How to Use AI to Nurture Leads Before They're Ready to Connect?

Who said it’s difficult to convert “not yet ready” leads to warm ones? Well, these leads know about your products and offerings but are not yet ready to purchase. Why so? This may be due to many reasons- some of them may be looking for more information, while others may hesitate or have a long and tough decision-making process.

The typical and traditional lead nurturing strategies such as generic emails, impersonal communication, and untimely messaging may not help them. You need to approach them in a bit different way, wherein you provide the exact value-added insights they are looking for. AI agents and chatbots can address such clients with personalized messaging to address their specific needs at the right time. Sounds interesting, right?

Such features are particularly useful for B2B companies implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM). With tailored and personalized interactions and content, the one-size-fits-all nurturing process can be transformed into a highly personalized one. The best part is that this addresses the exact pain points of your “not so ready” clients with minimal human interference involved. Read on to learn more about it!

Key AI strategies for pre-connection nurturing

The best part about AI lead nurturing is the AI agents and chatbots are available round the clock for your lead prospects. Besides this support, they provide personalized content based on your leads’ needs. Below are a few strategies that show how AI helps you nurture your “not so ready” prospects better.

1. Intelligent content delivery

Using your leads’ names in the messaging is an age-old personalized approach. With AI, you can go beyond this point and deliver the content they want. AI can easily track user behavior across the web along with the resources they are interacting with.

This helps you craft more personalized emails beyond the regular generic follow-up ones. AI can understand the nuanced questions, user intent, and their preferences, subtly hinting at the data collection capabilities that drive this intelligent delivery. This ensures that your users and leads get custom content delivery according to their preferences and needs.

2. Predictive lead insights

Based on the data collected from user behavior and previous interactions, AI helps you pitch your sales content much like a friendly recommendation. For example, if a user has expressed interest in your product, it can provide deeper insights, thus convincing them that the product meets their needs. This customized interaction feels less like a sales chat, thus boosting engagement and customer satisfaction.

3. Always-on engagement and support

Today, leads expect constant support and interaction around the clock (even outside business hours). The best and most cost-effective solution to this lies in taking help from AI. It can not just answer your leads’ queries instantly but can also offer them tailored advice and suggestions for keeping up with the engagement.

4. Personalization at Scale

Nurturing a lead involves providing them with personalized content. But AI helps you make better recommendations beyond the typical “related content.” It delivers customized content specifically relevant to the lead’s industry, company size, or particular challenges they have mentioned. This personalization brings you the leads’ trust and loyalty.

Building your AI-powered nurturing system

Now that you know about AI lead nurturing, how do you build the perfect AI-powered nurturing system to boost your lead conversion rate? Let’s do this together!

Step 1: Data-driven foundations

The base of building an AI-powered nurturing system is collecting comprehensive, rich, and high-quality data related to the leads. So, you need to move beyond the basic contact information and focus on key details such as their company size, role, industry, and specific pain points.

Furthermore, while collecting this data, you must ensure the data quality and the user’s privacy. Go for regular audits and validation processes, ensure compliance with regulations, and be transparent about data usage. Chatbot interactions can be a savior in this scenario, capturing the necessary high-quality data right from the user’s conversations and interactions.

Step 2: Choosing the right AI solution

Now that you have the data on your users, you need to choose the right AI solution that will help you deliver personalized experiences to them. Build an AI-powered lead nurturing strategy based on your business’s size and budget.

While chatbots are the most common solutions, look for other AI solutions that can help you with customer support, analytics, and, in short, the broader AI strategy. While deciding the AI solutions for your business, focus on key factors such as seamless integration, user-friendliness, flexibility and scalability.

Step 3: Mapping the customer journey with AI

Mapping the customer journey with AI goes beyond the traditional sales funnel. For “not yet ready” leads, specific AI touchpoints can significantly impact their nurturing journey. Examples include personalized email sequences triggered by specific behaviors, tailored website experiences that adapt to user preferences, and intelligent resource recommendations.

An AI chatbot can play a crucial role at various touchpoints, such as offering support during a resource download, guiding users through complex pricing pages, or providing instant answers to specific queries. By strategically placing AI interactions at key moments, you ensure a smooth, engaging, and personalized journey for every lead.

Nurturing Strategies for Different “Not So Ready” Profiles

To nurture your “not so ready” lead prospects, you must first understand why they are not yet ready to commit. Let’s understand some common types of “not so ready” clients and how you can address them.

1. The Researcher

This type of lead prospect is looking for more information related to your products and is also looking for other options and alternatives. To engage such profiles, you need to win their trust. Using AI-powered content recommendations, you can offer them detailed insights and downloadable resources for in-depth information.

Intelligent chat assistance can guide them through complex topics, answer their detailed questions, and offer further resources without overwhelming them. This subtle integration of chatbots can significantly enhance their exploration experience.

2. The Skeptic

This group of lead prospects is highly interested in your products and offerings but needs more push, such as social evidence or proof. AI can deliver personalized case studies and testimonials related to their industry for such lead prospects.

Besides building credibility, it can connect and interact with the lead prospects, thus understanding their problem and providing them with data-backed responses.

3. The Price-conscious

Such leads are in confusion regarding your products’ value and cost-effectiveness. While they’re interested in the product, they are still assessing the cost-benefit and ROI of it.

To address such prospects, AI can send them personalized value-focused content, thus indicating how the particular product is better than others and worth every penny. Furthermore, with intelligent interactions, they can segment leads based on their budget and subtly excite them towards affordable plans and payment options.

Not just this, AI can also alert the prospect about price drops and flash sale prices along with personalized discounts and coupon codes.

4. The “Champion” profile

The “Champion” profile includes the lead prospects already convinced of your products and their value-worthiness. However, the problem with them is that they are still convincing other business stakeholders to approve.

In such scenarios, AI can provide them with highly specific information they need, such as case studies, ROI calculators, stakeholder-specific content, etc. This is a great way to build credibility and secure buy-in from the key decision-makers of the business.

Measuring what matters: Success beyond the sale

Once your AI-powered lead nurturing system is live, evaluate its effectiveness. You also need to measure the impact it has on your lead prospects, and thus, you need to measure beyond sales figures.

Engagement metrics specific to early-stage

Firstly, you need to measure and evaluate how well AI can engage your target audience in the early stages. For this, track metrics such as AI conversations (chatbot conversation flow), content downloads, and lead time on a specific page.

Furthermore, the individual account progress should be looked at, such as how frequently the user has viewed the product or interacted with the chatbot. Such stats and metrics help you understand your users in the earliest stages and how AI supports their journey on your platform.

Lead scoring evaluation

By analyzing user behavior and other engagement metrics, AI can accurately predict and identify a user’s readiness for lead conversion. Chatbot interactions are a goldmine as they provide real-time behavioral insights of a lead, starting from their first interaction to resources requested and pages visited. This way, your team focuses on the promising prospects, which improves lead qualification and refines the lead scoring process.

The long game

AI lead nurturing is not a short-term investment; it’s an investment for the future. AI’s value extends beyond immediate sales, proving its worth over long sales cycles. By consistently tracking ROI on nurturing efforts, AI demonstrates its impact on sustainable growth. This long-term approach emphasizes the enduring benefits of AI in lead nurturing.

AI lead nurturing- The future of patient, personalized lead nurturing

With AI, businesses can efficiently understand the needs of the “not-so-ready” users and nurture them better. With personalized content delivery and insights, it has increased engagement and improved lead quality, thus ultimately boosting conversion rates. With the right information delivered at the right time, they are a boon for turning prospects to leads.

To know how to use AI to improve your lead conversion, start by auditing your current lead nurturing process and looking for areas and opportunities for implementing AI. Ready to take the next step? Start your AI strategy with chatbots as the basics and scale up gradually.