Artificial Intelligence is one of the most versatile technologies in the current context. From empowering research to sales, AI finds application in almost every industry and can be the gamechanger that your business has been waiting for.
Contents
Grow Your Business With Artificial Intelligence
Customers want instant gratification; they demand fast, efficient, and reliable support, 24/7. Besides, most buyers in both B2B and B2C expect businesses to anticipate their needs and send them personalized communications rather than treating them as a number or statistic.
Of course, it isn’t humanly possible to meet the growing customer demands satisfactorily. Still, software like AI-powered chatbots and other customer-facing technology can help you personalize the customer experience and boost sales through better personalization and lead acquisition strategies.
For example, a chatbot can provide fast and efficient customer support around the clock. Data indicates that chatbots can answer up to 80% of repetitive or straightforward queries by directing users to relevant resources or FAQ pages.
Thanks to neural language programming, chatbots can understand and answer questions contextually.
Chatbots also improve lead acquisition and customer experience by collecting user data and greeting site visitors with personalized offers or information accordingly.
AI and Customer Acquisition
Artificial Intelligence can help you gain crucial insights into buyer behaviour to augment your lead generation and nurturing strategies. Below, we have discussed five ways in which AI can improve your lead acquisition efforts significantly:
1) Generate More Accurate Leads with AI
According to a recent study, 61 per cent of businesses invest in AI to improve lead generation activities.
In general, finding, contacting, and engaging leads requires a lot of time and patience. Besides, most leads only warm-up after multiple communications. But salespersons often give up by this time owing to feelings of anger, frustration, and helplessness.
Fortunately, chatbots have no feelings, and they can work tirelessly to contact thousands of leads, multiple times, to help your company reach out and acquire more customers.
AI-powered sales platforms further refine lead generation through auto profiling, and filtering leads according to pre-set data.
This ensures you only focus on quality leads, saving you precious time, and improving the chances of conversion significantly.
Also Read: Chatbots Vs Humans: Will Bots Take Over Customer Service?
2) Predictive Analytics for Better Personalization
AI can predict user behaviour for acquiring more customers and cashing in on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
This becomes possible by crunching your growing user data with sophisticated machine algorithms to predict the likely behaviour of a user.
Armed with this information, marketers can reach out to prospects at an opportune time, with the right message about the right product, when they are most likely to buy.
Predictive analytics can also be used to build accurate churn prediction models. With this, you can identify the users most likely to churn in a given timeframe and take appropriate marketing actions to retain them.
3) Improved Customer Service with AI
AI-based software can improve your customer service experience and also reduce associated costs.
Besides enabling 24/7 services, AI allows companies to use data analytics and personalize their customer service. With this, leads are better catered to and are likely to buy from your brand.
AI not only gives you customer insights; it can also help you improve the overall customer experience through regular feedbacks and surveys.
You can use a chatbot to ask users for an NPS score after every transaction in a non-intrusive manner to understand their experience better.
One can also employ sentiment analysis with social listening to categorize social comments into actionable issues and feedback.
4) Smart Email Curation
Email remains a key channel for customer acquisition. Up to 59 per cent of B2B marketers consider email the most effective channel for generating revenue. Besides, you can further improve the ROI of email marketing through AI-based automation.
Think about it – teams often spend hours in composing and scheduling emails for multiple customer segments. However, even with the right segments, you cannot possibly deliver personalized emails to every customer on your list.
AI algorithms can help in this case by tracking subscribers’ email browsing data and website experience to understand how they interact with your content.
Such technology also helps you create hyper-personalized content and automatically deliver it at a convenient time, based on subscribers’ past interactions and site behaviour.
In case you are worried about the mechanical nature of automated emails, there’s nothing to fret. Modern automation technology specializes in crafting emails that are exceptionally authentic in tone and seem like they are from a real person.
Epson, a leading printer manufacturer, used automated emails to see a 240 per cent increase in the customer response rate and a 75 per cent increase in qualified leads.
5) Intelligent Chatbots
Everybody has heard about chatbots in customer service. But chatbots can be used for automating various processes, apart from your customer service, to get some great results for your business.
But why are chatbots so effective? That’s because chatbots have access to several customer-centred data points.
Powered by machine learning algorithms, chatbots can sift through all these data points, as well as past information and behaviour, to deliver crucial insights – like what is a user likely to buy next, whether a user is satisfied or likely to churn, is the user-facing any specific problem interacting with particular content on the site, etc.
Also Read: What are Intelligent Apps
Such insights improve lead generation significantly – with up to 3X increase in lead generation and engagement after the implementation of a sales bot.
Take the example of HubSpot that uses a smart mix of AI and reality to improve customer service experience and simultaneously move customers down the sales funnel.
The chatbot serves at the frontline to get all the preliminary information. Once a live person is available, they can take over the conversation and close the customer.
Final Thoughts
Integrating AI into your customer acquisition strategies can help you identify low hanging fruits and convert them into profitable business opportunities.
If you are looking for a place to start, sales and customer service automation chatbot is one of the most straightforward AI-based solutions to implement and offers tremendous ROI when used correctly.
Of course, AI is not meant to replace humans. Rather, it supports them in eliminating repetitive tasks to free up their time for creative thinking and innovation, the bedrock of Industry 4.0.
