A Look at How AI Can Identify High-Intent Website Visitors and Transform Your Marketing Funnel

That great recipe your friend cooked, your next exciting tech purchase, how to tie a bow tie  — there is almost nothing we do that we don't research first on the web. You name it, we Google it. Most of the research that a buyer conducts for a considered sale happens online, either on your company's website or worse, your competitor's website. And even if buyers ultimately buy from a salesperson or offline or at a store, they usually research their purchases online first. As a company, your best opportunity to discover and capture your customers' buying intent before they purchase all happens online, and often on your very own website.

Why Anonymous Website Visitors are Problematic

It's great that there are potential customers on your website, but the challenge is knowing how to engage them. Typically 98% of website traffic is anonymous, and when a high buyer-intent visitor hits your site, you have very little time to engage them  — typically less than a minute before they bounce onto the next competitor.

A whole industry has exploded in the effort to identify anonymous visitors and deploy sales processes to target them effectively within this timeframe. Reverse IP platforms promise to identify visitors' locations and track down the companies they are working for, but their success rate is low. The shift to remote work and the popularity of VPNs (which change default IP addresses) have also caused reverse IP tools to struggle.

When these tools do succeed, their findings are based on companies your visitors work for, rather than their individual buyer intent. Reverse IP tools also gather this information asynchronously, making it hard to leverage when a potential customer hits your site.

AI and Buyer Intent

Traditional tech advancements have helped to aggregate, process, and communicate data. But AI systems do more, they significantly alter the interactions between humans and data, solving problems in real-time with minimal human input, delivering outcomes with repeatable accuracy, and adapting as circumstances change.

While traditional marketing intelligence is based on a human hypothesis of what represents a good lead, AI understands the actual patterns that lead to the right outcome. So, instead of the five percent accuracy of a marketer's best guess, AI's accuracy rate is actually closer to 90 percent, which can have a transformational impact on any business.

It's machine learning's high confidence levels that take it from helpful to useful. For example, mapping technology was helpful in digitally visualizing terrain, but it became truly useful to consumers when Google Maps could illustrate the best route with high confidence. Similarly, self-driving only becomes useful once machine learning hits a tipping point in its accuracy and therefore users' confidence in its ability to steer your vehicle in heavy traffic. It's the same for deriving the buyer-intent of every website visitor, known or anonymous.

AI can assess hundreds of thousands of potential visitor pathways and hundreds of disparate digital fingerprints — from referral URLs to page-views, time-on-page, page sequencing, and UTM parameters. It then compares those behaviors with millions of chat outcomes across billions of visitor profiles to predict the probability of a visitor converting into a customer, at an accuracy rate of over 90 percent.

In short, AI can identify every high-intent visitor that hits your site and engage them with a messaging platform or chat tool, using the right combination of proactive chat, sales agents, and specialized sales chatbots to qualify and nurture the mass of lower buyer-intent visitors.

Instead of only engaging the two percent of visitors who reveal themselves with an email address or initiate contact, AI opens the revenue aperture to all visitors — known or anonymous —  with the ability to see and engage every visitor with high buyer intent. It can also keep improving and adapting to changes like seasonal variations, competitive influence, pricing, and packaging changes much better than any human ever could.

How Marketers Can Benefit from AI

With the help of this accurate insight, marketers can then lay out the best engagement based on AI predictions — straight to a live sales agent for high scores, a proactive chatbot engagement for medium scores; and nurture bots and self-serve portals for low scores.

Over the last decade, chatbots have exploded to the point where 79 percent of businesses admit chatbots have the power to grow their company. Chat functionality has blended into apps and almost every website experience, often to the chagrin of the earnest visitor who is just there to explore and learn. Chat is no longer just a 1:1 real-time exchange of text, but a powerful AI-driven, omnichannel, personalization, and engagement engine.

Having identified high-intent visitors, marketers can fine-tune their investments with greater insight. And in the event those high-intent visitors manage to get away, now they have been flagged, they can be aggressively re-targeted through ad campaigns.

Data enhancement tools can be very expensive if applied to the entire volume of site visitors, but by accurately targeting them at visitors with high buyer intent, you won't waste resources profiling visitors that aren't in a buying cycle.

So, instead of casting your rod into a dark, invisible pool of anonymous visitors, you can now use AI to illuminate the full potential of your website and, like a commercial-grade fishfinder, direct you to that shoal of high-intent visitors, exactly when the time is right.

Author:

David McFarlane is a Board Member and Instructor for the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge and Venture Partner of VC firm Companyon Ventures.