Enhance every step of your customer journey from reaching prospective buyers to retargeting existing customers with AI technologies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) still conjures up images from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and deep-seated fears akin to the late Stephen Hawking’s words that AI “could spell the end of the human race.”
But AI isn’t the future; it’s the here and now. Siri, Alexa, and Netflix deliver the invisible technology shaping user experience, and it’s now entirely possible for businesses to leverage AI in much the same way in order to streamline both marketing and sales. More specifically, here are five tips to drive sales with AI.
- Use Voice Technology to Improve Mobile SEO
Voice technology, comprised of speech and voice recognition, is the leading choice for what we’ve come to know as digital assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Cortana). And while speech recognition converts spoken words into digital words, voice recognition marks speakers by linguistic features such as intonation, speech and style. The processing power we’ve come to know and love is made possible by a combination of both AI technologies like deep learning and natural language processing.
How can you use this AI voice technologies for sales? By recognizing the revolution that voice assistants are actively creating. We no longer pester Google with shorthand keywords like, ‘shoe stores near me.’ Instead, we nonchalantly ask Siri, “Hey Siri, are there any shoe stores nearby?” Intent and contextual meaning from long-tail keywords that answer who, what, where, when, why, and how are currently a greater source of reaching prospective customers.
- Use Chatbots for Instant and Streamlined Customer Service
An additional way to utilize AI in sales is through chatbots that serve as automated sales assistants. For example, prospects that browse your site inevitably have questions, either stumbling on a problem or raising a question regarding one of your products or services. With a chatbot available, prospects simply type out what’s on their mind, and the question is answered virtually instantly.
Unlike owners and employees, chatbots work at all hours, 365 days a year, providing an alternative to customers who frustratedly click out of your site instead of emailing or calling in hopes of a timely response. The lowering of your conversion rate and simultaneously rising bounce rate of lost prospects make chatbots a worthwhile investment for most digital marketing strategies.
- Use AI for ‘Intelligent’ Prospecting
The paradigm in digital sales is shifting from reactive to proactive strategies, instinct-driven propositions to data-driven results. Organizations that have collections of data at their disposal regarding the purchasing and behavioral patterns of customers can use machine learning to identify patterns and provide insights into customer behavior over a given period of time. This can generate models to correlate signals when a customer makes a purchase and when they don’t. In turn, these models can recognize signals from future customers and categorize prospects within your sales cycle.
Machine learning can analyze data about previously converted leads to recognize what exactly led to a conversion, and once the algorithm has been trained, lead scoring identifies high-quality leads. In the absence of categorized data, unsupervised learning allows the algorithm to identify patterns on its own.
- Make Data-based Recommendations to Increase Sales
Take note from Netflix and Amazon’s digital strategy and start recommending products and services to your current users. Easily confused with retargeting, what these media and e-commerce giants are revolutionizing is predictive targeting. Companies that help you follow users around with products that have already seen (i.e. retargeting) can get you quick and easy attribution. But how many of those users would’ve purchased without retargeting? Predictive targeting — predictive product recommendations — accounts for more than just a user’s browsing history and uncovers hidden patterns that are often counter-intuitive.
Companies that have true predictive product recommendations will utilize a greater variety of user and item affinities, and these recommendations will “learn” over time from thousands of signals in order to continually change and adapt along with your users. In this way, you can get more than one sale from existing customers or convert prospective customers into paying ones.
- Use AI for Personalized Website Experiences and Better CRO
While AI’s capacity to build new websites is non-existent, it can enhance your visitor experience with intelligent personalization on your site. By analyzing hundreds of data points about a single user — location, demographics, device, interaction with the website — AI has the ability to filter only the most qualified offers and content. Similarly, thanks to behavioral personalization, push notifications can be targeted to individual users, dispatching the right message at the right time.
The 2017 Real-Time Personalization Survey by Evergage notes that 33% of marketers surveyed use AI to deliver personalized web experiences. When asked about the benefits of AI-powered personalization, 63% of respondents noted increased conversion rates and 61% mentioned improved customer experiences.
AI also can enable you to recognize when data flow stops or unexpected traffic is visiting your site. At a time when customers expect increasingly meaningful experiences, you can use AI to automate large quantities of the personalized user experience to drive sales.
AI and Marketers Can Work Hand in Hand
AI delivers a dream previously considered impossible by digital marketers – to engage with an entirely individualized user base in a personalized and meaningful way. You’ve been exposed and affected by AI for years, and now it’s time to intentionally apply the same strategies and services to deliver personalized experiences that drive sales.
For more information on services and a comprehensive strategy to make AI drive sales for your business, contact our marketing team at RLC Media.
