Engagement is crucial to bringing interested leads through the sales funnel. Lead engagement increases conversions, improves clients’ appreciation for your brand, and ensures that interested buyers have the information they need to make a purchase decision. However, many brands struggle to provide the high degree of personalization and engagement that today’s customers need to make effective buying decisions.
Enter automation. With AI-powered solutions, you can offer clients the engagement and support prospects need while freeing up the sales team’s time to focus on crucial interactions.
Use Automation To Improve Lead Engagement: An Overview
There are several ways AI tools can help automate the lead engagement process, improving your brand’s ability to connect with both current and potential customers.
1. Personalized Communications
Today’s customers have come to expect high levels of personalization across their interactions with your brand. In fact, 91% of customers note that they are more likely to buy from a brand that provides recommendations that are personalized to their needs, and as many as 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized.
Personalized experiences and communication are key for your brand. That might mean showing product recommendations based on what customers have purchased in the past or sending out informational emails based on what they’ve engaged with or the products they’re most likely to buy.
Fortunately, AI solutions make personalization easy. AI tools can gather substantial information from your customer base as a whole and each customer specifically, then use it to tailor those interactions to individual customers.
2. Providing Value-Added Content
When you reach out to customers, you want to provide content that is valuable to them: something that answers their questions, serves their needs, or offers them deeper insights into how to get the most out of their interactions with your brand. If your goal is to have customers open their emails, then each email you send out should add value to the interaction in some way.
Enter AI-based solutions.
Not only can AI determine what type of content users are most likely to want to engage with–and what will provide genuine value to them–it can generate the emails and other content they need to take advantage of those interactions.
3. Keeping Customers “Warm”
When it comes to customer interactions, keeping them “warm” is essential. Customers are more likely to make a purchase when they have interacted recently with your brand. The more time passes between those interactions, the better the odds that customers will fall out of the sales funnel and fail to make a purchase.
Of course, exactly how long that takes—and how often you need to reach out to leads—may be highly dependent on both your industry and your specific brand. Fortunately, AI can help identify the ideal gap between communications. Additionally, AI can track interactions with customers to determine whether it’s time to reach out to them and make sure that none of them fall through the cracks.
Make Use of AI Tools: Key Strategies for Increasing Engagement
Your business’s specific strategy for lead nurturing will often depend on how your customers prefer to interact with you, what information your customers are looking for, and even how often you need to reach out. A home building company, for example, may have very different interactions with its customer base than a financial services company.
Fortunately, there are several ways to utilize AI tools to automate your lead engagement strategy while tailoring them to individual customer needs and plans.
1. Interact on Social Media
These days, most people have social media—though what platform they use and how often they check in can depend on specific demographics. That makes your social media account a key part of your customer interactions.
Posting engaging content may not be enough, either. You also want to ensure you’re interacting with your customers: answering their questions, offering appreciation for their contributions, or simply connecting with them.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you must have a dedicated customer service representative for that task. Not only can you automate your posting schedule, but you can also automate some of those key customer interactions, including using AI chatbots as part of your messaging response protocols. Those bots can handle basic customer queries or show your appreciation for customer connection.
2. Personalized Emails
When it comes to lead engagement and nurturing, personalized emails may be one of the most important tools in your arsenal. Emails are a communication directly from your brand to your customers. While you can certainly send out mass emails with marketing information, those emails are unlikely to create the deeper sense of connection many customers are looking for from your brand.
Personalized emails, on the other hand, allow you to offer exactly what individual customers are looking for. You can tailor recommendations to the purchases they’ve made or the browsing they’ve done on your site, provide them with more insights about your products, and make sure they’re getting the information they need to make a successful connection with your brand—and thanks to AI, you can do it for every customer.
Personalized emails can also take into account the emails customers don’t want to receive and ensure they aren’t getting an inbox full of information that isn’t useful to them or that, in some cases, can actively turn them off from your brand. Making the most of this key marketing tool can help you create a deeper, better relationship with customers.
3. Website Chatbots
Chatbots on your website aren’t just a fad. They’re an excellent way to deliver the customer service leads you are looking for, including personalized answers and attention, all at a lower cost than hiring human customer service representatives to take those tasks on solo.
Many customer service interactions are relatively simple. Customers may want to get a quick answer to a question, learn more about a product, or figure out what options your brand offers that will fit their needs. Those interactions don’t require a human touch, and when you have human customer service agents taking them on, it means they may not have the time and attention they need to devote to other tasks.
Chatbots, on the other hand, cost much less for your company overall and can free up employees’ time and attention to focus on more serious concerns. Furthermore, they can help customers realize just how important they are to your brand and what you have to offer.
4. Ensure Timely Follow-Ups
Following up with your customers is a critical part of ensuring that they get what they need out of their interactions with your brand. Often, customer service interactions assume that a customer is content if they don’t reach back out. However, a customer who is frustrated with the interaction or feels as though your customer service team has not delivered on their expectations might not reach back out to your brand.
You might reach out after a customer service interaction to ensure that the customer was satisfied with the resolution they got.
You might follow up with a customer who needed a new or complicated purchase to ensure they ended up with the products or services that fit their needs.
If a customer needs to make a return or an exchange, connect with them to make sure their needs were met.
Follow-up interactions can play a huge role in customer satisfaction with your brand. When you follow up after your interactions, you show customers that you genuinely care about the challenges they’re facing and that you are there to assist them in moving forward.
AI-Powered Digital Assistants: Your Lead Engagement and Nurturing Powerhouse
If you’re looking for a solution that will allow you to navigate those vital interactions with your customers, AI-powered digital assistants could be the tool you need. AI-powered digital assistants can integrate with your existing tools to provide ongoing support for your customers, no matter how they choose to interact with your brand. Since they have access to your CRM, those assistants can ensure that:
- Customers get the answers they’re looking for.
- Your customers have a consistent experience with the brand across channels.
- No one falls through the cracks or gets missed.
If the digital assistant runs into a challenge it can’t handle on its own, it can trigger a notification for your human customer service agents, allowing them to take care of potential issues and ensure continuity. Furthermore, it can provide further notifications or reminders if a customer service representative isn’t able to connect with a customer immediately.
At AtlasRTX, we offer a variety of digital assistant solutions that help you provide a higher standard of customer service, improve your customer interactions, and ensure your customers are getting what they need from your brand. Reach out to us today to learn more.
