Updated May 15, 2024: We refreshed the article by simplifying purchase intent explanations and giving more examples of why companies should consider using it to improve sales performance.
Knowing your target audience is critical to the success of your digital strategy. The more you know about your potential customers, the better the results of your targeting and engagement efforts will be.
Most sales and marketing tools give you demographic information like age, gender, interests, etc. Even if that data describes your website visitors, it doesn't shed light on their story and context.
Are people interested in your solution? Do they need guidance, or are they happy to do research on their own? Would they benefit from tailored content or recommendations?
It's easy to answer these questions if you know each website visitor's purchase intent (also known as buying intent).
Tip: Leverage purchase intent in your sales right now with Lift AI. This buyer-intent solution integrates into your marketing stack and identifies web visitors who already want to buy your offering, streamlining your sales process.
What is Purchase Intent (Buying Intent)?
Purchase intent is a new but increasingly more effective metric for lead generation. It describes your leads in terms of their willingness to buy your product or solution, which can be measured continuously.
Unlike purely demographic indicators, purchase intent represents a holistic approach to analyzing your audience. It combines demographic and behavioral information to not only take into consideration who your leads are but also which actions they take to explore your offering.
Understanding purchase intent can transform your sales and marketing efforts by enhancing targeting, personalization, and conversion rates.
- Improved targeting ensures you focus on high-intent leads, making your outreach more effective.
- Personalization allows you to tailor messages and offers to individual needs, creating more engaging experiences.
- Ultimately, this leads to higher conversion rates as you prioritize and engage with those most likely to buy, streamlining your sales process and driving revenue growth.
Buyer intent software helps you sell smarter and make more money by looking at real-time data to find high-intent prospects so you can target and engage at the right time. Using purchase intent to build effective marketing strategies also allows you to optimize your marketing messages, personalize your sales approaches, and increase conversions and ROI.
Understanding your audience from multiple perspectives is essential as products and services become more complex. Tracking buyer intent throughout the customer journey, often expressed using the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) model, provides continuous insights as visitors navigate their path to purchase.
How Purchasing Intent Changes Throughout the Buyer Journey
Awareness Stage
At the awareness stage, potential customers first learn about your product or service. They might show informational intent, indicating interest in your type of solution, but are not yet ready to buy.
For example, a visitor might discover your software company through a search engine, read a blog post about the importance of your type of software, and then leave to continue researching. This behavior shows they are aware of your product but are still in the early stages of their purchasing journey.
Interest Stage
As visitors move to the interest stage, they're looking for more detailed information about your products. Their intent is stronger as they evaluate how your solution meets their needs.
For example, the same visitor might explore product pages, download a whitepaper about your software’s features, or subscribe to your newsletter.
Desire Stage
In the desire stage, prospects develop a preference for your product. They compare it against competitors and other options, read customer reviews and success stories, or check pricing details. This stage reflects a higher intensity of purchase intent as they move closer to making a decision.
Action Stage
Finally, at the action stage, visitors are ready to make a purchase. They might sign up for a free trial, add items to the shopping cart, or request a demo. This stage encompasses transactional intent, where the visitor has completed all the necessary research and is ready to make a decision.
Because it can vary so widely throughout the buyer journey, it's important to understand each visitor's purchase intent intensity so you can allocate resources to where they'll have the most impact.
Determining purchase intent is also key for your marketing strategy to ensure you deliver the right message to each visitor.
Limitations of Traditional Purchase Intent Signals
Traditional purchase intent signals often fail because they’re based on outdated or incomplete third-party data. Signals like email engagement or generic behavioral indicators don’t have the specificity or timeliness to measure purchase intent. They give you a fragmented view of a prospect’s interest, missing all the nuances of their buying journey.
AI-powered visitor behavior analysis gives you real-time, detailed insights into user behavior. This advanced approach lets you understand and respond to purchase intent more accurately and effectively and supercharge your engagement and conversion strategies.
By using AI you can cut through the noise and focus on what matters most—turning visitors into loyal customers with precision and confidence.
How to Measure Purchase Intent
Measuring purchase intent is not easy. It involves identifying and evaluating the proper correlation between multiple inputs over large segments of your market.
Purchase intent needs data at scale. It's not possible to get good results by extrapolating a few particular situations to the whole audience.
For example, you can't solely rely on demographics. You need to monitor how your audience interacts with your website and services. You need to know where visitors are coming from, how engaged they are, and whether their actions are intentional or situational (e.g. clicking on an ad banner).
Visitors who come to your website via your newsletter would have higher purchase intent than someone clicking on an ad. Not only do newsletter subscribers engage with your content, but they've already shared their email addresses with you as well.
In a similar way, you can separate cohorts who are looking at different pages of your website. People who go to pricing and demo pages probably have a higher purchase intent than those who read about features or go to job openings.
Google Analytics and other similar analytics tools can help you uncover a few behavioral insights. The problem is that most do so after the fact, when visitors are long gone, and don't take into account nearly enough metrics to make accurate predictions.
Location, for example, could say a lot about a visitor, which is why IP address lookup is a popular feature of data intelligence software. Using reverse IP address search, data analytics and tools can determine the company that any visitor works for and automatically highlight key accounts. That said, remote work has made IP address lookups somewhat less valuable.
But even when you see raw data in real time, it takes too long to compare results and take action. Besides, up to 98% of website visitors would remain completely anonymous. And if you only rely on following up with visitors who subscribe for a newsletter or request a demo, you'll miss out on the majority who are interested in your offering but are not yet convinced enough to engage.
That's why, to measure purchase intent, you need to be able to account for many inputs, process them in real time, and assign a score of that purchase intent to each visitor.
How to Assign Purchase Intent Scores
Measuring purchase intent is about determining user behavior, including:
- What they read
- Which devices they use
- Which channels they come from
- How much time they spend on your website
- What pages they look at
This represents a complex path to purchase. For example, signing up for a demo is not a one-step buying process. People visit, read, leave, talk to coworkers, and come back at a later date. This is especially true for enterprise-level products or services with long-term commitments.
Each user journey component should influence (by adding or subtracting) the personal purchase intent score. With so many inputs and variables, real-time scoring isn't humanly possible. The inherent complexities of interpreting behavior data at scale require technologies like AI and machine learning.
There are several buyer intent data tools that companies can use to measure purchase intention and score purchase intent. Here’s a quick rundown of five of these tools:
1. KickFire
Offers powerful IP address intelligence to identify website visitors and their intent based on behavior and engagement. KickFire provides actionable firmographic details, enabling precise targeting.
2. Slintel
Uses purchase intent data to provide insights on prospects’ purchase journeys, enhancing sales outreach and conversion. Slintel's data-driven approach identifies when prospects are in-market, improving timing and relevance.
3. DemandJump
Tracks consumer behavior across multiple channels to prioritize high-intent leads. DemandJump’s insights help map out the entire buyer journey, uncovering hidden opportunities.
4. Leadfeeder
Integrates with your CRM to show which companies visit your website and provides intent data for targeting and follow-up. Leadfeeder’s real-time notifications enable timely and informed engagement.
5. Lift AI
Utilizes advanced machine learning to score website visitor behavior in real-time, identifying high-intent prospects and enabling effective engagement. Lift AI provides over 85% accuracy in predicting purchase intent, boosting sales efficiency.
By leveraging these tools, you can automate the process of intent scoring, ensuring timely and accurate identification of high-potential leads. This allows your sales and marketing teams to prioritize their efforts and engage with prospects more effectively.
What About Using Chat to Ask Users Directly?
A lot of companies today use chat on their website to directly ask visitors what they want.
Leveraging chat is a key tactic to identify anonymous website visitors, explain your product, and collect valuable feedback. When you're connected to visitors, you can just ask everything you want to know, right?
Not quite. Not everyone wants to be chatted with.
Even those who do only reveal tiny snippets of information in the chat. Additionally, the strategy of leveraging chat conversations works for your sales team only when your traffic is manageable. Otherwise, your team would get overwhelmed with sorting through visitors and trying to manually identify purchase intent.
Relying on chatbots to process every visitor is not ideal either. Chatbots have limited capacity for determining the most effective response and often miss out on opportunities where the human touch would have prevailed.
The reverse works much better. You should identify anonymous website visitors and determine their purchase intent before engaging with them in chat.
How can you do that at scale? You implement a tool like Lift AI.
Lift AI is a buyer intent solution that seamlessly integrates into your marketing stack and gives you accurate purchase intent indicators for every website visitor in real time.
The success of Lift AI can be attributed to a unique machine-learning model trained on billions of data points and millions of live sales interactions.
As a result, Lift AI will identify 9% of your website visitors who have the highest purchase intent and connect them directly to your sales team through any chat platform you already use (e.g. Drift). Lower-scoring visitors can be delegated to a self-help or nurturing bot and still get valuable information without taking up your sales team's time.
Real Results: Lift AI's Proven Effectiveness
Lift AI customers report up to a 10x increase in chat conversions within 90 days. Here are just a few of our customers' success stories:
PointClickCare
PointClickCare saw a remarkable 400% increase in chat conversions, resulting in over $1M in incremental revenue in just one year. By implementing Lift AI’s advanced machine learning and real-time buyer intent scoring, PointClickCare could identify high-intent visitors and engage them more effectively.
"The combination of Lift AI’s targeting model and chatbot optimization enabled PointClickCare to realize a 168% increase in qualified leads from chat in the first month!"
John Walker, Director Demand Marketing
Formstack
Formstack achieved an amazing 420% growth in its sales pipeline and 18x ROI using Lift AI. Lift AI’s ability to identify and score high-intent prospects accurately allowed Formstack to focus its sales efforts on leads most likely to convert. This strategic approach dramatically improved lead generation and conversion rates, showcasing Lift AI’s impact on enhancing overall sales performance.
Chronus
Chronus, an employee-driven development platform, used Lift AI to refine its targeting and engagement strategies. By combining Lift AI’s real-time intent scoring with 6sense’s ABM platform, Chronus saw an 11.6x increase in conversations converting to pipeline and saw a 50% reduction in time-to-value.
This integration created a “bullseye” segment of high-intent visitors, allowing Chronus to significantly boost its sales pipeline, with Lift AI alone generating 85% of Chronus’ total pipeline from completely anonymous visitors.
Truckstop
Freight software company Truckstop adopted Lift AI to enhance its engagement with high-intent visitors. As a result, the company achieved a 3.8x ROI within the first month and a 27x ROI by the fifth month. By focusing their time and resources on high-intent visitors, Truckstop was able to convert engagements to opportunities 3x higher than general traffic.
This led to immediate sales team buy-in and dramatically improved conversion metrics, transforming visitor interactions into actionable leads and significantly boosting revenue
Get Lift AI free for 30 days — no credit card required. Just install a JavaScript snippet on your website, and the solution will automatically configure itself.
Master purchase intent and grow your sales without learning new workflows or hiring new sales staff. With artificial intelligence, you can automate decisions that weren't even possible before.
FAQs
How do I identify purchase intent signals?
Identifying purchase intent signals involves analyzing various behavioral indicators that show a visitor’s likelihood to buy. Key signals include website interactions like frequent visits to product pages, downloading whitepapers, time spent on high-value pages, and actions such as requesting a demo or adding items to a cart. Advanced tools like Lift AI use machine learning to analyze these behaviors in real time, assigning intent scores to prioritize high-potential leads.
What are the best tools for tracking purchase intent?
The best tools for tracking purchase intent combine robust data collection with advanced predictive analytics. Some top tools include:
- Lift AI: Utilizes AI to score visitor behavior in real time, providing highly accurate intent data.
- 6sense: Uses AI-driven insights to predict buying behavior and identify in-market accounts.
- Demandbase: Focuses on account-based marketing with comprehensive intent data.
- Leadfeeder: Integrates with CRM systems to track which companies visit your website and their intent.
- KickFire: Offers IP address intelligence to identify and analyze visitor engagement.
These tools help businesses accurately track and leverage purchase intent to enhance their marketing and sales strategies.
