Mintigo DNA Spotlight: Smiling Faces More Likely to Buy

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Dec 13, 2012) - Today, Mintigo unveiled results from its most recent DNA Spotlight Report, which examined online professional profiles to determine the likelihood of prospects responding to a "cold email" from a B2B marketer. Mintigo's study focused on campaigns aimed at promoting B2B services to sales, marketing, and business development titles, and it evaluated publicly available profile attributes of the email recipients. Those attributes included the recipients' facial expressions in their profile photos, evaluated by eye and validated with the help of the Face.com facial recognition platform.

Key findings from the "Mintigo DNA Spotlight Report" include:

• A smile has real value. A prospect who smiled in his or her profile photo was 3.8 times more likely to respond than one who wasn't smiling. While 5.3% of recipients responded overall in the email campaigns, 20% of all "smilers" responded.
• People who "recommend" other LinkedIn members -- who attested to the skills of their connections on the LinkedIn network -- were 4.5 times more likely to respond than those who didn't.
• In general, responsive people posted longer descriptions of themselves and shorter descriptions of the individual jobs they hold or have held.
• Interestingly, the study found no direct correlation between the number of professional recommendations a person received and their likelihood to respond.
• There was also no correlation between the number of connections a prospect had on LinkedIn and their likelihood to respond.

Putting a Human Face on Big Data

To conduct this study, Mintigo used its Customer Search Engine™, which uses big data analytics to process unstructured information on the web, including social profiles and website content. Mintigo analyzed the click-through results of email campaigns sent by one of its customers. These campaigns were aimed at promoting B2B services to sales, marketing, and business development titles. Through the Customer Search Engine, Mintigo identified and sourced new contacts who exhibited the ideal traits of buyers -- or CustomerDNA. Mintigo also evaluated publicly available profile attributes of the email recipients. Those attributes included facial expression, evaluated by eye and validated with the help of the Face.com facial recognition platform. It also evaluated social connections, recommendations and career history from sources including LinkedIn profiles.

The Value of a Smile
For B2B marketers, the challenges of finding prospects who will respond to an email increase proportionally to the amount of data available. Meanwhile, click-through rates for B2B marketers' "cold lists" are sometimes less than 1 percent, with a cost per opportunity of upwards of $1,000 at times. The future of profiling prospects is, indeed, in the profile -- that is, in the professional profile data those prospects post online -- and marketers stand to benefit by putting a human face on big data. When a smiling face in a profile photo almost quadruples the chance that a prospect will respond to a cold email, something as simple as a smile indicates significant value.

Marketers currently tend to rely on traditional services that are incapable of analyzing clues from big data from the web and social networks, which can reveal valuable indicators of the behavior of prospects. But through sophisticated analysis of publicly available data, the process of finding and nurturing leads becomes much more efficient and ultimately more profitable.

About Mintigo
Mintigo operates the world's first Customer Search Engine, scanning the Web and social networks to provide marketers with a feed of prospects and campaign intelligence. Only Mintigo can analyze massive amounts of unstructured data on the Web to discover the unique CustomerDNA™ for any product. By discovering who is likely to buy today, Mintigo helps its customers send relevant, personalized campaigns, doubling campaign conversions and increasing revenue per customer. Mintigo is located in San Franisco and Tel Aviv. To learn more, visit www.mintigo.com.