Predictive Lead Scoring using R (Part 1/2)

Predictive Lead Scoring using R (Part 1/2)

Introduction:

In order to understand, Predictive Lead Scoring, one must first and foremost be familiar with the term ‘Marketing Automation’, referred to as ‘the new kid on the block’ by some. In the good old days, Marketing was synonymous to ‘Advertising’ and ‘Expensive Marketing Campaigns’ or ‘Outbound marketing’. And the Sales team was left to cold calling leads, which resulted in very low conversion rates. Then somebody high up there in the marketing field thought what if we could get the customers to come to us “Inbound marketing” rather than us reaching out to them, ‘Outbound Marketing’. And ‘Marketing Automation’ was born.

What is Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring?

According to Wikipepedia.com “Marketing automation” refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.

Following info graphic summarizes typical Marketing Automation Tasks and Platforms.

Marketing automation has a spotlight on the task of converting leads from the top of the marketing funnel by nurturing them into sales-ready ‘Prospects’, to the point of handshake where the Sales process begins. And Lead Scoring is a method used to assess the probability of Leads converting into Prospects. Traditionally sales guys assigned points to actions performed by Leads e.g. clicking on a web-site link, emailing, etc., in order to come up with a ‘Lead Score’.

Predictive Lead Scoring takes ‘Lead Scoring’ to the next dimension, by capitalizing on the huge data deluge (Big Data) generated by customers/leads and applying Statistical Algorithms to this data as illustrated in the following info graphic. R is the most popular open source language used in Predictive Analytics Applications.  Joseph Sirosh - Corporate Vice President, Machine Learning, Microsoft, recently announced that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. 

            http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/23/microsoft-acquire-revolution-analytics-help-customers-find-big-data-value-advanced-statistical-analysis/

 

Thank you for reading this post. In the next post I shall come up with a case study for Predictive Lead Scoring using R.