10 Ways to Acquire High-Quality Leads Using AI Lead Generation Tools

The quality of your services or outstanding product features don’t make any difference when you can’t sell it efficiently. To accelerate growth, you first have to get your product on top of prospects’ minds.

Businesses across the world are extensively using AI for lead generation purposes. In fact, artificial intelligence has emerged as one of the most effective solutions for businesses to grow their customer base. With AI and machine learning technologies evolving beyond our expectations, we now have highly advanced AI lead generation tools that generate high-quality leads faster than traditional methods.

These AI-powered software solutions can provide businesses with a competitive AI advantage. A McKinsey Global Survey on AI highlights the impact of AI adoption, revealing that AI-related revenue increases are most often reported in product development and marketing and sales. Among respondents, 41% report at least 5% revenue growth, 9% witness a 10% revenue increase, and 21% report a 10% cost decrease.

We’ll walk you through the ten best tactics to use AI for lead generation and show you why this trend makes marketers’ lives different.

But before we get to the heart of this article—AI for lead generation—you need to understand the typical lead generation process that top businesses follow.

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Understanding the lead generation process

Lead generation is a process of attracting prospects and increasing their interests by nurturing them, with the final goal of converting them into a customer.

Lead generation strategies involve techniques to attract interested prospects and convert them into qualified leads. Some awesome channels to generate leads are company websites, social media handles, and advertisements.

The online lead generation process typically includes the following components:

• Lead Capture: The odds are that most of your site visitors will never return to your site if you don’t capture a bit of their information. Start with capturing email addresses via lead generation landing pages.
• Lead Magnets: There is always a gap between website traffic and leads. Fill this gap by providing their site visitors with valuable information in exchange for their contact information.
• Lead Qualification: Analyze lead information to determine their likelihood of making a purchase.
• Lead Segmentation: Segment the qualified leads based on their personas and level of involvement.

While the lead generation process typically has the same components, the lead generation strategies differ for every business vertical. That’s why it’s essential for marketers to craft a strategy that works for their specific niche.

Despite the strategies, one thing that remains common for lead generation in the modern world of marketing is AI-powered lead generation tools.

AI for lead generation is the new norm for marketers. But very few marketers know how to get the best out of AI for lead generation.

Hence, in the next section, we’ll talk about the top tactics you should use while utilizing AI for lead generation.

Top 10 tactics to use AI for lead generation

The following are the top 10 tactics to use AI for lead generation.

1. Utilize existing assets to generate more leads

Your business might already have a few AI-powered tools that you can use for lead generation.

The most common AI adoption for lead generation in the marketing segment is chatbots. These virtual assistants guide your website visitors through your products and services. You can use chatbots for multiple tasks, from initial customer interactions to connecting clients to the right customer support representative depending on their issues. I’ll discuss chatbots more at a later point.

Inaccurate or low-quality data can compromise the performance of your AI lead generation tools, leading to ineffective targeting, affecting decision-making, and ultimately wasting resources. At large enterprises scale, even minor data inaccuracies can translate to significant financial and operational losses.

Gathering marketing data to feed to AI tools

Machine learning and AI algorithms should be trained before you can see actual results. The issue here is that gathering historical data about leads from tens of marketing and sales platforms is a time- and resource-consuming task.

To automate data aggregation, leverage a marketing data platform. These platforms automate the process of aggregating, organizing, and analyzing data from various sources. These solutions complement AI-powered lead generation tools and enhance their ability to generate targeted leads, personalize marketing messages, and optimize your overall marketing and sales strategies.

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2. Create buyer profiles

You get tons of traffic on your website, and some of them buy products/services from you. You might already know that these are your actual customers, and you should focus more on getting more customers like them.

How can you get more customers like them?

Create buyer personas according to the profile of your ideal buyer. For the initial marketing strategies of a business, the buyer personas can be created as per the primary research.

Here's an example of how a company can define ICP and buyer personas: 

But as your business grows and your website starts getting more traffic, you’ll have an opportunity to improve your buyer personas by using internal data.

This is where AI for lead generation comes in.

AI for lead generation can evolve your buyer personas towards personalization. AI and ML systems can create more accurate buyer personas by analyzing transactional and behavioral data from website visitors.

With more personalized buyer personas in place, you can tailor your marketing communication and strategies to generate better ROI from your lead generation efforts.

Use AI to find more prospects to target 

Another AI application for lead generation in B2B is to utilize tools like ChatGPT to find more accounts that match your ICP to run digital ad campaigns or to refine and prioritize your list of accounts by running additional research. 

Here're some of the actionable use cases and prompts. 

1. If you're running account-based marketing campaigns and want to find accounts that share similar attributes as your high-value customers, you may use the following prompts:

2. To further narrow down the list of prospects, ask ChatGPT to analyze if these companies meet other criteria. 

3. Alternatively, you can list all attributes in a prompt and ask ChatGPT to find companies that meet your criteria. Note: The ChatGPT model is trained on data up to September 2021, that's why you may double check if the information is still relevant. 

3. Score leads effectively

Predictive lead scoring is about determining which of your leads are ready to speak to the sales staff. Don’t you think it would be better if you ask your leads directly?

Yes, it makes sense to get in touch with your leads for the next step in the lead generation pipeline and here’s why:

But emailing the leads manually will require significant time and valuable marketing resources.

This is where AI for lead generation comes into play. 

The AI-powered tools for lead generation can create email lists from the leads database and send them a simple, yet personalized, email message.

If you feed your AI-powered lead generation tool with prospects’ responses, it can start seeing patterns and data correlations, making your leads scoring more intelligent than ever.

While managing multiple email campaigns, it's easy to get lost in the context. Target audiences, ICPs, and multitudes of email marketing metrics make targeting much more complicated. Eventually, marketers often can't understand some campaigns perform better than others. 

4. Employ chatbots to streamline buying process

The customers’ buying journey needs to be as easy as possible. One crucial element of a streamlined buying process is effective communication.

AI-powered chatbots can automate customer communication. With more and more customers getting comfortable with virtual assistant interactions, now is the time for businesses to employ chatbots in their customer-facing interfaces to increase lead generation.

For example, see how Moosend uses an AI-powered chatbot on their website to ask visitors for their email address.

The following are benefits of adopting AI-powered chatbots for lead generation:

• 24/7 availability
• Instant response
• Help customers through purchase
• Can be hyper-personalized for customers
• Omni-channel implementation capability
• Multilingual
• And most importantly, cost-efficient option for customer interaction

AI-powered chatbots are quite advanced. They can use preset questionnaires that persuade the website visitors to share their details.

5. Provide personalized service with ease

Personalization is the latest marketing trend where brands need to improve their customers’ experience by offering personalized services.

AI can help brands infuse personalization into their lead generation efforts. AI-powered tools are capable of processing large quantities of customer behavior data. These datasets can provide your marketing tools with insights that you can use for marketing communication personalization.

Moreover, based on your lead’s likes and dislikes, the AI algorithms can recommend their favorite products/services.

A very popular example of personalized services can be the OTT platform’s recommendation engine that suggests content based on a user’s watch history and likes.

6. Use automated email campaigns to attract more leads

AI-powered lead generation tools can help marketers successfully automate email marketing campaigns.

AI tools for lead generation can take your prospects’ browsing histories into consideration to construct personalized emails. Not only this, the AI algorithms can understand email marketing metrics to identify which elements of the emails are working and which aren’t. 

This helps the AI-powered tools to optimize and writing the email body content, subject lines, delivery time, etc.

Once the AI-powered tools have ample lead data, they can help you restructure your email campaigns and even clean up your email lists.

Following is an automated abandoned cart email sent by Fig.1 to its customers.

The following are the benefits of AI for lead generation via email marketing:

• Decrease email marketing cost
• Optimize subject lines and email content automatically
• Restructure email campaigns
• Optimize email send time
• Send automated email newsletters
• Helps generate high revenue via email

7. Segment leads more accurately

AI-powered solutions use clustering algorithms to segment leads more accurately.

Segmentation is a part of personalized communication and services. AI algorithms make sure that the right content reaches the right person at the right time. And for this, they need to segment leads based on predefined attributes like sales lifecycle stage, likelihood to buy, lead source, etc.

Suppose some of your leads are acquired through offering free eBooks or PDFs. In that case, they’re already aware of your services, and your AI tool can segment them separately to personalize marketing communication to them.

You can program your AI tool for lead generation to offer these customers special discounts and free trials to get them onboarded as they’re already at the edge of their buying journey.

8. Optimize predictive analytics for better leads

With AI for lead generation, predictive analytics can be integrated into your marketing strategies to boost sales figures.

Predictive analytics help marketers recognize which leads they should pursue to get quicker and higher results.

Learn how to move forward on the analytics maturity path by clicking the image below.

AI-powered predictive analytics can process your existing data to determine your ideal customers among your pool of leads. This helps you reduce your time on crafting marketing campaigns for leads that are less likely to convert.

With filtered leads, you can craft your marketing communication for the leads that matter, which improves your chances of winning them over.

9. Analyze old data to form a pattern

Marketing isn’t like a chemical formula where predefined processes and results are guaranteed. You need to try and test strategies to generate leads and convert them. Using AI for lead generation can help with that. 

Every business’s marketing needs to keep adjusting as per the customers' evolving needs. And this is where it becomes essential for marketers to understand customers’ reactions to their past marketing campaigns.

Luckily, analyzing data to identify patterns is the core competency of AI technology.

The data analysis feature of AI for lead generation can help marketers work proactively. It allows them to analyze how visitors turned into leads and form a pattern for successful lead generation. 

Marketers can identify the campaigns that delivered higher lead generation and conversions. And based on these insights, they can formulate future strategies and campaigns.

10. Enhance the quality of the sales pipeline

Sales pipelines are the heart of your business. But businesses face two big challenges while building sales funnels. The first is refining the sales funnel, and the second is strategizing for cross or up-sells.

Both these challenges of lead generation can be mitigated with the help of AI technology.

AI-powered software can score leads more accurately than a human. AI algorithms are free of subjective bias and personal opinions, which makes them a perfect tool for refining the sales funnel.

As we’ve discussed earlier, AI algorithms are highly efficient in identifying patterns and trends; they can automatically score your leads and let you focus on high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

Additionally, AI algorithms can predict every individual lead’s likeliness to buy additional services.

Coupled with ML, AI for lead generation can analyze the previous interactions with a particular lead to predict what products or services they’ll be most interested in. This allows marketers to focus on the specific products/services for these leads.

Moreover, having insights into leads’ likes and dislikes will eliminate the guesswork sales staff have to do. This also mitigates the risk of losing leads due to ineffective marketing communication.

AI for lead generation is the future

Undoubtedly, AI technology is beneficial for lead generation. Businesses from any domain can expect a more efficient sales pipeline that improves conversion rates.

With the help of AI technology, marketing tools have become more intelligent in organically boosting lead generation results.

If you haven’t implemented AI for lead generation strategies, now is the right time to implement a new digital strategy that includes AI and ML.

Lastly, it is essential to train your sales and marketing departments to use AI-powered tools so that you can make the most out of them.