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

Shopify is an e-commerce hosted platform that allows you to easily set up an online store. From custom templates to a secure and reliable online store, everything you need to run an online store is available on Shopify.

They recently made Fast Company’s 50 most innovative companies list in the retail category and are growing fast with more than 20,000 online stores today.

If you can’t find a functionality on the Shopify e-commerce platform, you will sure find it on the Shopify App Store. The app store provides an easy way for retailers to add functionality to their shopping cart to improve business and operations. You will find apps for shipping, marketing, customer service, inventory, reporting, social, and other business needs.

Now Shopify online retailers will be able to add Mineful as a Shopify app to send targeted emails based on customer behavior.

Timing is Everything
Consumers are bombarded with email offers. It is estimated that 15-20% of consumers opt out of email lists mainly due to email frequency. Retailers need to use email as way to engage consumers rather than a channel to send coupons. As any marketer knows, timing of the communication is key. Big retailers like Target understand this and use their own analytical tools to segment their customers and send the offers at the right time. Mineful provides smaller retailers with predictive analytics and segmentation tools that compare with those of the bigger companies.

Content is Still King
Once you know when is the best time to send an email campaign, content is what matters most. Most retailers do not have time to test whether subject line “30% off new t-shirts” or “free shipping on new t-shirts” is more successful. The difference can mean thousands of dollars. Varying the sentences, images, and products offered inside the email is a nightmare if not impossible for any retailer. Mineful allows you to easily create different variations of emails to A|B|C test all your communications.

Advanced Marketing Tools for the Small Retailer
Mineful is a powerful tool to segment customers and optimize your email marketing campaigns. It will sync your Shopify store data and help you leverage your own data to gain a competitive edge.

As with any Mineful account, it is free to try for 14-days. Once set up, Mineful goes on auto-pilot to trigger your campaigns and once it starts measuring responses, it adjusts to deliver the best message to each individual customer.

Quick Example of Email Segmentation
You’re sending an email 30-days after a purchase of a custom t-shirt. Which subject line is best?
A: “25% off your next order”
B: “Free shipping on custom t-shirts”

Mineful triggers these emails 30-days after every purchase of your custom t-shirt. By tracking which shoppers click on each email, our algorithm automatically adjusts to send the best email to each shopper based on their characteristics.

More Benefits for Online Retailers

• Measure, learn, and improve marketing efforts
• Repeat what works, dump what doesn’t; clear visibility of email marketing efforts
• No IT involvement needed; Mineful is in the cloud
• Easy to set up and use
• Analytical power to the small business
• Easily segment your customers based on purchase and customer information
• Mineful marketers and statisticians at your service

Mineful will continue to share best practices and training and educational materials with Shopify users of Mineful, to help them increase customer retention and repeat sales.

Analytics is a competitive advantage in online marketing. We are happy to partner with such an innovative company like Shopify and make Mineful available in the Shopify App Store.

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

Brad Anderson has written a great piece about Mineful. After meeting him in Dallas, Brad and I exchanged a couple of emails and had a few phone conversations. His description of what Mineful is and how it helps our clients is unparalleled.

Starting from the title, “Be Mindful of Mineful” to his story of how Mineful came to be and ended up in Dallas startup incubator Tech Wildcatters program is very interesting. All our features and benefits are explained very simplistically.

Finally, he ends by inviting everyone to Pitch Day coming on Tuesday, December 6th at the Magnolia Theater in Dallas. The event will also be live streamed at ustream.tv. We’ll get a post up here with the live stream.

Read Brad’s article “Be Mindful of Mineful: A brief in predictive customer retention“.

Mineful, an analytical application focused on customer retention, today announced that Chief Executive Officer Jaime Brugueras will present at the 2011 O’Reilly Strata “The Business of Data” Summit, to be held September 20-21 at The New York Marriot Marquis. Brugueras’ presentation is part of Strata Launch Pad where 5 companies got selected to get on stage and tell the world what they’re up to.

Brugueras will discuss the big gap that exists today with analytics and benefits and how Mineful is bridging this gap by using predictive alerts and actions to retain customers. Viewers will also get an ‘under the hood’ look at Mineful’s algorithms and how they are giving e-commerce websites a competitive advantage and higher customer lifetime values.
For more information on the 2011 O’Reilly Strata ‘The Business of Data’ Summit, please visit http://strataconf.com/summit2011/.

About Mineful
Mineful helps companies use data to retain customers. No reports! An analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction. Mineful integrates with major CRM and e-commerce platforms, uses its algorithms to detect customers at risk, and then provides the communication tools needed to entice customers to buy back from you. For additional information, go to http://www.mineful.com/.

UPDATE: Here is the presentation

We’ve never written an article that can describe what Mineful does better than Tech.li’s Olena Javorska’s article. She does a great job at describing the problem, the solution, and the benefits. She then goes into giving some inside scoop on the team. The article includes our homepage video, photos, and exclusive content.

Tech.li is a great organization that educates and promotes startups in the Midwest. This week they are inaugurating a new event to discuss the current state of Chicago tech, connect entrepreneurs, and educate. Our CEO will be there sharing what Mineful is up to. Join us and Chicago Alderman Danny Solis this Thursday at ifbyPhone’s HQ – 300 W Adams, Chicago. See you there!

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.

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!

We are looking for creative, dynamic, and highly motivated graduate students to join Mineful for a summer internship. More specifically, we are seeking people interested in solving real-world problems using Computer and Mathematical Sciences. The interns will help develop and implement algorithms in the following areas: customer attrition models, text mining, and segmentation.

The ideal applicant will have a passion to take on a hard challenge and enjoys working with different technologies. Has the ability to work with minimal supervision and enjoys working with others in a group.

This is a full-time paid position. Start and end dates are flexible within the summer of 2011. To apply email your website or resume to info(at)mineful.com.

Requirements:
BS in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematical Science or related field
Some experience will be good, but if you know your stuff you are in
Working knowledge of SQL. We use MySQL, but any major RDBMS will do
Java, Python, C++, or any other program language to implement algorithms
Knowledge of basic statistical, mathematical, and data mining principles
Ability to Learn and go outside the box to find a solution
Team player

Pluses:
Working with R
Knowledge of analytical applications in marketing
Entrepreneur-driven
Knowledge of artificial intelligence principles and business rules engines

Will Conan, Obama, a Bayesian model, or YOU win our bracket?

We invite all quants, statisticians, sabermetricians to put their methodology to test against both analytical and pure intuition picks. We intend to answer this question in the scope of the NCAA March Madness (and make dubious extensions to the world of business). Join for a chance to win bragging rights, an interview, PR, and if interested a free Mineful account. We have created a contest and today we challenge you, or anyone you think is an expert at March Madness to join.

It’s public, it’s free, and it takes less than 10 minutes to complete.
All you have to do is:

1- Login (yahoo, google, or facebook)
2- Create your bracket here ; group id: 98116

Who said Statistics wasn’t fun? Madness!