GBM optimizes its investment products to increase user engagement and retention

The leading brokerage firm in operations on the Mexican Stock Exchange, GBM is a financial services company that offers investment and wealth management solutions to individuals, corporations and institutional investors. GBM has more than 37 years of experience in the market and is committed to providing its clients with access to cutting-edge tools and platforms for investing in a safe, intelligent, and simple way.

With multiple teams working across the same products, GBM needed to go beyond basic insights to track the hidden dynamics of user behavior with clear metrics available to everyone. As promoters of economic growth and social impact, the company also wanted to identify areas of customer friction to deliver the best platform experience so it could continue to invest in its clients, its employees, and Mexico.

By using Mixpanel to track specific user actions, such as the most bought and sold stocks, GBM is able to provide relevant notifications to customers. By utilizing Mixpanel to track the adoption of new features, retrieve error information, and monitor user engagement, GBM has been able to adopt a new data-driven approach and see improvement across the board.

• Improved user engagement
• Targeted and personalized communication with customers
• Data-driven decision making
• Increased platform retention and customer loyalty

What are the main ways you use Mixpanel in your business?

We offer our customers three main investment products: trading, smart cash, and wealth management. We use Mixpanel to decide how to optimize our products, which is why we have approximately 50 to 60 employees using the platform across around 10 applications. The analytics provided by Mixpanel are valuable in understanding user behavior, identifying potential issues, and enhancing overall service quality.

For instance, with Mixpanel, we can see the most bought and sold stocks, enabling us to provide relevant notifications to customers. So if, say, Tesla is the most bought stock and its value goes up by 2%, we can send a notification to inform users of this development.

We also use Mixpanel to track the adoption of new features, retrieve error information, and view how frequently users visit the app. This data helps us prioritize features and make effective product decisions.

How do you use Mixpanel to send push notifications?

We use Mixpanel to send push notifications by creating cohorts with specific properties. These cohorts are groups of users who share common characteristics or behaviors. For example, we can create a cohort of users who have money in their Smart Cash account but haven’t made any recent deposits.

Once the cohort is defined, we can use it as a target audience for the push notification campaign. The push notification is sent to the users within the cohort, reminding them of their available funds and encouraging them to engage with the app.

To analyze the effectiveness of the push notification, we note the specific date when the notification was sent in the event timeline of Mixpanel. By doing this, we can track user behavior and determine whether the notification resulted in higher user activity at that time. This data helps us understand the impact of their push notification campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize future notifications for better user engagement.

What’s an example of a use case?

We utilize Mixpanel to optimize our trading service by analyzing user behavior and engagement. The key metric for success in this context is user retention across time and understanding how engaged users are with the trading platform.

Using Mixpanel, we can track and analyze trends related to stock popularity and user activity on different days of the week. We can identify which stocks are trending and determine the days when users are most active in trading. This information allows us to make informed decisions about offering tailored promotions or incentives to encourage trading on less active days.

For instance, if user activity is higher on certain days of the week, we can analyze the reasons behind this trend. Armed with this insight, we can plan targeted marketing efforts or provide relevant information to users to capitalize on these patterns.

How does everyone having a consistent set of metrics help with decision-making?

Mixpanel acts as a single source of truth for data, eliminating discrepancies and promoting decision-making based on accurate information. Having a consistent set of metrics through Mixpanel helps to create a unified sense of understanding, allowing all departments to be aligned. Mixpanel’s dashboards and insights are easily understandable for every team, ensuring a cohesive interpretation of data across the organization.

Our marketing teams can create data-driven campaigns by pulling statistics from Mixpanel. Then by using Mixpanel’s dashboards and insights, teams can track the success of their campaigns and initiatives, allowing for real-time monitoring and data-driven adjustments.

Ultimately, Mixpanel makes it easier for our teams to collaborate and make well-informed decisions together, leading to more effective and efficient operations.

How do you use Mixpanel alongside some of your existing tools?

We use Mixpanel alongside other tools such as Power BI and predictive tools for adoption to enhance our data analysis capabilities. Mixpanel is particularly valuable for user-behavior analysis, allowing us to obtain data on specific user actions. It integrates seamlessly with our existing systems and it is easy to use and understand.

One significant advantage of Mixpanel is its ability to connect with other tools and track data that may not be directly visible to Mixpanel. By combining data from various sources, we can get a comprehensive view of user behavior and make more informed decisions. For instance, we connect Mixpanel to Redshift Spectrum to analyze user deposits.

With this integration, we can analyze how often users deposit money, whether it’s weekly or monthly. Based on this data, they can make decisions about targeting communications to remind users to deposit funds. This data-driven approach allows us to nudge users who may forget to deposit money, ultimately increasing platform engagement and the inflow of capital.

Mixpanel’s future development to sync directly with data warehouses, like Cloud Data Warehouses, presents exciting opportunities. By incorporating data beyond just user experience in the apps, such as CRM systems, revenue data, and marketing data, we’ll be able to gain even deeper insights into user behavior and make more sophisticated decisions.

How can you tell these nudge messages are effective?

The key difference lies in the targeted approach. If we send generic newsletters to all database users, the open rate is very low. However, when we use Mixpanel’s segmentation capabilities to send personalized and specific notifications to users based on their interests, preferences, and behavior, the open rate becomes significantly higher.

The targeted approach ensures that users receive relevant information, which captures their attention and encourages them to interact with the platform. As a result, this approach leads to increased engagement, better retention, and more positive user experiences.