If there is one thing I love, it’s getting inside a brand new car. The scent, the lights, the gadgets, and of course turning the engine on for the first time. It’s exhilarating!

With our newly release, I hope that it will bring you just as much delight as taking the new car for a spin. I’m very excited to welcome you to the new Mineful. Go ahead, turn it on. Let us know how it feels.

So, what’s new?

More ways to connect your data
We’ve added the ability to upload data from two e-commerce platforms, Shopify and Yahoo. By leveraging the API these platforms provide, now you can start analyzing your store’s data in minutes. 70% of an analyst’s work is uploading and cleansing the data, we do it for you. For those online retailers not using Shopify or Yahoo, you can push data using our REST API.

Email Triggers
It’s automatic! Create rules to trigger different messages based on customer lifecycle and behavior. For example, send a survey 7 days after a purchase. Trigger an offer 30 days after an initial purchase, trigger a stronger offer if there hasn’t been a purchase in 90 days. Send a reward to clients who pass a certain threshold of total purchases. Combine them: send an email when one of your most important customers rates your service poorly or their likelihood of attrition is above a certain number. The possibilities are endless…

Lifetime Value Dashboard
Keep track of your customer metrics and see how they change over time. In real-time, track customer lifetime value, retention rates, average purchase, purchase frequency, number of customers saved, and overall satisfaction. If Mineful works, this dashboard will reflect it. You can also see email response metrics and compare templates to optimize your email offerings and content.

More Help
You’ll find a new redesign of our help pages focused on instantly helping you make the most out of Mineful. From start to end, you will find everything you need to put the foot on the pedal without having to log in.

Coming Soon…
This new edition of Mineful is just the foundation and there’s plenty to do. Next will come the important pieces that will make Mineful the most powerful analytical tool on the web.

Things to look for are more connectors like Volusion and Magento. More metrics in the lifetime value dashboard and the ability to segment those metrics by customer attribute.

We’ve now laid the groundwork to allow you to take action on your data — but this is only the beginning.

It’s going to be a wild ride, and we’re glad to have you with us.

Jaime Brugueras
CEO and Co-Founder

On July 14, the Mineful website and its analytical platform will have a major overhaul. Our new tool focuses on helping businesses retain customers. In short, Mineful can now be described as an analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction.

Inspired by our clients’ needs, we’ve added a way to easily integrate and analyze transactional data from CRMs and e-commerce platforms. We’ve pre-built a set of customer retention metrics to track in real-time. Mineful provides a way to quickly act on the information by displaying a list of customers that should be contacted along with tools to make this communication easy.

You might call it marketing automation or business intelligence, we just think it is an easy way for businesses of all sizes to increase customer retention. You know that just a 5% increase in retention can increase profitability by more than 75%, right? So what are you waiting for? You can watch our new video, take a tour, see our new pricing, or simply start using it for FREE.

Enhancements:

• Salesforce.com Integration – A way to easily integrate data from Salesforce.com.
• Interaction Table – This table displays customers at risk of leaving and gives you an easy way to communicate with them via email. In this release, only alerts based on transaction/sales data are displayed.
• Customer Retention Analysis – An analysis that predicts when a customer’s purchasing pattern has gone cold. It uses the customers’ transactions, segment, and seasonality to provide an accurate determination of attrition likelihood.
• Measure Page – This new measure page has various customer retention metrics pre-installed including: customer lifetime revenue, average purchase size, average frequencies, and customer retention rates.
• New Results Page – A quick way to view your survey results in real-time. You can dive into individual responses and read comments or view text results with the keyword density analysis.
• Putting comments on dashboards – Allows you to write content inside a dashboard. You can write your own observations about the results you’re getting and customize it with a little knowledge of HTML and CSS.
• Can use the Back button – The Mineful application previously existed all in one page. Now each link has a separate page allowing you to use the back button on your browser! This was major reconstruction, but it will speed up the application.

Mineful dashboards can now be viewed on the iPad, iPhone, and other non-flash devices. Mineful users can now access their customer, satisfaction, and loyalty information anytime, anywhere on-the-go in a timely manner without compromise. There is no App to download or install. Just use the Safari browser and you can immediately spring into action.

If you are in an iPad right now, go ahead and check out one of our interactive examples. You will now be able to: view your reports in real-time, share via a simple web link, create tabs to make navigation easy, and use a wide variety of graphic styles, all in the iPad.

Surveys for mobile phone users gives you real-time feedback
Understanding that more than 40% of Americans are using smart phones, it is important to reach customers while on a desktop or on the go. Therefore, Mineful has built-in capability to detect if a survey is taken on a mobile device: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and others. It transforms the online survey into a user-friendly format so it can be easily read and answered on a small screen for mobile device.

Before this enhancement, surveys would look great on a big monitor but looked small on a mobile screen. Mobile surveys in Mineful now:

• - Detect automatically that a survey is taken on a mobile device
• - Adjusts font-sizes, zoom, and logos to best fit a mobile device
• - Automatically displays only one question per page
• - Uses your survey colors and other formatting you’ve done
• - Supports all 15 question types

Send user-friendly surveys to smart phone users

Do you have a smart phone? Try our new user survey (http://mineful.nisurvey.com) on your mobile phone and compare it with the online version. Lovely. All of the advantages of using Mineful still apply when taking the survey on a mobile device. You still can:

• - Integrate pre-loaded information about respondents
• - Create surveys in multiple languages and store all results in one table
• - Create web-based survey dashboards and see trends/results in real time.
• - Click away to more than 20 different types of analysis
• - …and lots more

Send your first mobile survey by signing up for a FREE Account today!

This latest release includes text piping, creating advanced logic rules to hide or show questions, optionally creating an alternative thank you page, and using gauge charts on our marketing indices.

Enhancements:

• Gauge Charts – Give your significant other this eye candy gauge charts.
• Text Piping – Allows you to carry text from the answer to a previous question to a subsequent question.
• Advanced Logic For Hide/Show – Build complex logic rules for showing questions and pages based one or multiple criteria.
• Alternative Thank You Page – Used to lead respondents to an alternative final page. This option is useful when a set of respondents do not meet specific criteria for your research.
• Add/Delete Multiple Validation Fields – Two weeks ago we introduced this new feature. Today, we enhance it by allowing you to add or delete these fields once created.

Fixes:

• Chart type reverts to previous one on dashboards
• When creating a survey from a previously created one with a general data file, do not copy first question
• Translated choices not displayed in multiple languages
• When creating a survey from a previously created one, carry the question weights
• When one Adds a choice from the scrollable list, list goes back to the top

1. Data Integration – Sometimes the most valuable data sits in the databases of the companies that you work for. And while clients may not know this, you are surely aware of the fact that combining demographic data with sales data can give you a lot of insight into the manner in which the business is going. It helps you understand your overall database of customers so that you can devise segment specific strategies if there is a need to do so. The Mineful feature also allows you to merge survey data with existing information that the client may have about the customers. For example if your client is a telecom company and you have just conducted a customer satisfaction survey for them, you can combine usage data with the satisfaction scores and look at the attitudinal data from a Heavy-medium-light user perspective. Alternately, you can also look at the kind of plans that the customers are using and look at satisfaction scores based on the kind of usage plan that they have taken.

2. Real-Time Dashboards – The usual procedure is something like this: gather the data, import it to statistical software, look at the results, transfer results to Excel to create charts, and send to PowerPoint. This can take hours every time a client requests information. Plus, Excel charts and data is not appealing. It also does not update automatically. Mineful allows you to create marketing dashboards that are not only good and pleasing to look at but also communicate a large amount of information in a small chart. In addition, online marketing dashboards also allow you to present analyzed data as it is being gathered in real time. You can export the dashboards to use in presentations as well.

3. Research Branding – Mineful is a company that is ever evolving. And towards this end we value and understand your need to customize your research and brand it. When you use Mineful you can use your logo or the client logo on all the dashboards and marketing analysis that you do. In addition to that, if you feel that you have a specific analysis requirement that the marketing analysis software does not currently have, you can always contact the Mineful team for some added and special features on request.

4. Client Access and Permissions – Client-based security can be set for your research so that specific clients are allowed to see the reports you create for them. Additionally, you can assign role-based permissions within a client in order to control the type of usage that person has access., For example, read-only vs analyst or region manager vs corporate executive.

5. Professional Analytics – You know your regressions from your t-test to your chi-square test. Plus, you need simple frequencies, cross-tabulations, and personalized indices. At the click of a button, Mineful lets you run analysis on customer, survey, and marketing data. Simply select the analysis of interest, enter a few parameters, and there it is – your impressive chart with your analysis results. Modify chart parameter like title, colors, and chart type to your liking. Finally, save your report and share with your client. That was easy wasn’t it?

This latest release includes the ability to hide/show questions, publish your survey in 7 new languages, run weighted frequency distributions, add multiple validation fields prior to starting a survey, and display choices with a scrollable list.

Enhancements:

• Hide/Show questions provides the ability to not display a question based on an integrated data field. For example, if my customer base contains segments, I can ask specific questions to each segments.
• 7 New Languages: create your survey in multiple languages and store all responses in one database. New languages include: Chinese, Polish, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
• Weighted Frequencies: Use the choice weights you assign and create weighted frequency distribution charts.
• Multiple Validation Fields: Create multiple “passwords” to your survey. Upload a spreadsheet and have the survey taker enter for example a username and passord, or employee id, name, and key.
• Scrollable List: Ability to display choices from a multiple-choice multiple-answer question as a scrollable list. Great when your list of choices is veeery long.

Fixes:

• Support for Latin characters on dashboards
• Second time one exports a chart was not working
• When hitting back on an integrated survey
• Migrate database to UTF-8
• Charts not displaying on Weighted Average Analysis

Most of the customer satisfaction surveys and products that you are likely to come across in the market are likely to have complicated algorithms for calculating the customer satisfaction index. But in all this ‘big’ talk, you are likely to get none of the company professionals to explain the specific analysis that is used to arrive at the customer satisfaction index. This is mainly because these customer satisfaction products are created by third parties. The whole thing is covered up by saying that it is a ‘black box’ and that they are not allowed to give out the details of the calculation.

While some of the customer satisfaction models actually use good partial correlations and regressions to arrive at the factors that are important in driving customer satisfaction indices, the fact is that the overall satisfaction is merely always a weighted average of the top four or five questions about the product quality, experience, differentiation, recommendation or loyalty.

It is therefore best to be able to calculate the satisfaction index with the knowledge of the elements that go into it. In addition to that, a programs or algorithms that allow you to set the weights based on the needs of your specific industry are better.

The Mineful Customer Satisfaction Index
The Mineful Satisfaction Index is calculated in a simple manner. It takes in a total of at most 5 questions. As a user you can enter the weight that you want to attach to the specific question. For example, you may choose to have the following questions at an overall level for the customer satisfaction index and the corresponding weights.

Based on the customer responses that are received, each response is allotted a value of the rating scale minus one times the question weight.
The sum of this for all the question is then scaled to produce a 100-point index. See formula below and an example for one response.

The overall customer index is then calculated by adding the weighted average responses and then scaling it
to 100-point scale. The weights are automatically standardized to add up to 1. See final calculation below:
(100/7)((7-1)*.25 + (5-1)*.35 + (1-1)*.15 + (6-1)*.15) = 52.14

The Mineful software allows you to create this customer satisfaction index at the click of a button. It can allow you to trend the indices over time and plot them so that you can see how your company is doing over time. In addition to that you can also calculate the customer satisfaction index for different segments like males, younger customers and the like to understand the customers better.

If you know the specific factors that have gone into calculating the customer satisfaction index, you will know what you need to do to take corrective action. With the knowledge about the specific aspect that you need to work on, you can create retention strategies to ensure that you do not lose customers. For example, if the customer satisfaction index is low because the customers are seeing your product or service as a ‘me too’ then you need to ensure that you create some sort of differentiation (real or perceived) in the minds of the customers. Alternately, if there is low satisfaction with the product, you may have to go back on the bench and try and come up with some innovative variants with more resources allocated in research and development.

Are you worried you are about to delete survey data? Do not worry, unless you are doing one of the following 5 actions that allow you to delete survey data in Mineful.

1. Delete the Survey – If you delete a survey, you will lose all data collected or uploaded into that survey.

2. Delete the Published Source – You have gathered data say through various links or email list. If you delete a link or email list, all responses gathered through that sources will be deleted.

3. Delete Questions – If you delete a question while editing the survey, all the data for that question will be deleted.

4. Delete Choice – If you delete a choice, then all respondents who answered that choice will now have a blank.

5. Delete a Record – In the Data Views, while viewing the data record by record, you can delete a specific record by clicking on the red “X” at the top menu. This will delete all the responses for that specific respondent, i.e. you delete a row in the data.

When William Sealy Gosset published the t-test in 1908, he was thinking business (specifically Guiness’), but not necessarily marketing. More than 100 years later, this test has found its way into many fields including marketing. In this post you will find two examples of applications of the t-test in marketing. For more information about the t-test visit this wiki and for details on how to run a t-test using Mineful, go to our t-test analysis page.

Example 1: Pre-Post Marketing Campaign
You have started a new marketing campaign and are seeing the sales numbers come in. The numbers look slightly higher year-to-year and you want to know if they are indeed different or are they slightly higher by pure chance. Since you are taking measurements on the same “process”, but in two different occasions, you want to run a “Paired t-test”. The paired t-test eliminate the effects other confounding factors by matching observations of similar traits. For example, sales in October 2009 vs sales in October 2010. Or in observational studies, the blood pressure of a person before the pill paired with the blood pressure of that same person after the pill. Join that with many other people or months of sales data, and you have a paired sample.

Basically, the t-test will determine whether the average sales numbers are significantly different before and after the new marketing campaign. Go ahead, upload or connect your before and after campaign data and determine if something has changed significantly.

Example 2: Average Satisfaction Between Two Groups
You have survey data and used the Average by Category analysis to see the average overall satisfaction by gender, market, customer segment, or other group. The results show that in Chicago the average satisfaction is 5.6 and in Madison 6.1. But is the .5 difference significantly different? Should I take action and question my service people in Chicago because of this difference? A two-sample t-test allows you to test if this difference occurred by pure chance or if there is something else that’s driving customer satisfaction lower in Chicago.

There are many other uses of the t-test in marketing. Want to share one with the internet? Comment below and tell us how you used the t-test in your marketing research.