Table of Contents
Introduction
In the last couple of years, online communities have learned periodically how AI has started to control everything. It is not a coincidence as well-organized artificial intelligence can create many positive effects.
Most people haven’t realized that AI had already conquered online platforms before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022. However, they have been learning with us for decades. But here, don’t think about robotics and semi-self-driving cars.
Using AI for automation, machine learning, or natural language processing is not a new trend. There are dozens of examples of these in the online sector.
You can ask the question, what is new then? The velocity. People start to realize that without AI their online shop will fall to their death. The competition between online businesses is bigger than ever, and saving money in one or two sections can brighten a company’s future.
There are thousands of hopeful AI applications that can help a company reduce its expenses, but it is very hard to pick the right one. The one that really helps get it out of the mud.
In this article, I will show you some promising AI tools that can help your company in different situations. Meanwhile, I will also guide you through the main parts of the conversion funnel and I will show you how you can connect the different parts with artificial intelligence. It will basically help you optimize your conversion funnel without locating more human resources.
The conversion funnel and its elements
The conversion funnel is the overall term of the buyer’s journey leading up to a purchase or just a simple conversion.
There are four well-separated elements, in which the buyer will take part if we are thinking about a successful buyer’s journey.
An unsuccessful journey means that the potential buyer gets stuck in a step and doesn’t go further. Most of the time, companies measure the rate between the successful and all conversions, this metric is called conversion rate.
Awareness
The first level of the conversion funnel is awareness. Your main task here is to pull as many visitors to your site as you can. You must create compelling advertisements, determine your advertisement platforms, develop your social media appearance, and so on.
Most of the time this is the most expensive step, so it requires planning.
Interest
The second level is interesting. Since it is not enough to generate publicity, you need to convince these potential buyers.
There are many different techniques on how you can do that:
- Discounts
- Engaging content
- Appealing design
- Tailored display
And this list does not even contain all of your possible options.
Desire
If a single user successfully gained some interest in connection with your site, the user can go to the next step: the desire.
Here, you need to build trust amongst your potential buyers, guide them through both your mission and vision and stimulate them to learn more about your company and your products.
You can achieve that by sending tailored leads, establishing a good email campaign, or just creating personalized content.
Action
And we finally managed to reach the final destination: the action. It means that your potential buyers become real buyers and buy something from you. If this activity happens, the user goes through your funnel successfully, this is called a macro conversion.
However, micro-conversions also exist. It means that the action didn’t lead to a purchase, just to grab some email address, or for example to convince your users to download something from your site.
Conversion rate optimization means the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website in this case.
What is an AI funnel?
An ‘AI funnel’ is a concept or process where AI technologies are strategically employed at various stages of the customer journey to improve and automate marketing and sales efforts. Basically, it’s about AI-powered conversion optimization through automation, analysis, and ongoing improvements.
Now, let’s see those AI tools that will help you to go through each of these levels. Let’s start with the first one.
Creating awareness with AI
As I wrote earlier, you can spend tons of money on advertising to your projected audience. But, what if it means too much for you?
What if you have to tighten your budget?
AI and a very useful site can help you solve this issue. Contactout has several layers, but one of them is actually very helpful to both B2B and B2C companies.
This function is called a search portal, where you can find businesses and people from LinkedIn.
You can filter many different variables (job title, department, seniority, company, and many others) thanks to their built-in AI system, this way you can find the people you really need. Those people who can fit into your projected target audience.
This web app also gives you the opportunity to grab their public emails, and telephone numbers without a single click.
Here, it is so much easier to attract people’s attention without spending money on both offline and online advertising methods. Then you can also create tailored prospects to fascinate these people and get them to browse your site.
Ensuring to bring your messages to more and more people will eventually lead to better conversion rate optimization.
Engage your customers more practically
To optimize your conversion funnel, using the increased opportunities of artificial intelligence and meanwhile engaging your potential customers is not an impossible mission.
My favorite AI application which met this criteria is by far Midjourney. This is a photo creator service, but these photos are created by the artificial intelligence itself through your prompts.
You only need to download Discord to your PC or mobile phone, and then add a Midjourney server to your account.
After this, your one and only task is to click on one of the Newbie or General servers and give prompts to the computer, using the order #imagine.
There are no borders in terms of imagination: from my personal experience, if your order is clear, the AI will generate a satisfying picture for you.
Moreover, their software creates 4 different pictures in under one minute. If you find a preferable one out of those four, you need to click on its numbered name, and the software will create your chosen one in a bigger size.
However, there is one barrier, which caused some issues throughout my career. Midjourney’s AI can’t interpret if you want to use words in your pic. In this case, the program will use scrawls.
It is not a big issue, as you can also copy your sentences to the pic after you download it from Discord. But sometimes the AI will add these scrawls to your images randomly. And it can be frustrating.
In which cases can this service be useful to impress your potential clients?
There are several options, I try to list some of them, but the number of opportunities is almost infinite.
- Creating appealing pictures for your landing page
- Throughout content marketing responsibilities (to illustrate a topic that you write for)
- To illustrate your company’s social media posts
Unfortunately, this service is not free. It was, for a very long time, but because of the increased interest from businesses and individual use, Midjourney shot down this opportunity.
But the basic plan is only 10 dollars for a single month.
How to impress your potential buyers with non-human methods
When you reach the stage of desire, you are only one step behind reaching the actual conversion. However, this is one of the trickiest parts of the whole conversion funnel. As most of the time you don’t really know what your customers really need.
You want to impress them, but there are no people with the same characteristics. Everybody is a little different, and you have to create very accurate target groups to be sure you will convince them.
But there is at least one tool that always works according to many sources. This is called the chatbot.
This software allows you to maintain a good connection between the business and the customers without human resources. You don’t need to hire coworkers who answer questions from visitors, as artificial intelligence can handle it efficiently nowadays.
Chatbots increase the user experience, and since you answer the most bothersome issues quickly, it can also build trust.
The question is the following: What is the best AI-powered chatbot in the market?
It’s a tricky question since there are tons of excellent choices.
Here, I will talk about EBI.AI, as I use their service regularly.
The one thing I really like about this option is its infinite opportunities for customization. Their integrated AI can understand more than 130 languages, with a 90% accuracy according to their own calculations.
They use NLP (Natural Language Processing). It means that the AI can interpret everyday language, it can also decide whether an action is taken or will be taken, and ask the following question based on these time factors.
But you don’t have to worry if the AI can’t solve an issue by itself as this is the biggest fear in terms of AI chatbots. They provide you with a real-time human interface that helps you out in these tricky moments.
Their display is very simple, it takes only a few minutes to create your own chatbot from signing up to their site. After you log into your account, they ask you some simple questions about your organization, and the place (the URL of the actual site) you want to implement it.
After you get inside, you need to create workflows. The workflow here is basically a predicted conversation between you and your customer. When you type the question, the AI will generate many other ones, which are similar to the one you add.
When you completely sketch the workflow, you need to click the check mark to end it. It will automatically generate this chatbot tab on your own site.
What tool can help you through ending conversions?
From my perspective, this is the only step where I don’t use AI software, as it doesn’t boost your efficiency most of the time.
In this step, the main problem is that many people believe when a customer reaches this stage we are all good. We can sit back and relax just watching how our revenue is growing and how we are making more and more sales.
This is all wrong. You miss one crucial step. Measuring your results and analyzing your tiny mistakes.
- How quickly did an average user go through this procedure?
- Where were most of the users stuck?
- What was the average session length?
These questions have to be answered in case you want to improve your numbers. But this is only half of the work that should be done. Using a funnel analysis tool may show you the issues, but you need to answer the “why” as well!
These all require qualitative research like analyzing individual session replays or visualizing user interactions.
That is when Capturly comes into the picture.
Our software helps you understand user behavior, identify problem spots, increase conversion rates, and grow your sales.
There are four different packages we offer to companies based on the quantity of their user and the in-depth analysis they need.
If you are not sure which package is useful to you, we offer a 14-day trial to each of our plans to help you with your decision!
Conclusions
As you can see there are numerous promising AI-powered tools that can lead to increased conversions.
But what can you win using these apps? I think this question comes up in all of our minds.
- Automation – you can finally miss the repetitive jobs and reorganize those to the artificial intelligence (Just like Contactout can help you).
- Saving money and time – Just think about the AI-powered pic creators. You can create an illustration in just a matter of minutes and for a cheap monthly fee (A good example of this is Midjourney).
- Increasing your UX – Most research showed that people rather communicate with real people instead of bots in communication between a customer and a business. But if one is available at any time, and the other isn’t? Most people will choose the first option.
I hope that you have found these AI tools useful, and practical. In my opinion, the next few years will bring revolutionary changes in the whole digital marketing sector and you need to keep up the pace before it is not too late.
So I encourage you to search for other options as well and don’t be afraid of these new opportunities.