Sunsetting features to focus on product analytics

Published January 13, 2021

A year from now, on Jan 1, 2022, we’ll remove the Messages & Experiments feature from Mixpanel. This post outlines:

Note: while mobile A/B testing is affected, the Experiments Report is not, and will remain part of our analytics offering.

Since the early days of Mixpanel, customers have relied on the product to understand their users’ behaviors and needs. It started with the ability to analyze usage trends and funnels with only a few clicks, then expanded quickly to additional types of analysis.

In 2012, we launched a Messages & Experiments add-on (called “Engage” at the time) to make it simple to send emails and push notifications, and conduct mobile A/B tests, based on users’ actions. Mobile and web apps were relatively new at the time, and we were filling a crucial “engagement marketing” gap for customers, and in the market at large.

Since then, the number of digital products has skyrocketed. With that, so has their level of sophistication and their importance as revenue generators for the companies that make them. Product and engineering teams are growing at a record pace to fuel all this, and to build better products, faster.  

As a result, Mixpanel has been fortunate to benefit from more demand for a deeper understanding of how products are used. In 2020 alone, we shipped 92 product enhancements based on customer requests, including a full UX redesign that made every report simpler, faster, and more powerful. And we’re thrilled that these changes are resonating.

As requests for new types of analysis have grown, we’ve found it hard to keep pace with Messages & Experiments. A few years ago, we started filling the gap by integrating with other companies that are singularly-focused on that market. Thanks to their focus, their products have improved at an incredible rate. 

From a broader business perspective, what was a single market in 2012—”product analytics and engagement”—has split into two markets that are each even bigger. Product analytics, especially, is growing faster than ever with the economy’s rapid shift to digital.

Eventually, we asked ourselves the question that guides all of our product decisions: how can we best prioritize to deliver the most value to our users?

Putting emotions aside, the answer was clear. Doubling down on product analytics and deepening our integrations with other best-in-class tools was the right path forward. Trying to excel in both areas would only compromise our ability to deliver what the majority of customers wanted most: answers to more and more questions about their users, enabling them to ship smarter and faster.

This desire for more “answers” spans businesses of all sizes, from tech giants like Uber and vrbo, to startups like mmhmm, and growth companies like Personal Capital, and Talkspace.

We understand this will be a change for those of you who rely on Messages & Experiments today, and we’re committed to helping you along the way. Here’s what we’ve done to ease the transition:

Even though Mixpanel will no longer be able to build or send messages for you, it still offers the best message targeting and impact measurement on the market. Through our integrations, you can create a loop that ensures you deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time—then measure whether your messages drove the desired down-funnel results in terms of purchases, engagement, or anything else you’re optimizing for.

This starts by creating cohorts in Mixpanel that represent any group of users you want to reach, based on actions they have or have not taken. Once you’ve defined the criteria, you can send these cohorts to any of our messaging partners who will deliver emails, push notifications, etc. to the right people and devices. From there, our messaging partners will push the data about who received, and engaged with, those messages back into Mixpanel for further analysis.

That’s a very brief summary of all that’s possible. To learn more about our preferred messaging partners and use cases for pairing their products with Mixpanel, check out this page on our website.

While we have eight messaging integrations, we’ve developed deeper relationships with six companies who offer certified integrations, as well as discounts for new customers transitioning from Messages & Experiments. As a next step, we recommend picking the one that best meets your needs.

Below, each partner has provided a summary of their product and a link to a web page where you can get more details on their integration and offer. (Partners are listed in alphabetical order.)

Airship gives brands the user-level data, AI orchestration, A/B testing, and services they need to deliver personalized & relevant journeys across mobile, email, SMS & more.

Insider bridges the gaps between web, mobile web, app, messaging, email, and advertising channels to deliver tailored customer messaging and experimentation.

Iterable enables brands to create, execute, and optimize sophisticated cross-channel campaigns with a focus on data flexibility, personalization, and tailored journeys.

Leanplum allows mobile-first brands to create cross-channel campaigns and maximize conversion through complex A/B testing. 

MoEngage offers AI-powered customer journey orchestration and personalization capabilities at scale across many channels like mobile push and email.

OneSignal is built for Growth and Product teams to send push notifications & in-app messages at scale and in real-time, as well as marketing emails and SMS.

We also have eight experimentation integrations, out of which three companies offer certified bi-directional integrations that let you analyze the impact of experiments on product usage, as well as sync cohorts from Mixpanel to expose your users to more targeted experiments, A/B test or feature flags. Partners are listed in alphabetical order.

Kameleoon lets digital product owners and marketers run experiments to quickly and automatically personalize their website and wider digital experience to the needs of each and every one of their visitors.

Taplytics enables product, engineering, data, and marketing teams to execute client and server-side A/B tests, reduce risk through controlled feature rollouts, and deliver personalized messages across any device.

VWO enables companies to run A/B, multivariate and split tests across websites, mobile apps, and server-side and also understand customer journeys via heatmaps and session-recordings.

Thank you for being a valued Mixpanel customer. We’re excited to show you how our focus on product analytics will put even more powerful, yet simple, analysis in your team’s hands. If there’s anything we can do to help with your transition to a new messaging solution, please don’t hesitate to reach out.