Small to large-scale business owners worldwide are trying to keep up with today’s fast-paced marketing trends. Trying to stay afloat with all the new, innovative technology can seem daunting, but every company should be aware of specific digital marketing methods, concepts, and technologies.

One such concept is about lead generation – the process of capitalizing on organic interest for your product or service to turn the interest into a sale. In this article, we will discuss the basic trappings of lead generation, but more importantly, we’ll take a look at lead generation using AI.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way over the last few decades, and the emerging technology of lead generation using AI is helpful for any company to be aware of. In this article, you’ll learn that lead generation using AI can be streamlined and straightforward and help your business succeed in creating lasting relationships with customers.

How do you use AI for lead generation?

There are a handful of ways AI can bolster your lead generation. AI chatbots, automated email campaigns, and the fact that AI enables you to extract insights that the average sales agent cannot all combine to make using AI for lead generation a compelling method by which to grow your business.

Lead Generation

Before we get into the details of how AI-powered software can improve your business marketing leads, let’s take a look at what lead generations actually are. On a basic level, lead generation is the process of creating loyal clients by generating interest in a product or service – with the end goal of transforming that interest into a sale. Sales and marketing teams work tirelessly on these generation efforts to obtain quality leads. Lead generations can be important for any particular industry and are built by content marketing and nurturing leads with campaigns that draw the customer in.

Lead generation can provide valuable insights into customer data and customer behavior. Collecting potential leads – particularly quality leads – enables businesses to educate potential customers, typically with marketing teams helping put together email campaigns. It is widely agreed upon that email marketing campaigns are still a very effective use of marketing methodology when these emails get sent to qualified leads – or high-quality leads.

Lead Generation Using AI

Luckily for business owners, there are a handful of ways businesses can use artificial intelligence to produce and qualify leads. Lead generation is effective on its own, but using AI technology and AI-powered tools can save businesses time and effort and result in increased lead generation. Uniquely, Artificial Intelligence can use user interest to produce sales leads based on your existing content marketing. Here are a few ways artificial intelligence can be used to support lead generation.

Artificial intelligence can generate more leads from your existing assets.

AI-based tools, which will be discussed in more detail below, can automatically generate leads through applications such as chatbots or virtual assistants by answering questions in place of or alongside human agents.

AI helps you score leads more effectively.

AI can learn “lessons” from lead conversion data. This can help you produce lead scoring that is based on math and not the feelings and intuitions from your sales team. Such data can help identify customer trends and behavior that your human teams, even with all of their market intelligence, are liable to miss.

AI Can Help You Find More Leads.

Conveniently, due to the way AI approaches this work, it can find you new leads based on the characteristics, browsing patterns, and browsing behaviors of the leads you already have. This results in the ability to grow your pipeline directly.

Artificial Intelligence

AI technology is ever-evolving. Because of this, throughout AI’s history, many different applications, AI algorithms that analyze data, and automated emails have been generated by using AI-powered applications. There are a few ways AI-powered software and applications can positively impact the customer experience.

Machine learning

It is essential to discuss machine learning to understand why AI-powered applications can be useful to your business. Contrary to popular misconceptions, machine learning and artificial intelligence are not the same things. In fact, machine learning is a subset of AI that is actively leveraged to make AI even smarter.

The bottom line is that machine learning assists humans in problem-solving in an even more efficient way. Machine learning algorithms occur when a computer gets data to analyze. Then it learns as it stumbles upon trends and patterns. The more the human feeds the machine data, the more refined algorithms become, thus creating data analysis and insights that are even more accurate.

Machine learning is currently having a big impact on the marketing world. It enables marketers and business owners to quickly and efficiently analyze large quantities of data without error, which is, of course, not possible for humans. Machine learning impacts personalized marketing, content optimization, segmentation, and intelligent chatbots, which we will discuss in more detail below.

Virtual Chatbots Or Assistants

One exciting innovation in the AI tech world, as it has to do with marketing businesses and lead generation, is the emergence of virtual assistants or what is more commonly known as “chatbots.” Chatbots are smart assistants that exist within your website – you have probably encountered a chatbot during your own personal processes with customer services. They respond to client inquiries with pre-programmed questions in messaging apps with customers, in part to prevent users from feeling unsupported while browsing your business site.

Such platforms streamline a query resolution by assisting the customer at a basic level, analyzing the data, and optimizing it for the ease of interpretation of its human counterparts. Chatbots create best fit leads by having pro-active conversations with customers – these AI bots are programmed to problem solve and promote lead generation. They also can prevent cart abandonment by nudging the customer gently while they are still on the browser window. They gather big data using conversations and other factors to provide actionable insights and leads for businesses. Chatbots and virtual assistants also assess recurring behavior, providing insights to the humans using them. Similar in looks to Facebook Messenger, these chatbots speak with online consumers with sales acumen and helpful information.

Chatbots are an effective way to establish query resolutions using AI technology.

Automated Email Campaigns

One thing AI technology is known for in the marketing world is its ability to produce high-quality email automated email campaigns based on the users who have chosen to provide their email address to you due to their interest in your product or service. This is a step after lead prospecting, where each sale begins by finding folks who may one day be customers. Automated emails are commonly used in marketing and can be created using AI-powered technology.

The artificial software (which will be discussed in detail below) uses optimized subject lines based on a person’s browsing history on your website, their shopping history, and even their order history. These emails are known for sharing unique and compelling information about the company – including sharing discount coupons. These types of bold innovations lead to potential customers or prospective customers wanting to switch brands. The more data the artificial intelligence gets, the more personalized and helpful an email marketing campaign will be, based on such data. As an example, AI applications that get placed on sites targeted at single women will produce email campaigns based on your intended demographic. 

Lead Generation Process

It is essential to understand what the actual process of lead generation is. The lead generation process begins with the platform you want to choose to use for your lead generation efforts. Remember that lead generation is the process of trying to generate leads of professed interest and turning that interest into sales. Many business owners use lead generation tools or lead generation software to accomplish this crucial task. More leads than ever get generated by AI tools, known as AI lead generation. New leads are processed, counted, and remembered by the lead generation tools and used for marketing campaigns in the future.

Some of the methods by which business owners are choosing to create new leads are through job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and, of course, online content. Lead generation is vital because when a customer shows an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer or client is natural. This process occurs after you’ve already attracted an audience member and aim to convert the visitor into leads for your sales agent.

The lead generation process is inherently affected by lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of ranking leads to determine whether they are sales-ready. Leads are scored based on the interest shown in the product or service, the customer’s current place in the purchasing process, and their overall fit for your business. AI lead generation scores for you, typically, and AI lead generation also diminishes the amount of manpower you invest in your commitment to generating leads.

Lead Generation Software

There are several top AI lead generation tools. We’ve put together a guide of them to help you decide when choosing which course to take to add AI to your lead creation.

Drift

Drift is an AI-powered chatbot that assists businesses in using conversations to remove friction from their purchasing process. Drift uses a chatbot, email, video, and intelligent automation products.

The bots created at Drift use their technology to “learn” from conversations happening on your website between your clients and your sales reps. This vital information enables bots to answer questions and even understand what a helpful, effective, and fruitful lead looks like.

Conversica

Conversica offers an AI assistant that works around the clock to qualify leads on your site. This way, you can automatically turn them into more sales. So often, companies are liable to letting leads fall through the cracks because they simply do not have the resources to follow up with each one of them. Conversica, however, allows companies to clone the whole sales team to ensure every lead has a one to one conversation.

LeadCrunch

Lead Crunch leverages AI predictive models to find B2B leads by generating a unique mathematical model of your ideal potential customer – based on your data. After that, LeadCrunch helps optimize activity throughout the sales funnel and, by doing so, generates the most potential fruitful customers and educates you about them.

Wrap Up

Lead generation is an essential thing for companies to remain cognizant of. Lead generation is the process by which you turn interested customers into a sale. Utilizing AI to produce lead generation can help you score leads more accurately and even find more leads. Using machine learning, AI technology can use virtual chatbots or assistants to help your customers and also produce automated email campaigns to keep your customers engaged. Lead generation is affected by lead scoring, which is the process of ranking leads to determine whether they are sales-ready. There are several artificial tech applications out there to assist you in this process – Drift, Conversica, and LeadCrunch are just a few that we’ve researched.

FAQ

What is automated lead generation?

Automated lead generation is the process of utilizing tools powered by AI and machine learning to establish lead generations systems across your channels. It is essentially the leveraging of artificial intelligence to generate more accurate, helpful, and fruitful leads for a company.

How does AI help in acquiring new customers with lead nurturing and scoring?

AI assists in locking in new customers with nurturing by consistently reaching out to customers along their purchasing journey. AI assists with scoring by ranking leads according to how ready they are for a sale. These things combined create a system by which you will likely be able to latch onto new customers more easily.