Mintigo Moves From Predicting Prospects To Reeling Them In

Mintigo is today announcing a new B2B product that uses the customer intelligence from its predictive lead scoring to drive marketing campaigns.

Called Predictive Campaigns and available for now in an invitation-only beta, the new offering employs predictive modeling to automatically select what Mintigo considers the next best message, offer, channel and timing for turning a prospect into a customer. It then commands an integrated marketing automation platform to issue the response.

It goes beyond the firm’s previous practice, which used a variety of data clues to determine which of a client company’s existing leads, or new contacts, were most likely to become customers or to buy related products. That intelligence was then implemented by the client company on its marketing tools.

Now, chief product officer Atul Kumar told me, Mintigo is directly instructing the marketing automation platform as to “the next best action” for reeling in that prospect. Alternatively, the marketer can query Mintigo as to what the next best offer might be — or the marketer can take back control at any time.

Mintigo, he said, becomes a “kind of conductor,” the brains behind the scene.

“If [there’s] this prospect, do this.”

Currently, Predictive Campaigns is only integrated with Oracle’s B2B marketing automation platform Eloqua, but Mintigo said other integrations will be completed before the product is released by the end of Q1 next year.

Kumar said Predictive Campaigns is intended to avoid the guessing, manual setup and rule-based responses of many B2B marketing campaigns, which are often pre-defined journeys with little or no feedback-based fine-tuning.

The Next Evolutionary Step

He added that most marketers don’t build specific customer journeys for specific customers because of the time involved.

For instance, he said, for all website visitors who submit an email address and download a white paper, the marketing platform might be set to wait two days, then send an follow-up email with a case study, then wait three days and send another email offering assistance, and so on.

It’s totally driven by guesswork, Kumar said. In other words, why wait two days after a white paper is downloaded, and not three?

In its place, Predictive Campaigns utilizes the client company’s customer response data from desktop or mobile sites, apps and other sources — what types of customers have responded to what kinds of offers or messages at which times? — to determine and implement in real time what it considers the best response. It employs the existing channels in the marketing platform, such as email or social, and the existing messaging and offers.

Here’s a screen showing marketing campaigns generated by Predictive Campaigns:

Kumar said that Predictive Campaigns is the next step in the evolution of predictive marketing, where the predictive intelligence about a specific lead is used to directly conduct the campaign.

Just last week, predictive marketing firm Infer similarly offered its own vision of the next evolutionary step — a Prospect Management Platform that utilizes predictive modeling to provide recommended actions like marketing content, alerts or nurturing campaigns for converting leads into customers. For both companies, predictive customer intelligence is now used to direct marketing efforts, and not simply to provide targets.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.