How to Use AI for Sales Funnel Optimisation in Your Business
Every stage in your sales funnel is driven by data. AI can help you create measurable outcomes and improve effectiveness at each stage. This blog talks about usage of AI in sales funnel optimisation - for each of the four sales funnel stages!
Today’s disruptive marketspace has made it impossible for businesses to grow without leveraging technology. Over the years, I have observed that most businesses get really clueless at the Sales Funnel stage. In this article, I have explained how you can implement AI to optimise different stages of the sales funnel in your business. nbsp;
But before I move on to the use of AI for sales funnel optimisation, let me quickly brief you about the four different stages of the sales funnel.
What are the Different Stages of Sales Funnel?
Now, if you have read about the sales funnel, you must have found multiple sources that have talked about 5 stages or even 7 stages in the sales funnel. I like to divide the sales funnel into four different stages - Awareness, Interest, Analysis, and Action. Each of these Sales Funnel stages can definitely be further segregated!
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Awareness: This stage is all about creating awareness about your brand, services, and products.
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Interest: Interacting and generating interest in your visitors or newsletter/blog subscribers is easily your next step.
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Analysis: Next comes user behavior analysis and personalizing experience of your visitors & subscribers.
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Decision making: The last step is to convert interest into action and be your users’ first choice when they finally decide to buy your products or use services.
I like to call it “Sales Circle” rather than “Sales Funnel” because this process is not unidirectional. Even more difficult part comes next - Customer retention which takes the focus from the last stage of the sales funnel to generating awareness & upselling your services / products.
According to a study by Gartner, AI Implementation has increased by 270% in just 4 years!
The marketing and sales department are using AI more than other departments of businesses. If you are one of such businesses you should definitely analyze how successful you have been at utilizing AI to its full potential. If you are not so sure, read ahead!
AI in Marketing: Sales Funnel Optimisation
I believe that there is not just one perfect way of sales funnel optimisation. You can also do it without using AI but I wouldn’t be so sure of its final results. Using AI you can truly define the way a website visitor or a prospect sees your brand, services, and/or products at different stages of the sales funnel and can also help in reducing marketing costs.
6 Ways to Reduce Marketing Costs Without Impacting Your Business
Creating Awareness
Over the years, I have talked to multiple business development teams. Defining & targeting the right audience is one of the most common issues the executives face. The entire goal is to detect your target audience, collect data, and use it to present your services right where and in a way that your users need it, right?
Source: Moz
A Complete Guide to PPC Marketing
The first step of this entire process is telling the world your target audience (awareness) about your brand, products, and services. It could be through onsite/offsite blogs, videos, social media, podcasts, or any other platforms. Marketers have been using various kinds of analytics tools to measure the impact of their efforts such as PPC Marketing since forever, but it’s time to ask yourself what value do these tools add to your marketing efforts?
51% of consumers believe brands send too much irrelevant content.
Irrespective of the platform you choose for creating brand awareness, AI can help you define the right direction for your campaign. Implementing AI on the front-end might require advanced AI-assisted tools. You can, however, use AI at the backend to get improved visibility and enhanced monitoring over who is talking & reading about your brand, products, or services.
You can rely on this collected data to redirect your awareness campaign and modify it to suit your target audience.
Taking Control of UX (Interest)
The User Experience (UX) and User Design (UI) of your business are how you woo a prospect or a visitor and push them down the sales funnel. Competition is getting more fierce each day. As such, taking control of the user experience of your business has become more relevant than ever.
Peter is a prospect and came to your website. He couldn’t navigate to the page he was looking for and got stuck on your service page. This counts for a poor experience and, history has it, that Peter won’t ever return to your website.
88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.
AI is playing a vital role in content structuring - defining Information Architecture (IA) by search engines, websites, etc. For starters, use AI to categorise your website’s content in a way that is best for your users. The phrase “intent-marketing” has been around for a while now. It’s about pitching the right thing at the right time and keeping a prospect engaged until you make a sale.
Implement complex ML capabilities of AI for multivariate testing against the conventional A/B testing of your website. This will help you find the right combination of variables on your website, backed by data, for every user. I believe that without the use of AI you can’t have enough data to truly understand & categorize a visitor’s intent, change your website’s UX accordingly and benefit from it.
AI in Analysis & Decision Making
You, as an entrepreneur, know that running a business is all about taking risks. But how much can you put at stake? Is your business at a safe stage for you to take risks? AI in analytics adds “calculated” to risks and allows you to actually benefit from them!
Analytics is the most important part of any marketing campaign you run for your business. It shows you things like how your target audience is reacting, how good is the CTR, etc. This collected and analysed data helps you to draw a better response from your target audience. How can AI help with your business analytics?
88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.
Imagine this. You go to a website looking for something and it’s right there. You want to learn about a process and you get highly resourceful blogs & eBooks in your inbox. Obviously, you will remember this experience and visit this website when you are looking for related products or services.
This is what AI in Analytics is capable of. Enforcing a decision based on the majority of your visitors’ behavior on all your users is no longer a viable option. The subsets of AI - Unsupervised, Supervised, and Reinforcement Machine Learning can not only help you identify patterns in user behavior but also can help you use these patterns to personalize the experience for every visitor.x
AI in Sales Funnel Optimisation: Final Words
Professor John McCarthy, a reputed American computer scientist, said that AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Considering the significance of brand awareness, user experience, and analytics to drive conversions in your business, “intelligent machine” is something you are missing from your sales funnel.
By monitoring your users’ behavior closely at every stage of the sales funnel and gauging the right actions to take on prospects using AI will help you drive conversions in your business like never before!