Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could skyrocket your lead-to-sales conversions to new heights?
Most business owners struggle with this.
Data shows that a whopping 79% of leads never convert to sales. This highlights how challenging it can be to move leads through the customer funnel journey.
The good news is, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can supercharge your customer funnel journey to help you get more sales.
AI will efficiently weed out your low-quality leads and eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, allowing you to focus on higher-quality and converting ones seamlessly.
AI will help your brand grow by preventing your leads from falling through the cracks at each stage of the customer funnel, which increases your sales-ready prospects for conversion.
Read on to learn more about how you can use AI to bolster your customer funnel journey.
Customer Funnel Journey: What is it?
A customer funnel’s structure and components can vary depending on the company or industry, among other factors.
The standard customer journey funnel stages can include:
- Awareness. This stage focuses on raising awareness for your brand and sharing information about your value with your target audiences.
- Interest. Here, your leads learn more about your business, products, and services. You can introduce your positioning and capture leads by encouraging signups to your email newsletters (among others).
- Consideration. In this step, engage your leads actively by delivering personalized messages that reinforce your brand’s benefits. Provide specific information to overcome objections and qualify your leads.
- Evaluation. Your prospects start showing interest in your products and services at this phase, deciding whether to buy from you or other brands. Highlight why prospects should choose you over your competitors to make them stick.
- Conversion. After your leads convert to customers, market your onboarding materials, deliver messages celebrating their decision, and assess satisfaction levels. This stage is also a great time to run your upselling and cross-selling strategies.
The customer funnel can show you how your leads interact with your brand and where they fall off. This helps you refine and improve your strategies to keep your leads moving through each stage until they ultimately become paying customers.
A well-defined customer funnel journey helps you optimize your lead capture, engagement, nurturing, qualifying, and converting efforts.
It also informs your strategies to help you create immersive and memorable experiences across devices, channels, platforms, etc. that make your leads stick and convince them to become loyal clients.
The importance of using AI in the customer funnel journey
It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive to establish an effective customer funnel journey.
However, AI can do the heavy lifting for your sales and marketing teams through automated methods, such as autonomously identifying more qualified leads quickly. This reduces the strain on your resources and your teams avoid needlessly chasing less-qualified leads.
AI can serve as your company’s sales and marketing virtual assistant by handling repetitive and tedious tasks. This frees up your teams so they can focus on more meaningful, higher-level, and revenue-generating work.
The technology can also reduce human error and work 24/7, optimizing your lead engagement, nurturing, and qualifying efforts.
Through machine learning technology, you can “train” your AI to respond to conversations and events the way you would.
Your AI can learn from lead interactions and data, and the more input it accumulates, the more it can optimize its functions and responses on its own.
Ways to leverage AI in each stage of the customer funnel journey
Below are several ways AI-based technology can boost your customer funnel journey.
Streamline your lead generation efforts
The customer funnel journey typically begins with raising brand awareness, and this is where a lot of manual work is done.
For instance, you’ll need to build and design campaigns to tailor them to potential customers who haven’t heard of your products and services before.
This includes creating content such as blog posts, articles, lead magnets (ebooks and whitepapers), and website content (among others) to raise brand awareness and capture leads.
However, the content creation process can take a huge amount of time and resources — unless you use an AI-powered platform that can automate your content creation process.
This is where Broca comes in handy.
Broca provides a deep learning AI platform that generates content for your marketing and sales needs in a flash, saving you from the resource-draining aspects of building content.
If you’re creating content for all your campaigns, Broca delivers by instantly generating content, from ideation to distribution, for your website and marketing channels.
First, provide a campaign brief (in a few sentences) describing your campaign and where you want to direct your traffic, such as your blog post or landing page.
The platform then creates core messaging based on your campaign brief, giving you three key benefits of your brand, an enticing value proposition, and a killer headline. You can validate and modify all these with your team before proceeding.
Finally, Broca creates promotional content out of your core messaging, providing you with brand-aligned and ready-to-distribute emails, ad copies, and social media posts.
The platform creates your marketing and sales content across channels, which helps ensure your content and messaging remain consistent throughout the customer funnel journey.
Broca also streamlines creating Google ads by analyzing your current ads and generating new suggestions, putting your ad channels on autopilot.
A robust AI-based content-generating platform is a game-changer in your content creation for lead generation.
It significantly cuts down on the time-intensive, tedious, and usually complex process of creating effective content by doing the heavy lifting aspects of the process.
With AI under your tool belt, you and your teams don’t break a sweat but still get high-quality, consistent content at a scale that generates significant leads.
Automate your lead nurturing and qualifying processes
To get your leads to interact with your brand and guide them to the next stage of the customer funnel journey, you’ll need to nurture and qualify them.
However, the lead nurturing and qualifying process can take up plenty of time and energy that your sales team can optimize better to implement strategies to close deals.
The solution? Delegate your lead nurturing and qualifying initiatives to a reliable virtual sales assistant.
If you want to take things a step further, use an AI-powered sales assistant.
One such solution is Exceed.ai.
Exceed.ai is a powerful virtual sales assistant with conversational AI that works alongside your sales and marketing teams to nurture and qualify your leads.
It helps you move your leads along the customer funnel journey until they are sales-ready.
Exceed’s AI-driven platform uses a conversational bot and machine learning technology to provide your leads with highly personalized and contextual interactions.
It uses AI to deliver human-like responses and follow-ups via chat and email, automating your lead engagement, nurturing, and qualifying processes.
First, it engages your leads through your web or chat-like forms through personable interactions. Here’s an example of Exceed’s AI-generated email, in this case, from their own email marketing operation. (It’s always a good sign when a company uses its own product and Exceed does all of its lead nurturing via their AI assistant.)
The virtual assistant then assists your leads by answering questions, dealing with objections, and responding to their requests while simultaneously gathering data for your Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Next, it implements automated nurturing and uses intelligent follow-ups to move your leads through the customer journey funnel stages.
The VA acts as a virtual Sales Development Representative (SDR) by validating your leads based on the previous and current conversations and your Sequence or Playbook (more on this later).
Finally, after the VA qualifies your lead, it hands over your sales-ready prospects to your human sales representatives for closing.
It can automatically book a schedule for your leads based on your sales reps’ appointment availability that you and your team configure within the Exceed.ai platform.
The AI-based virtual assistant handles the entire process, from engaging your leads to handing them off to your sales reps. This saves your team tons of time and energy while ensuring you generate, nurture, and qualify your leads effectively.
Another key Exceed.ai feature is Sequences.
Sequences serve as your playbooks or campaigns with pre-built, customizable chat and email templates.
Each sequence for every campaign includes guided templates for many use cases, such as getting your lead’s attention, engaging them with a product intro, and handover chats or emails.
Customize the template or build one from scratch to set the automated responses your Virtual Assistant sends out for every sequence in your campaign.
All these features streamline your lead interactions as they move along the customer funnel journey.
With AI led lead nurturing, your sales and marketing teams spend minimum effort and time on your lead nurturing and qualifying processes. They can divert their resources to closing sales instead, boosting your business’ sales performance.
Improve customer conversations when closing sales
Not all prospects end up converting even when they made it as far as one click or a conversation with your sales reps away from becoming a closed deal.
This makes it crucial to ensure your sales reps can skillfully and effectively steer the conversation so your prospects successfully convert into customers.
Cogito, an AI software that uses real-time emotional intelligence software and incorporates machine learning with AI, can analyze voice calls between your reps and prospects (or customers).
The software is primarily designed to augment your call center and sales agents with an AI coaching system.
For instance, if your reps speak too fast during a customer call, Cogito sends a prompt alerting them to talk slower and pace how they speak.
Cogito’s technology combines speech analytics and conventional sentiment with proprietary voice insights, which can help your sales reps spot opportunities on the fly during prospect and customer conversations.
Cogito’s AI coaching software detects and measures the customer’s sentiment by:
- Using AI informed by behavioral science and machine learning to uncover over 200 voice signals, revealing how speakers feel.
- Uncovering trends, patterns, and problems through data compiled in many conversations over time that can be almost impossible to detect by humans alone.
Cogito also provides an automatically generated experience score that alerts your agents of the customer’s sentiment in real time, helping them adjust their speaking style accordingly.
Enhance customer loyalty and retention
It can take less of your resources to retain existing customers than convert new leads, making the loyalty stage a critical phase of your customer funnel journey.
AI can help you retain and establish loyal customers through machine learning technology that automatically displays highly-personalized right before and after-sales offers.
For instance, AI-based Ecommerce website software integrations can help you build, upsell and cross-sell strategies automatically. This can enhance your customer’s shopping experience further seamlessly while increasing your average revenue per buyer.
These tools can use machine learning and algorithms to deliver relevant and automated cart recommendations without requiring you to pre-set or configure anything.
In a nutshell, using an AI-driven platform that can seamlessly provide supplementary and interesting product offers tailored to each shopper which boosts their customer experience.
This leads to a memorable experience with your brand, encouraging repeat business, nurturing trust, and in turn, increasing customer loyalty.
Start optimizing your customer funnel journey
AI-based software are powerful tools that can significantly reduce and streamline your busywork tasks, enhancing the process and experience for your teams and your customers.
The right AI-driven platforms can help ensure your leads avoid slipping through the cracks as they move through each stage of the customer funnel journey. These tools can help optimize your strategies to effectively convert your leads into paying and loyal customers.
While investing in tools with AI capabilities might not be cheap to start, the benefits can far outweigh the costs, and you will end up with seamless and efficient lead conversion processes in the long run.
