Have your sales and marketing teams been struggling with acquiring and retaining customers? If so, you might want to consider implementing artificial intelligence in your business. Here are four ways AI can help boost sales and achieve customer loyalty, regardless of the size of your company.
1. Automating Tedious and Time-Intensive Work
Automating work that is tedious and time-consuming with tools such as call recording software can significantly enhance performance and productivity. This leaves you with more time for higher-value tasks. You can utilize the power of AI to help you automate and more effectively manage the following tasks and activities:
- Automate customer relationship management (CRM) data entry.
- Suggest sales rep responses during live or written conversations with leads.
- Schedule and organize meetings.
- Use a sales rep chat/email bot to save time via customized and automated chats/emails.
AI can automate many tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks such as communications tracking, updating contact data, or generating a weekly status report for leads. Offloading these tasks gives your sales team more space and time to focus on what matters the most — selling and building relationships with customers.
2. Improving Lead Quality and Shortening the Sales Cycle
Still not sure if you should use AI to improve your sales efforts? Maybe knowing that AI generates more leads than the majority of marketing methods will change your mind.
It’s stressful for sales reps to meet quotas. Bad leads typically eat up too much time and effort. Artificial intelligence can help improve lead quality and shorten the sales cycle in four ways.
Finding Data and Providing an Actionable Report
Data as to who is searching for your product and how qualified these prospects are is available. Unfortunately, this information is complex and scattered across many websites and databases. AI can gather, synthesize, and make sense of that data with an actionable report so that you can make more sales.
Providing Accurate Lead Segmentation
The success of any marketing campaign depends on accurate lead segmentation. Lead segmentation refers to a process of dividing your audience into different groups based on various parameters such as behavior, demographics, browsed content, interactions, and more. The gathered data is then used to create highly personalized marketing campaigns and messages. These custom campaigns address the segmented group’s specific needs or interests.
Enabling Automated Email Campaigns
Artificial intelligence enables you to create and send automated email campaigns. These can be triggered by predetermined events such as cart abandonment, user unsubscribing from the newsletter, signing up for a membership, and similar situations. These customized email campaigns have higher open rates due to optimized content and specific mailing times when users are most likely to check their email.
Detecting Industry Trends and Business Opportunities
Artificial intelligence inspects large data sets to find trends and opportunities. These help you stay relevant and put you ahead of your competition.
With insight into potential customer behavior — such as prior engagement, products they purchased, pages they’ve visited, and more — AI can score and highlight the healthiest customer accounts. This helps prioritize and focus on the most promising leads. You can also use AI-powered lead generation platforms to find prospects that match your existing customer profiles, creating a continual pipeline of high-quality leads.
3. Optimizing Pricing
With AI, you no longer have to guess the best price to help you score a sale. AI-powered technology crunches all customer data such as location, size, and earlier successful sales. It then comes up with the best price you should offer.
This type of pricing is highly personalized. It’s also time-dependent on a particular customer, which increases the chances of achieving a sale. It speeds up the whole buying-selling process. It also improves customer experience by minimizing back-and-forth negotiations with the most optimal price set in place. You don’t have to worry about the corporate margins either, as you can protect them with pre-authorized markdown guardrails.
What’s great about Al-powered models is that they can consider thousands of hidden relationships, such as how one product’s price change affects other products in the portfolio. It can then recommend individual prices to maximize revenue and sales of the entire portfolio.
Furthermore, AI reveals connections we wouldn’t normally see. Examples include when people are open and interested in advanced services or additional products your sales team offers. This makes up-sells and cross-sells more predictable and manageable by providing information on customers likely to respond well to an up-sell or cross-sell. Using advanced analytics that comes packaged with AI tools is a sure way to stretch goals and maximize sales revenue.
4. Improving Customer Engagement and Satisfaction
A weak, impersonal, or frustrating customer experience is a sure way to lose money and customers. Fortunately, AI can help businesses seamlessly improve the customer experience with a higher degree of personalization.
AI can help you track and collect data on how customers navigate your website. This provides valuable insight that helps you out in three strategic categories.
Understanding Your Customer Better
Artificial intelligence and machine learning facilitate a more accurate understanding of customers by gathering and analyzing behavioral, historical, and social data. This data is used to improve the customer journey and increase sales by displaying more relevant content.
Making Real-Time Decisions and Predictive Behavior Analysis
Real-time decision-making refers to making decisions based on the most recent available data from the current interaction between a customer and a business. When you recognize and understand a customer’s intention, with the data produced in real-time, you can present highly personalized and relevant content to a customer. Predictive analytics, on the other hand, uses data mining, statistics, and modeling. This is used to make predictions such as when and how it’s best to communicate with a customer.
Using Chatbots to Provide Personalized Assistance to Customers
Chatbots shouldn’t be viewed as a way to replace the human workforce. Rather, chatbots are there to help your employees become more efficient. It’s essential to hit the right balance between chatbots and human interaction. You want to deliver the most convenient experience to your customers. AI-powered chatbots can save money when customers take care of minor issues on their own. However, it’s best if they’re used to deal with a select number of issues. These might include order tracking, invoice and account management, and others.
AI Can Offer a Competitive Advantage Tune-Up
Incorporating AI-powered tools into your marketing campaigns gives you a much-needed competitive advantage in a world where every customer matters. It’s a valuable, data-driven, and proven way to engage visitors and personalize content and product recommendations in a way that drives sales and improves customer satisfaction.
