CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS
TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND
GROWTH
Use best-of-breed technology to make smarter
decisions and take intelligent actions that engage
your customers and improve business results.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................
2
BUILDING YOUR OPEN DATA ECOSYSTEM ..............................
6
ANALY TICS ........................................................................
6
PRODUCT ..........................................................................
11
MARKETING .....................................................................
14
SALES & SUPPORT ...........................................................
22
HOW MIXPANEL POWERS THE ECOSYSTEM ...........................
25
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................
29
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 1
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE PROBLEM
It’s no longer disputable that data is crucial to creating great products
and customer experiences, and driving top-line growth. But a shortage
of data isn’t the problem, as companies today can track almost every
interaction they have with customers. The issue at hand is the debate
over the best way to actually get value out of all that data, and
translate it into useful information for the everyday decision-makers
who need it to do their jobs more effectively.
It’s clear that companies see the need to use data to make decisions, in fact
74% of firms say they want to be data-driven, but only 29% say they are good
at connecting analytics to action1.
Forrester
Most companies form analytics teams who use data warehouses, SQL,
and other advanced analytics techniques to answer complex questions
about the business. What they quickly find is that this doesn’t provide
a long-term solution for product, growth, and marketing teams, who
often lack the advanced skills and expertise necessary to self-serve
answers to their own questions. This causes heavy reliance on the
analytics teams, which then become a bottleneck, and causes actions
or decisions to be delayed. In addition to hindering productivity, these
delays can make companies less competitive if they can’t iterate fast
enough or make the right decisions quickly.
THE OLD SOLUTION
In an effort to make analytics and the actions that stem from them
easier, companies started turning to vendors who promised a suite
of tools that would meet all of their needs for digital marketing. This
all-in-one approach was appealing due to the promise that all the tools
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 2
Teams can’t self-serve answers to questions when data is siloed
would work together out of the box. However, these suites often don’t
play well with the other tools in your stack, and while they may offer
more features, they tend to be highly complex. The steep learning
curve means that only people with years of expertise with the products
can use them effectively, creating yet another bottleneck.
With the expansion of software to the mainstream, there has been
an explosion of “best-of-breed” tools, meaning companies no longer
need to compromise when a suite they’ve invested in has a few parts
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 3
holding them back. Companies can now hand-pick purpose-built
products that solve specific problems, and integrate them with each
other, and into existing workflows.
On average, enterprise companies use 1,020 applications2 .
Mulesoft Connectivity Benchmark Report
THE NEW SOLUTION
We believe in a best-of-breed approach, as do our customers. To stay
competitive and meet customer expectations, teams need purposebuilt tools that address specific needs, and a place to go to self-serve
answers to their own questions. Is it worth it to compromise on a
suite of tools that checks more boxes, if you’ll never use those extra
features? Not when there is so much at stake.
With an open platform like Mixpanel, teams can answer questions
about user behavior in seconds, without analytics expertise. This
enables product, marketing, and analytics teams to act faster to
improve experiences, engage users and drive growth.
Think of Mixpanel like the engine that powers the best-of breed stack.
Now imagine a marketer at a SaaS company who wants to drive plan
upgrades. By analyzing fine-grained user behavior data in Mixpanel,
alongside the email activity generated by their automation tool, they
can send more timely, targeted campaigns. When customer-centric
teams like product and marketing need instant answers, Mixpanel
serves as the go-to tool. The result? Companies make intelligent
decisions faster and pinpoint how to deliver value to their users.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 4
An open data ecosystem provides teams across the organization with deep user insights
ENRICH USER BEHAVIOR DATA WITH BEST-OF-BREED TOOLS
Once you’ve decided on the right approach for your business needs,
how do you go about selecting the right tools or suites? We’re here
to help. With over 20,000 customers, our award-winning support and
success team has had their fair share of conversations with customers
about tools they use in their data ecosystem, and what they like
about them. We took that qualitative data, and surveyed over 400
Mixpanel customers across departments to learn quantitatively what
our customers use day to day, where those tools fall short, and what
they did best. Lastly, we compared customer feedback to Gartner and
Forrester analyst reports to build the list you see below.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 5
BUILDING YOUR
OPEN DATA
ECOSYSTEM
ANALY TICS
Like we mention above, companies using an all-in-one analytics
solution will encounter the same bottlenecks as those who rely solely
on data scientists or analysts to pull insights from a data warehouse.
But a specialized, best-of-breed analytics tool, like Mixpanel, offers
companies a competitive advantage. Mixpanel serves everyday
product, marketing and analytics users who use reports like Funnels or
Retention to surface user behavior insights on demand. The platform
even goes a step further to automatically deliver surprising new trends
or anomalies via machine learning models, custom-built for user
analytics data. Mixpanel also caters to power users who may want to
send data to their data warehouse or write their own JQL (Mixpanel’s
JavaScript Query Language) queries.
For reasons like these, one leading Fortune 500 Media company
switched to Mixpanel from their legacy all-in-one analytics solution
after becoming increasingly frustrated with the cumbersome tool.
“We wanted an agile, self-serve analytics solution with a very good
reputation on the market, and we found it in Mixpanel. It’s an
advanced segmentation solution that’s incredibly fast and fluid for
analysis.”
Fortune 500 Media Company, Senior Manager, Product Strategy.
Take a look at some of the most popular tools companies use to build
their data ecosystem.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 6
CATEGORY
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
UPDATED AS OF JUNE 2018
Data
warehouse:
store all the
data created in
your stack in
one place.
Best for companies with high volume of querying (known to scale well with low-cost, flexible
pricing models and fast query times)
Most popular data warehouse on the market with the largest cloud deployments
Handles structured and unstructured data well
Built to power Business Intelligence tools
Best for companies who need to run complex queries on large amounts of data without
running out of memory (data storage and compute power are kept separate)
Can expand up to the petabyte scale in the cloud & pay as you go
Capture and analyze in real-time with SQL
Integrated with other Google data products
Best for large companies using existing Microsoft products (strong integrations within
Microsoft ecosystem) who need a hybrid solution offering both cloud and on-premise
environments
Provides cloud, on-premise, and hybrid tools to satisfy needs of large companies
Strong automation feature set
Best for companies on Amazon Web Services who load data onto Snowflake (only supports
AWS)
Pricing separates storage from compute, lower cost than competitors
Easy, flexible implementation
Data pipeline:
build
integrations
between the
tools in your
stack to share
data and
trigger actions.
Best for companies who need to load data from tools into any data warehouse (not focused on
loading data between tools)
Manages and adapts to schema changes
Live view into data piping
Best for large companies who have used it before (no free trial available)
Strong focus on data governance and sophisticated piping structure, makes it a robust
solution for large enterprises
Best for companies using other Cloudera solutions (works well with other solutions like
Cloudera Manager and Impala)
An open source software framework for distributed storing and processing of data
Uses MapReduce model
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
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CATEGORY
Data pipeline:
build integrations
between the tools
in your stack to
share data and
trigger actions.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who need to ingest data from many different sources and need data lake
capabilities
Platform for collecting data and sharing it with marketing, advertising, and reporting
tools
Focuses on internet of things data and flexible integrations
Best for companies looking for lightweight automation between tools (“recipes” not built to be
heavily customized)
Automate interaction between components of your data stack with workflows
Trigger an action in one tool and end with an action in another tool
More than 1,000 apps connected
See details in Marketing section
Tag management:
use tags or pixels to
collect and share
customer data
between tools
Best for companies already using Adobe Analytics (easy implementation when already using
Adobe Analytics)
Trigger services based on user actions
Additional event tracking feature
Best for companies already using Google Analytics and Adwords (tight integration provides
more holistic analytics)
Easy way to give limited analytics access to vendors
Allows marketers to add/update code snippets without engineering resources
Free plan meets many companies tag management needs
Best for companies with more complex tag management needs (no free plan, there are free
tools available that suit more basic needs)
Universal hub for sharing data across tools and vendors
Connects all vendors in your stack together using standardized tagging
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 8
CATEGORY
Analytics: analyze
your data, share
metrics, and
uncover insights
to improve your
business
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies with marketers who have extensive experience using Adobe Analytics
(robust product that requires significant training)
Enterprise analytics solution with strong history in web analytics
Known for its broad selection of pre-built dashboards
Focuses on marketing analytics
Best for companies focused on marketing analytics with analysts available (machine
learning needs to be configured by a data scientist and is marketing use case focused)
Understand how your site is performing by page, audience type, and traffic source
Free version and relatively easy implementation
Integrated with the Google ecosystem for advanced ad targeting, web optimization,
and A/B testing
Best for companies looking for a user behavior analytics solution that marketers, product,
engineers, designers, support, sales, and analytics teams can easily use
Understand user behavior with fast, ad hoc analysis and prebuilt reports to measure
conversion, engagement, and retention across various user cohorts
Integrate additional user data sources to answer more advanced questions. Options
include attribution, experimentation, support, and sales data
Uncover hidden insights with machine learning including anomaly detection, predictive
user conversion, and event correlation analysis.
Take action with emails, push, or in-app notifications, in Mixpanel or partner tools
Data visualization
and business
intelligence: build
complex reports
and dashboards
from your data
Best for companies with less complex visualization needs (drag and drop functionality
offered)
Drag and drop functionality makes it user friendly for non-technical users
Combine data from warehouses, spreadsheets, and over 450 business apps to analyze
business data in real-time
ETL tools for cleaning and manipulating data
Easy to visualize and share across organization
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 9
CATEGORY
Data visualization
and business
intelligence: build
complex reports
and dashboards
from your data
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies with less complex visualization needs who want to easily share
visualizations (strong collaboration and sharing tools, browser-based)
Supports wide variety of use cases across different business units
Own SQL-based language, LookML, which offers improved organizational capabilities
and analytics
Top professional, consultant, and implementation services
Best for companies with strong technical analysts (doesn’t support drag and drop query
building)
Query data from a warehouse using SQL, Python, or R
Easily save and share queries with your team
Create charts and dashboards to visualize data
Best for companies with advanced Excel users, and resources to purchase additional tools
and build integrations
Connect data directly from your warehouse or 3rd party applications & model and
visualize with the familiarity of Excel
Drag and drop interactive report building
More affordable BI option than competitors
Best for enterprise companies who need features around data governance, support,
improved SDKs and APIs (license cost can be prohibitive for small companies)
On-premise, cloud, or hosted solution that connects to databases, spreadsheets, or
3rd party apps
Strong visualization features allow you to use a drag and drop interface to build
robust, interactive charts and dashboards
Caters to enterprise companies with new features around data governance, support,
improved SDKs and APIs
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 10
PRODUCT
Product teams struggle to balance the endless list of feature requests
from customers with strained engineering and design resources. To
prioritize development and best allocate resources, they need to
answer questions like “How can we make our product more engaging
for customers?” The answer to that question doesn’t lie in the data
collected by one single tool.
It’s only by using the best tools in tandem with each other that teams
can answer these vital strategic questions. In fact, 86% of product
managers surveyed said they were interested in combining Mixpanel
data with their other data sources in order to answer more complex
questions or enrich the other tools in their stack.
One Mixpanel customer, Travel Republic, needed more compelling,
engaging landing pages in order to succeed in the increasingly
competitive vacation booking industry. They use VWO for A/B testing
and Mixpanel for user analytics. By integrating both tools, they were
able to clearly measure the effects of different landing pages and
subsequently strategize on how to drive customer retention and
engagement.
“We saw an average 30% increase in retention with
our new landing pages”
Andy Nyberg, Product Insight Manager at Travel Republic
When evaluating the tools in the list below, focus not only on what
tools product teams will need in their day-to-day roles but also how
the data they generate could be used across other teams. For instance,
data from an experimentation tool can help marketers refine their
messaging, or product development data can help support teams
report bugs faster.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
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CATEGORY
Experimentation
and A/B testing:
create and
test different
experiences
of your digital
product before
rolling out the
changes to
everyone.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for larger web-focused companies (doesn’t support experiments on mobile apps) who use
Google Analytics (built on top of Google Analytics)
Integrates into Google’s full suite of tools for strong tracking, targeting, and reporting
Target experiments at high value users using audience demographics
Said to be easy to get up and running
Best for companies who need a mobile A/B testing solution included in Analytics solution
(integrates with other tools for web A/B testing)
See more details in Analytics section
Best for companies who need robust experiments on both mobile and web (offers no free or
starter plans)
Strong experimentation foundation rooted in A/B testing to drive website conversions
Growing recommendation and personalization features
Maintains open architecture and works to integrate popular 3rd party vendors
Best for web-focused companies (doesn’t support experiments on mobile apps) looking for
additional functionality (also offers heatmaps, recordings, surveys...etc)
Can be self-hosted
Offers solutions for both beginners and experts
Said to be user-friendly, easy to get tests up and running quickly
Product
development:
streamline the
development and
release of product
updates, so you
can identify and
address issues
quickly.
Best for companies with complicated monitoring needs (simpler tools available for companies
with less complex needs)
Application monitoring platform, popular with the latest infrastructures using containers
and microservices
Automated baselining of system and business metrics, with built-in deviation alerting
Automatically traces issues for deep analysis of its cause, and recommends actions
Best for companies with less complex monitoring needs and smaller budget (free plan
available, no built-in search functionality for complex queries)
Free deployment implementation and automation of new releases from beta testing to
user adoption
Acquired and integrated the popular developer tools, Fabric and Crashlytics, which
provide powerful real-time crash reporting
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 12
CATEGORY
Product
development:
streamline the
development and
release of product
updates, so you
can identify and
address issues
quickly.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who need basic, fast bug and crash reporting (only offers email
support)
Bug and crash reporting tool that solicits user feedback to fix issues and improve
products
Free starter plan
Integrations with GitHub, Slack, JIRA, and Trello
Best for companies with complex monitoring and reporting needs, who want pre-built
integrations (Atlassian offers 2,000+ apps that integrate with products like Jira or
Confluence)
Suite of collaboration features (Trello, Hipchat) make Atlassian relevant for entire
organizations
Bitbucket allows developers to easily collaborate on Git repositories
Best for companies who want to primarily use APM product to see results quickly and
receive alerts for issues (results appear in minutes)
Monitors health and identifies bottlenecks in your backend infrastructure
Traces errors for root-cause analysis of system issues
Ties operations to business value for better business optimization
Payment: easily
accept payments
from users without
building a payment
processing solution.
Best for companies who need peer to peer payments (supports Venmo and paypal) and
dedicated support resources
Credit service for users making large purchases
Great for world-wide transactions
Best for small to midsize businesses who don’t need Android or Apple Pay payments (not
supported) but with strong international presence (available in 200+ countries)
Credit service for users making large purchases
Great for world-wide transactions
Best for companies targeting Chinese market (works with Alipay, chinese payment
platform) and who want to leverage APIs (suite of developer-focused APIs updated
frequently)
One page payment processing (no page or app redirects)
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MARKETING
Thanks to remarketing and personalization tools, marketers can target
their users in more creative ways. But consumers are also bombarded
with marketing content all the time. Aiming for industry averages
on email open rates and notification opt-ins doesn’t cut it any more.
Marketers must be able to answer questions like “Did my campaign
actually drive someone to try, buy, and ultimately use our product
regularly?”
Andrew Capland, the Director of Growth at Wistia, the video hosting
and analytics platform, realized he needed to answer this question
shortly after he was hired. One of his first tasks was to convert more
website visitors into signups. As he dug into what users did after
signing up, he saw that although conversion rates had increased, only
20% of those new accounts were actually driving long-term value.
Based on this analysis, Wistia shifted their strategy. Instead of just
driving more conversions, they instead focused on how to get more
value from the customers they already had.
How did Andrew reach this conclusion? He combined data from their
business intelligence tool, Mixpanel, and their CRM. By analyzing these
data sources together and understanding their downstream effects,
Andrew was able to spark positive changes that impacted more than
just their marketing strategy.
“And that really changed the way that we thought about new
account generation, user onboarding, activation, and how to
encourage new accounts to purchase.”
Andrew Capland, Director of Growth at Wistia.
Andrew and the marketing team at Wistia are the exception, though.
The majority of companies still falter when integrating their tools.
27% of marketers have integrated best-of-breed stacks, but 42%
admit their technology is ‘fragmented’ or ‘piecemeal’.3
When evaluating these marketing tools, remember that just because
a marketing suite seems to check all the boxes, it doesn’t necessarily
mean all those tools will play well together.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 14
CATEGORY
Marketing suites:
all-in-one suite
of tools that span
email marketing,
advertising,
mobile marketing,
attribution, and
more
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for B2C companies with extensive experience using the suite (customers cite technical
support and services as areas of improvement4 )
Focused on content, data, and consumer engagement & experiences
Strong integration with Adobe Analytics suite & Experience Manager, the content
management system
Best for companies who need robust, diverse marketing functions and who use a strong
analytics solution in tandem (customers cite low scores in analytics5 )
Spans across marketing to commerce and supply chain
Especially strong in managing and visualizing complete view of campaigns
Best for B2B or B2C companies focused on cross-channel and cross-platform marketing
campaigns with resources available for implementation (customers cite complex, challenging
implementation6)
Dedicated tools for either B2B (Eloqua) or B2C (Responsys) focus within suite
Works best on large campaigns where ads and content work in unison
Best for B2C companies who need a cloud-based solution with available IT resources to
help manage (customers cite issues with support and setup that require IT help7)
Strong multi-channel functionality, especially when used with Journey Builder
Partnered with Google for advertising campaigns across Search, YouTube, and Gmail
Powerful when integrated with other Salesforce solutions in sales and support,
extensive integrations with other tools available in Salesforce AppExchange
Marketing
automation:
trigger automated
messages to your
users based on
actions or user
qualifications
Best for companies who focus on mobile messaging, marketing and engagement
Transform data from many sources into “live” customer views that collect historical,
in-the-moment, and predictive information to act on
Provides a visualization & orchestration tool that allows for continuous, cohesive
messaging experiences
Operates as a modern “stream processing” system that creates an interactive feedback
loop to immediately act on data
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
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CATEGORY
Marketing
automation:
trigger automated
messages to your
users based on
actions or user
qualifications
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for US-based companies with smaller marketing teams or less complex campaign
needs (limited languages available, focus on out-of-the-box features)
Simple, easy to use
Known for helping generate leads through inbound marketing (blogs, email, social
media)
Best for small to mid-size companies who value speed and ease of use (lacks some
enterprise features like automated list segmentation)
Strong in email marketing; tight integration with Mandrill for transactional emails
User friendly UI, which makes it easy to get up and running quickly
Best for marketers with previous experience and companies prioritizing lead management,
social, and email marketing (sophisticated campaigns can often require professional
services)
Integrates offline data, for non-digital marketing like events.
Popular for low-volume, high-touch marketing efforts
Best for companies who have a very high volume of email delivery
Highly reliable for sending all transactional emails and email marketing
Best for mobile-focused companies (lacks some non-mobile touchpoints like web in-app
notifications)
Specializes in mobile engagement through push and SMS notifications
Used to supplement other marketing automation tools for companies looking for
best-in-breed mobile engagement
Growing into multichannel campaign management and investing in recommendation
& optimization features
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 16
CATEGORY
Personalization
& testing: test
changes and
customize content
to the specific
requirements of a
person based on
data from the user
profile
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies with complex testing and personalization needs (simpler solutions exist for
more basic needs)
Machine learning engine using predictive targeting to personalize user experiences
Automatically recommends best experience for each user
Best for companies with resources to help with coding and UI design needs
Predictive 1-to-1 recommendations, not cohorts
Strong customer profile management
Real-time personalization to target for session intent
Best for companies in retail who can use professional services
Test, optimize, and personalize customer experiences. Great for those in the retail
industry
Target audience segments or create individual experiences. Supports cross-domain
testing
Included in Experimentation & A/B testing section
Mobile attribution:
tie the install of an
app to a specific
source
Best for companies who don’t need to send notifications through mobile attribution tool (not
supported)
Measure the entire user journey and tie user behavior back to the original ad or reengagement campaign to analyze ROI, LTV, and user funnels
Helps protect your data and marketing budget from performance ad fraud, only pay for
legitimate engagements and scale with confidence
Create targeted user segments, and retarget, engage, discover new users with Audience
Builder
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• 17
CATEGORY
Mobile attribution:
tie the install of an
app to a specific
source
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who don’t need a landing page creation & hosting tool (not supported)
Attribute every mobile install and conversion, measuring your media spend and LTV to
optimize your ROI
Boost your cross-channel conversions and user experience with integrated OneLink
deep linking
Best-in-class data accuracy and portability, automation, integrations, audience
segmentation and fraud protection
Best for companies who don’t need extensive admin restraints (can’t bulk delete links)
Easy to track link performance across platforms and devices from one place
Specializes in deep linking, mobile attribution
Known to have especially technical and responsive support and product teams
Best for companies worried about customer churn (provides predictive churn modeling)
Analytics and configurable attribution to assist marketers in defining their quality, high
lifetime value users
A lightweight SDK capable of sending unlimited data points for analytics or syndication
to other media partners
Fraud prevention measures through traffic verification tools and Global Fraud Blacklist
plus 13 visualizations of flagged data for fraud detection during a campaign
Kochava Collective, an independent data marketplace with over 2.5B unique device
profiles for audience discovery, insights, and enrichment
Best for companies looking to keep attribution & mobile notifications in same tool
Grow revenue by engaging with the right customers from acquisition through
retention, increasing ROI
Mitigate exposure to mobile fraud while improving privacy and data processing
compliance, as well as system reliability
Streamline measurement and management of mobile and digital marketing
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CATEGORY
Advertising:
create ads, target
your audience,
and bid on ad
placement, and
then evaluate
which facets of
your advertising
strategy are
working.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who need a scalable, highly customizable advertising solution to
purchase and sell ads
Sophisticated automated bidding for the real-time sale and purchase of ads
Designed for buyers with resources to build on APIs
Machine learning features help clients with customization
Best for companies with extensive experience and a large budget to navigate disjointed
workflow
Cross-channel advertising platform serving TV, search, and social
Multiple search providers to target varied and international audience
Best for companies more focused on raising awareness than driving conversions and who
want to use Facebook data to build audiences
Run across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and their Audience Network sites
Photo, video, and interactive formats
Can target users on interests, behaviors, and “lookalike” audiences (ie. a list of
current customers)
Best for companies focused on driving conversions, reaching the most users, and who
don’t need to target based on behaviors or interests
Ad network delivers across display, video, search, and apps
Content
management:
create and
manage your
digital content
to make sure it
gets circulated
efficiently
Best for enterprise companies using the open source platform Drupal (only platform
supported)
Nurtures and leverages power of open source community
Can build customer journeys through touchpoints with step-by-step KPIs
Best for modern midsize and large enterprises with experience or access to solutions
experts (customers cite a steep learning curve and difficult finding experts8)
Digital experience platform to build, test, personalize, and optimize experiences
AI-powered content marketing and personalization features
Popular APIs for custom development and integrations
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• 19
CATEGORY
Content
management:
create and manage
your digital content
to make sure it
gets circulated
efficiently
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best suited for midsize enterprises and those with an in-house .NET expert (due to
investments in Microsoft Azure)
Content management system focused on commerce experiences
Best suited for midsize enterprises and those invested in Europe.
Easy to scale, maintain, and use, so users can focus on innovation
Best for companies needing robust functionality across content management, testing,
delivery and analytics, with experienced users or available resources (customers say
support and services need improvement, and extensive training required 9 )
New connectors and API-focused architecture make it easy to integrate
Strengths in managing content, personalization, and surfacing useful insights
Best for companies looking for a full-service solution rather than a point solution
Unify first party, second party, and third party data
Enables marketers to use data to inform all marketing activities from direct mail to
television to websites
Best for companies with a strong analytics solutions in place (customers cite analytics as an
area of improvement10 )
Unifies data from across devices and channels to create customer profiles
Tools built for advertisers and publishers
Build segments for targeting and personalization; has Lookalike Audiences
Data management
target audiences
Best for companies who need a robust, flexible platform and don’t need custom reporting
(customers cite this as an area of improvement11 )
using anonymous
Unify data across touchpoints to build complete data profiles.
data and target
Act on the data across advertising, commerce, and content experiences
platform: create
advertising
campaigns to those
audiences.
Integrate 2nd and 3rd person data and use ML and data-science-as-a-service to
surface automatic insights.
Best for companies looking for an smaller vendor with higher-touch customer services (one
of the last DMPs that remains independent)
Unify online and offline data from mobile, social, search, and OTT
Global data exchange with 2nd party data
Plan and measure TV/Video campaigns using digital and viewership data
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 20
CATEGORY
Data
management
platform
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who don’t need tight integrations within Oracle suite or outside vendors
(customers cite this as a strong area of improvement12)
Personalize digital, mobile, and offline marketing campaigns
Combine data with huge 3rd party audience sets
Oracle ID Graph - unifies disparate data sources to help marketers reach targets across
all their touchpoints
Survey: collect
and analyze
customer
feedback
Best for companies who want to survey customers across all channels and don’t need strong
demographic targeting or extensive integrations
Measure customer, product, brand, and employee experiences
Survey via email, SMS, mobile, phone, website, social channels and offline surveys
Best for small to mid-size companies who don’t have very complex survey requirements
(doesn’t support enterprise features like filtered questions or complex skip rules)
Easily implement surveys for employees, research, & to gather customer feedback
Usability and pre-built templates make it easy to scale and use across different teams
Customer data
platform: unify
all customer
data, behavior,
and profiles
from internal
and external
sources
Best for companies with extra focus on mobile (was originally mobile only)
Foundational data layer with a flexible data schema and 175+ pre-built connectors
Can collect data from web, mobile, connected devices, backend systems, and more, with
deep integrations and SDKs that support mobile-specific use cases that web-first tools
can’t
AudienceSync allows marketers to build and sync audience lists across platforms for
multi-channel campaigns and experiences
Strong encryption, governance controls, and live monitoring to protect customer data
and privacy
Best for companies who want to get started quickly and test it out (free version offered)
Simplify data collection with one API, to integrate 200+ tools with the flip of a switch
Excels at collecting customer data across all channels: web, mobile, and server, so that
regardless of source, data is unified
Broad integration catalog, 100+ integrations available server-side, so can enable data
flows while limiting client-side code, avoiding latency, and reducing app bloat
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
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SALES AND SUPPORT
Due to the endless supply of information on product blogs, software
review websites, research firms, and via word-of-mouth, customers
are more informed about companies and their competitors than ever
before. Plus, they also expect that sales and customer support teams
understand their problems and can anticipate their needs. For instance,
“83% of business buyers say it’s absolutely critical that the sales person
has intimate knowledge of their product or service offerings”13 .
Acquiring that “intimate knowledge” could be the difference between
a happy paying customer and a missed opportunity. For example, if a
sales rep at a SaaS company can see that their prospect on the free
trial keeps hitting feature gates when they try to invite new users, they
can tailor their outreach better and deliver the pitch with confidence.
But if they aren’t aware of the 10 support tickets the prospect
submitted while trying to set up a new flow, they risk appearing
uninformed or overconfident.
In order to get this knowledge, sales teams need to be able to combine
a CRM like Salesforce with other data sources, like user behavior data
in Mixpanel and customer support data in Zendesk.
Similarly, support teams need all the help they can get in keeping
their customers happy and loyal. Customers are impatient, as “83% of
business buyers say it’s absolutely critical to immediately be routed to
the agent who is most knowledgeable about their company’s issue”.14
In order to meet these expectations, support and success teams need
an inside view into their customers’ behavior in their products. If a
customer writes into support because they can’t login to their app,
the support agent should be able to see the actions leading up to the
issue, the browser they’re on, their app version, and so on, before
sending even one email or chat.
For customer-facing teams to deliver the best, most personalized
customer experience possible, they need a clear view of customer
activity and an organized, efficient way of communicating with them.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 22
CATEGORY
Support
and success:
manage customer
support
communications
and monitor
account health.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies focused on boosting productivity among customer success teams
who use another support tool in tandem
Helps model and predict churn of current customers
Discover opportunities for upsells and cross-sells through deeper customer
success tracking
Best for small to midsize companies focused on delivering extremely personalized
customer support experiences (offers features like user profiles or smart suggestions)
In-product messaging and live sales chats to capture, qualify, and convert leads
Targeted messages to nurture users on their journey
Help desk and public knowledge base for easier customer self-service
Best for midsize to large customers with enterprise-level feature needs who need
automation capabilities
Customer support across phone, email, chat, SMS
Dashboards and team performance metrics
Better case management with smarter routing and customer history data and
case workflows
Best for small to large size customers looking for a scalable solution that can be widely
integrated (Zendesk marketplace offers 700+ partner apps)
Track, prioritize, and solve customer tickets
Multilingual, multi-brand. Email, social, live chat, phone, text all available
Macros for automation. Easy team collaboration. Strong support data analysis
CRM: manage
the process of
nurturing leads
into customers,
and keep track
of your team’s
progress.
Best for companies with robust reporting and customization needs, and available
resources to help with implementation
Makes it easy to segment and follow up with contacts on a regular basis
Campaign and marketing automation is strong suit
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 23
CATEGORY
CRM: manage
the process of
nurturing leads
into customers,
and keep track
of your team’s
progress.
TOOL
WHAT IT DOES BEST
Best for companies who need enterprise resource planning and want to leverage social selling
features (strong after LinkedIn acquisition)
Predictive lead scoring, opportunity management, and relationship health metrics
Social intelligence for sentiment and competitive trends
Reporting and dashboards with performance gamification
Best for companies with most robust reporting and tracking needs looking for cloud-based
solution with extensive data governance functionality
Rated #1 CRM platform with robust features including segmented sales data,
forecasting, and team performance management)
Helps with in-person or digital selling, includes quote to cash process automation
Large user base, up and down market with a set of industry specific products
Smart recommendations for top leads and next steps
Best for B2C companies (not architected for account-based marketing)
Flexible CRM build with open-source components
Extendable through add-ons and customizations
Available on-premise or in the cloud
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 24
HOW MIXPANEL
POWERS THE DATA
ECOSYSTEM
Everything we’ve built at Mixpanel was designed with an open data
ecosystem in mind. Mixpanel’s architecture was purpose-built to
enable data to flow seamlessly in and out of Mixpanel. Through
turnkey integrations, APIs, and partnerships with data pipeline tools,
Mixpanel provides teams within an organization a more complete view
into the user journey.
For years, Mixpanel has helped companies of all shapes and sizes
understand how people are behaving on their digital properties.
Funnels help companies better understand how behaviors lead to
conversion. Retention reports show how actions correlate to user
retention; in other words how products and marketing campaigns
return value to the user & drive deeper user engagement. Machine
learning models automatically surface deep user insights, so teams
can spend less time data mining and more time taking action. All these
reports become exponentially more powerful when user behavior
collected by Mixpanel is paired with data collected in other tools across
the organization.
ANALY TICS THAT RUN ON THE ENTIRE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
When analytics run on the entire customer journey, teams have a
competitive advantage. Remember Andrew at Wistia? If his team had
simply focused on increasing conversion rates, without understanding
the value those newly converted customers actually provided,
Andrew’s business insights would have steered the company in the
wrong direction.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 25
Mixpanel transforms your user data from online and offline sources
With a specialized platform like Mixpanel, teams can go to one place
and see all the different interactions between users or prospects and a
company. Support agents can see how their efforts influence customer
retention, and marketers can see which campaigns lead to the most
valuable long-lasting customers. These enriched user profiles enable
teams to analyze user behavior in much more detail, so they can each
take targeted, effective action that ultimately benefits the customer.
Combine data from all your sources to build targeted cohorts of users based on their behavior
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH • 26
Taking more effective action might be in the form of sending a
promotion at a specific time, or creating a new strategy to drive
upgrades. A customer success manager can use user behavior data to
influence account health scores in a CRM like Salesforce, so they can
identify at-risk customers and re-engage them. For a designer, it might
mean targeting power users on the paid plan with high NPS scores
with an invitation to participate in a user research session.
Enable teams across your organization to take more effective action and make smarter decisions.
When these insights live in Mixpanel, they can be used by teams
across the organization. For example, Lemonade, a renters and home
insurance company, creates Mixpanel accounts for new employees as
part of their onboarding process to ensure everyone has a way to selfserve answers to their questions.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
• 27
“We want people to engage with data, ask questions, and
find the answers in data to make the right decisions...
Nearly everyone here uses Mixpanel, so we are all
empowered to make informed decisions with data. For
example, when we release a new innovative feature and
measure it with Mixpanel, we see its direct impact on the
business.”
Gil Sadis, Head of Product at Lemonade
Today, 95% of all employees at Lemonade use Mixpanel to surface
insights about their users and measure the effects of their actions.
As a result, their marketing team doubles the rate of acquiring new
policyholders every ten weeks, their product managers save half a
day’s work every week, and their UX designers increased the overall
purchase rate by 250% with a revamped navigation design. Because
decision-makers at Lemonade can be independent and do the analysis
necessary to make decisions and measure their impact, it makes for a
more efficient, competitive organization as a whole.
CONCLUSION
Whether you’re looking for a new mobile marketing tool, or starting
from scratch, the process of evaluating and selecting the right tool can
be confusing. Use this guide as a starting point for selecting your initial
list of tools to consider, and keep an eye out for our next paper, where
we’ll dive even deeper into the tool evaluation and selection process.
Or if you’re looking for a way to get more ROI out of the tools in your
stack, let Mixpanel help. Join the 20,000 other customers who use
Mixpanel to build better products and customer experiences, and take
more intelligent action every day.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW MIXPANEL CAN HELP TEAMS ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION
ANSWER MORE COMPLEX QUESTIONS AND TAKE MORE INTELLIGENT ACTION,
EMAIL INQUIRIES@MIXPANEL.COM OR CALL: (888) 510-2370
MIXPANEL.COM
• INQUIRIES@MIXPANEL.COM
• (888)
510-2370
CHOOSING THE RIGHT
TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION
AND
GROWTH • 28
Endnotes
1
Forrester Research, Inc
2
MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report 2018
3
Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2017
4
Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Gartner, published 4/24/18
5
Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Gartner, published 4/24/18
6
Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Gartner, published 4/24/18
7
Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Gartner, published 4/24/18
8
Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Gartner, published 1/17/18
9
Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Gartner, published 1/17/18
10
The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms, Q2 2017, published 6/1/17
11
The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms, Q2 2017, published 6/1/17
12
State of the Connected Customer, Salesforce, 2018.
13
State of the Connected Customer Salesforce, 2018.
14
The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms, Q2 2017, published 6/1/17
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS TO DRIVE INNOVATION AND GROWTH
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