titled 3 Ways to Apply a ‘Moneyball’ Approach to Online Marketing. In it, we compare online marketing to how Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s used analytics to get the biggest bang for their buck. Online marketing is very similar to Sabermetrics in that one optimizes ROI in order to get more sales from our marketing budget. For example, finding undervalued players is like finding undervalued keywords and A|B testing is like sending players to the minor leagues. In Running your online marketing like the Oakland A’s we dig into 3 specific aspects: online advertising, cross-sell/upsell, and multivariate testing. In each one we provide specific actions a marketer can take to improve ROI.

If you liked the movie and would like to get a few ideas on improving marketing ROI then you’ll like the article. Go ahead and read the 3 Ways to Apply a ‘Moneyball’ Approach to Online Marketing.

Our friends at Software Advice have put together an article on their marketing automation software website that’s a must read. The article is titled Marketing Analytics vs. Website Analytics and it was written by Hubspot’s product manager Meghan Keaney. Mainly the article touches on how these two data sources are better used when put together. Their discussion focuses on measuring the ROI of your marketing initiatives in order to answer questions like:

• Are my readers becoming customers?
• How many people clicked on an email marketing campaign and bought something?
• Which results in more leads, social media, PPC, or organic search?
• What’s the ROI on each of my ad campaigns

It is a very interesting and must-read for every one in e-commerce. Check it out here.

In January of this year, we wrote a post Presenting the New Mineful. In it, we listed the features that our recently launched tool had to take action on data. It was a very exciting post to write.

Twenty seven updates later, we have not written about all the improvements we’ve done to help online merchants save customers and improve marketing campaigns. Here is a summary of all the new useful things you’ll find in Mineful.

5 New e-commerce Platform Integrations
Since January, we’ve added 5 new integrations with e-commerce platforms. Shopify and Yahoo were available in January. Now we connect with 5 more: Magento (and Magento Go), Volusion, 3D Cart and Big Commerce. Our REST API has gotten a lot of love recently also by allowing retailers and web apps to send generic events and engage customers based on custom events that happen on their sites.

New Sales Trends
Once your e-commerce data is in, Mineful quickly fills up your Sales dashboard. We’ve added trends for the following metrics: Sales, Number of Transactions, Revenue per Customer, and the Average Number of Purchases. You can select to view these sales metrics by month, quarter, or year. Learn more.

Frequency Metrics
We’ve also added a few metrics related to purchase frequency and customer lifetime value. In this dashboard you will find the number of customers who’ve purchased once, twice, and up to 5 or more times. You’ll also see how customer lifetime value changes over time as well as the number of new customers by period.

More Rules to Trigger Emails

Triggered emails and unique auto responders have always been a key focus for our team. We’ve made it extremely easy for anyone to set up autoresponders based on purchase events. Now you can use one of 11 different rules to trigger emails. You can trigger emails to customers based on their (click here for more details):

• Answer to a survey
• Total number of purchases
• The date of last purchase
• Total amount spend
• Last time they were contacted
• Custom events
• If and when they’ve been sent a specific email template
• Size of their purchase pattern changes

A|B Testing Just Got a Lot Easier
Say you are not sure of which subject line works best for your latest email marketing campaign. Holding everything else identical, now you can deploy your campaign and tell Mineful to send at random one subject line or 10 others. Then you can view your Email Metrics dashboard to understand which subject line worked best. Since you can easily create dozens of variations of the same email, changing subject lines, images, and offers, A|B testing has gotten a lot easier now.

Getting Feedback and Tracking Response
With our integrated survey tool, now you can trigger feedback based on purchase behavior. You can gather feedback 3,5, or any number of days after purchase. Since we dynamically create a link for each of your respondents, you’ll be able to integrate your customer characteristics with the feedback they provide AND send reminders to those that have not completed your (hopefully) short survey.

Other Enhancements

• A new portal page with engagement and email metrics
• A new widget after you log in with a daily customer retention tip
• Test your email templates by sending them to yourself and your colleagues
• A redesign of the main menu for easier access to the tools you use most
• Delete/solve alerts with the click of a button
• Enhanced support documentation all available from our homepage
• Ability to import the date when a customer first became a customer
• Send emails with delays, i.e. send an email 3 days after event (sale, login, etc) happens

We’ve been building Mineful based on what online merchants are telling us is important to them. Based on their invaluable feedback, we’ve improved in leaps and bounds over the last few months. Together our team is devoted to one thing and one thing only; helping our clients increase sales and customer engagement.

It is only going to get better, and we’re glad to have you with us.

Jaime Brugueras
CEO and Co-Founder

Only two days after our previous integration partner, today we are excited to announce the release of our seamless integration with Volusion to provide customer analytics and email automation to all Volusion users.

Mineful helps online retailers increase customer retention by using purchase history to drive highly targeted emails. The integration is quick and only takes a few minutes to set up. Once set up, your shopping cart data is downloaded every day and your reports and email automation rules updated automatically.

Key Benefits of Email Automation for Volusion

Increased Revenue – When you combine e-commerce, customer, and email response data you send more targeted emails and offers that lead to higher conversions rates and engagement.

Cost Efficiency – Get access to powerful analytics and email automation platform for the price of other more simplistic email marketing tools.

KEY FEATURES

Shopping cart integration – Seamlessly use data in your shopping cart to drive email marketing campaigns.

Customer analytics & reporting – Quick access to metrics trended over time. Metrics include: average number of purchases, revenue per customer, customer lifetime value, and many more.

A|B Testing – Easily create variations of email message to understand which offers, subject lines, and images work best for each type of campaign and customer segment.

Segmentation – Target buyers and personalize content based on preferences, behaviors and purchase-related data.

Automation – Create rules to trigger email messages and Mineful does the rest.

Email campaign metrics – Track emails sent, click through rates, and conversion rates for each of your email templates.

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest shopping cart analytics and email automation platform, Mineful for Magento and Magento Go.

Mineful helps online retailers increase customer retention and repeat sales by using buyer behaviors, preferences, and purchase history to drive highly targeted emails. The integration is seamless and only takes a few minutes to set up. Once set up, your shopping cart data is downloaded every day and your reports and email automation rules updated automatically.

Key Benefits of Email Automation for Magento

Increased Revenue – When you combine e-commerce, customer, and email response data you send more targeted emails and offers that lead to higher conversions rates and engagement.

Cost Efficiency – Get access to powerful analytics and email automation platform for the price of other more simplistic email marketing tools.

Time Savings – Automate email marketing campaigns based on recency, frequency, purchase pattern changes and even feedback. This allows you to send targeted offers at the right time without pushing any buttons. Purchase and customer metrics are trended over time and updated automatically so there is no need to clean, tabulate, and report on the data.

KEY FEATURES

Shopping cart integration – Seamlessly use data in your shopping cart to drive email marketing campaigns.

Shopping cart reporting & analytics – Quickly after your integration, you’ll have access to metrics trended over time. Metrics include: average number of purchases, revenue per customer, customer lifetime value, and many more.

A|B Testing – Easily create variations of email message to understand which offers, subject lines, and images work best for each type of campaign and customer segment.

Segmentation – Target buyers and personalize content based on preferences, behaviors and purchase-related data.

Automation – Create rules to trigger email messages and Mineful does the rest.

Email campaign metrics – Track emails sent, click through rates, and conversion rates for each of your email templates.

Data is an asset to any business. Many times, getting the information you need becomes a cost because of the difficulties of exporting, cleansing, analyzing and presenting the information. That’s why we’ve created a new introduction page into our portal. After you integrate your shopping cart, quickly you’ll access a few purchase and email campaign metrics updated in real-time, making it easy for e-commerce businesses to stay on top of e-commerce shopping cart metrics.

Shopping cart and email campaign metrics

Every time you log into Mineful, now you will have access to high-level customer, purchase and email campaign metrics. The tool also provides a more detailed e-commerce dashboard, but in this post I will only talk about the metrics on our “home” page.

Customer Segments

The first thing that catches my attention is a pie chart that segments your customers into three: New, Engaged, and Inactive. Every e-commerce business cycle is different which is why we’ve designed this segmentation process dynamically. The definitions are:

New customers – Those customers that were first entered into the system within your data’s average purchase frequency. So if your average purchase frequency is 60 days, new customers are those that made their first purchase in the last 60 days.

Inactive customers – We look, as in new customers, at the average purchase frequency from all your customers. If a customer is on the bottom 20th percentile in terms of average frequency, then they are considered inactive.

Engaged customers – Basically the rest, those that are neither New or Inactive.

Shopping Cart Metrics

These charts represent purchase metrics in trailing yearly periods. So if today is March 1, 2012 Current period is 3/1/2011 to 3/1/2012 and Previous period is 3/1/2010 to 2/28/2011.

Revenue per Customer – This chart displays the average revenue per customers in the last 365 days (Current) and 365 days before that (Previous).
Average # of purchases – This chart displays the average number of transactions in the last 365 days (Current) and 365 days before that (Previous).

Email Campaigns Metrics

Three metrics are displayed regarding the emails sent through Mineful.

Emails Sent – The total number of emails sent through the system.
Click Through – The number of unique emails that were clicked on one or more links in your e-mail expressed as a percentage of total emails sent.
Conversion Rate – The number of unique individuals who purchased after a click through expressed as a percentage of emails sent.

I’m curious to find out what other high-level metrics would you, as a e-commerce business owner or manager, like to access or find most beneficial. Please list some of them on the comments section.

Trigger-based email campaigns can help an online retailer increase clickthrough rates and sales. It also saves significant time since rules are set to automatically trigger emails based on events a customer takes with the brand.

There are various types of triggers, some more successful than others. In this post, we explain a few best practices to follow when an online retailer decides it is time to implement trigger email marketing campaigns.

What is trigger-based email marketing?

A triggered email is a message sent based on an event or purchase behavior done by a customer. Trigger based emails are used to deliver targeted content at the right time, rather than sending the same offers and messages to all clients. It has been shown that triggered emails are twice as more successful than regular emails based on ROI and clickthrough rates.

Types of Triggered Emails

Not too long ago we wrote a few examples of rules-based triggers and last year Practical Commerce published a nice post giving 6 examples of triggered emails. Essentially you have five categories of automatic emails. We have also expanded this list a bit more on this popular post of Rules that Matter Most in Customer Retention.

The simple/automatic emails – These include your welcome emails, purchase confirmation, and shipping updates. A clear event happens like a purchase or a sign up and your system quickly sends out the email.

Abandon shopping cart emails – A customer adds a few items to the cart but never purchases them. Simple and efficient technique. A few things to consider when implementing this type of solution is first to understand what is driving abandonment. Solve the problem, if there is one, rather than using this as a solution to fix it. If you will send an offer after shopping cart abandonment, make sure the customer has not purchased the items already. Finally, customers will catch on if you send them offers after abandonment and will greatly reduce your margins.

Order reminder emails – Order reminder emails is another powerful tool for retailers with replenishable products. If you are selling health/beauty, food/drug, apparel, office supplies or anything that needs reordering every x amount of time, remind your clients it is time to buy more. In our experience, it is one of the most successful tools for a marketer. Simply put, it sends an email with a product offer at the time when the shopper is “running out” of your product. It will depend on your product so find out on average how often each product is bought by customers and start your campaign a few weeks before and continue it a few weeks after (stop after purchase).

Customer attrition emails – When you have a customer that has not bought in a long time or suddenly has changed their buying pattern, these emails are intended to re-engage them with your brand. The first sign of churn is simple to find out since you can find out which customers haven’t bought in x number of months. The second type is a bit trickier because it involves pattern. Say a customer purchases once every quarter and it is almost the end of the quarter and they haven’t come to your site. You can remind them with good content and offers. For those customers you want to resuscitate, you need emails that take this unengaged segment and engages them again with your brand. They don’t have to be strong offers, it could just be a few useful emails to ‘get their feet’ wet again with your company.

Internet behavior emails – These are trigger emails after a shopper browses your site. When a logged in shopper browses your site and searches for products you don’t want to automatically send them an email. Give them time, make them feel that it is a coincidence that they’ve recently been on your site. Remind them about you and give them something useful, not an offer, something they can take home and remember you as the provider. They’ll know where to go after that.

Best Practices with Trigger Emails

To be successful at trigger based emails the number one rule is to set frequency limits. A recent study showed that the number one reason customers opt out is the frequency that the emails were being sent. Don’t spam them, send them relevant emails at the right time.

Your rules engine does not need to contain a thousand triggers. Set a few, ones you understand, and see which ones have the best results. Content is always king. I usually suggest my clients to have a set of emails that are not offer related but solely provide useful content to the readers. For example, if you are selling baby products, have a few trigger rules (after initial sign up) that sends them your best articles for say breastfeeding.

Finally, test, measure, and refine. Although there is much science here, creativity is key. Know which emails have highest clickthrough rates and which don’t. Find out which subject lines, content, and images have the most success. Use what works, dump what doesn’t, and continue creating.

Benefits of trigger based emails

Triggered emails will save you huge amounts of time. Once you have your most successful campaigns in place, you can set your rules and market to your customers without spending any time. Since you are targeting customers based on what and when they’ve purchased, your targeted emails will have significantly higher clickthrough rates. Higher clickthrough rates will give you higher sales. Now because these are existing customers, you are getting much more (hence increasing customer lifetime value) from each customer. This has a huge impact on your bottom line since acquiring a new customer costs 7x more than getting an extra purchase from an existing customer.

If you are interested in learning more about how Mineful can power your shopping cart with trigger email marketing campaign, contact our CEO at ceo(at)mineful.com.

Your boss, your client, or your business is assigned with the task of preparing an executive report of customer satisfaction. What should it have? Below we mention 5 key things to include on your customer satisfaction dashboard that will impress your boss, your client, and yourself and help your business increase customer retention and stay on top of the Voice of the Customer.

1. Key Performance Indicators

Most web-based customer satisfaction dashboards start with a few key metrics. These metrics provide is a great way in which various parameters can be tracked on a regular basis.

• Customer Satisfaction Index – takes into account all the information that is captured at an overall basis and creates a ‘one-number’ index
• Net Promoter Score – computes the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors
• Likelihood to purchase again – Very important for businesses with repeat purchases
• Likelihood to recommend – some argue that this is the single most important driver of satisfaction
• Overall satisfaction – On a scale from 0 to 10, how satisfied were you with XYZ company’s services

2. Segmentation

Taking a deeper dive into the previous metrics can help discover which customer segments, areas, or products have significantly higher/lower satisfaction scores. Once discovered, you can analyze why these differences exist and fix any existing issues.

3. Trends

Not only is it important to look at satisfaction levels at an absolute level in your customer satisfaction dashboard, but trending can help you gauge any differences in satisfaction through time. A customer satisfaction trend allows you to quickly assess if any strategies to improve satisfaction are having any effect on any of your metrics. Choosing the period is important and depends on the size of your sample at each time period. A smooth curve and amble sample sizes are recommended.

4. Key Drivers

What are the key drivers of satisfaction? In statistical words, this seeks to understand correlates most with your customer satisfaction index or any other satisfaction index. To start, a simple cross-tab analysis can clearly demonstrate any differences in satisfaction between groups or questions. More advanced marketing firms and businesses use correlations, factor analysis, and driver analysis to find out of many possibilities which columns in your data correlate (positively or negatively)

5. Comments Analysis

When your sample size is small, there is no need for advanced text analysis tools. Any business owner or manager should find the time to read through the comments written by their customers. A nifty trick is to sort comments by satisfaction index so you can quickly read through the comments of dissatisfied customers, and when sorted in the other direction, reads the comments of satisfied customers (those are the ones I enjoy reading). If your sample size makes it prohibitive to read all comments, consider using tag clouds and sentiment analysis tools.

At Mineful, we’ve built a customer satisfaction dashboards application with the tools needed to implement all the above mentioned points. Once you have a bit of survey data inside the tool, go ahead and build your customer satisfaction dashboard, share it with colleagues and clients, and listen to what your customers are saying.

Jaime Brugueras, Ph.D.
CEO, Mineful

Not sure how Mineful works?
Check out our Help Center and get started right away!