We were thrilled to present at the Chat Funnels DemandGen Summit, 2021 alongside some big names like ZoomInfo, DemandBase, VanillaSoft, Tealium, and more.
Almost 3,000 attendees from across the globe joined the DemandGen Summit to learn about the latest insights, tools, and technology.
Our presentation reveals exactly how you can use buyer intent AI and chat to turn anonymous visitors into revenue, and how PointClickCare was able to 4x their conversions using this approach.
The full written transcript for this webinar is shown below.
If you're interested in learning more, contact us today or request your own free trial to get started.
Full Webinar Transcript:
Hello, my name is Don Simpson; I'm the CEO and founder of Market link and lift AI. And what I'm here to talk with you about today is what I think is probably the biggest revenue opportunity on your website, and I would argue is likely to be the biggest revenue growth opportunity in your company; and it's something that a lot of people really are missing, and not taking advantage of the opportunity. So what I'm going to talk to you about is turning anonymous website visitors into revenue, give you a quick overview.
Conversational marketing has really exploded. In the last few years, the growth has been insane, the number of companies in it, but the challenge is most of your website visitors are anonymous. And although the biggest opportunity to convert those anonymous visitors is in the moment through chat, it's also really, really difficult to do at scale. So if you have an ABM program, you can use identity tools, which help you to determine what company your visitors work for; but to really understand the opportunity with each visitor, you have to know the buying intent, and the only way to know that intent is worth AI. So once you know the buying intent, then you can take action with those individual visitors, and you can deliver on the promise of chat, and really turn it into a superpower.
So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about lift AI, and the background, and the product that we built, and what it can do for you and for your company. So let's talk about conversational marketing first and how it's exploded. So we've been in around this space for almost 30 years now. We started out, we watch the world go from call centers to websites, and now back to conversations. Since around 2004, our company market link was paid to provide live sales agents to convert website visitors on a pay-for-performance model; we worked for a lot of global brands in building that capability.
When we started, there were probably three or four chat companies in the world, and of course, now there are hundreds, and many of them are very, very good companies, and it's really become a staple in every organization, but when we started down this path, as I said, there was very little. And I think, we really pushed, this as far as it could go from the perspective of, we use predictive analytics extensively to try to identify and predict which visitors if we engage them with live sales support would convert.
And, as far as we push that, as much as we pushed it, it's impossible to be able to make it work. Predictive analytics is really based on the hypothesis, and when visitors can take hundreds, thousands of different pathways, it really makes it increasingly difficult to try and determine whether or not that individual visitor is a good prospect.
So we started testing and using AI, and we went through a number of iterations until we finally found a model that worked and worked at scale, and we think it's really a transformational thing for your business. And I'm going to dig into the detail on that a little bit later, but first let's talk about the problem you might not even know exists.
So mostly the visitors on your website are anonymous, according to Mark Keto, "98% of website visitors are anonymous", which means you really don't know anything about them other than they are on your website. Google is going to tell you some things that give you a high-level breakdown, maybe where they come from, maybe some other bits and pieces of information that give you a little bit of insight, but essentially, if you have 100,000 people on your website in a month, 90,000 of them are ghosts. So given that 98% are anonymous, what really, what does that leave you with? How are you going to manage that traffic now? Well, converting those anonymous visitors might be your biggest opportunity, but it's also the biggest challenge. What traditional conversion tactics such as website optimization, and AV testing, and pop-up windows, doing a compelling offer, that all works. It increases your conversion rates, but it still leaves far too many opportunities unleft and unconverted. Too many visitors that end up abandoning your site, and once you've gone, they may never come back again. Now, Chats the most effective way to get at these visits, but it's really difficult, and if it's if done wrong, it can be really costly.
So the challenge is a lot of visitors get frustrated talking to a bot and bail. And what many companies do is they've got this one size fits all bots strategy, and so they think, "Okay, well, we've adopted chat, we put a bot on our site, but it really, ends up leaving a lot to be desired, and a lot of visitors that don't get the experience that they're looking for". And I would argue worse, many, many companies use the chat in a way that they asked for the email address way too early in the process, and they end up chasing off many potential buyers, so it's understandable. I mean, you’re flying blind, 98% of your visitors are anonymous, what else do? You can't have a live sales agent chat with every visitor; your salespeople are going to revolt if you do that. So, if you're a little bit more advanced, and you use chat strategically, you might use some rule-based targeting to display chat on specific pages, or even further, you might fold it into some complex journey, and journey mapping that you've done, and spent hours mapping out, that invariably changes constantly. You hope visitors are going to fall through this, the website funnel, and the journey mapping, but in our experience, there are only around 5% of visitors that follow an anticipated path. You know, people are erratic, their behavior is erratic, and trying to define upfront how they're going to act is almost impossible.
So, you're on the right track, you're trying different things, you're doing different things, but you know, the problem, well, it's still there. So what many companies do, and typically, if you have an ABM program, if you're selling b2b, there are some great tools on the market that will reveal the identity of your visitors through their IP address. Some of them, we're seeing 30% identified, but I'll put a little texture to that as we talk. I mean, there's some 50,55, 60, 65%, whether they'll say that, "We can give you an identity match and tell you what company this individual works for", but you may know what company they work for, but it really doesn't give you any information on that individual. It doesn't tell you how qualified that individual is and who they are, and in a work from home world, it gets increasingly more difficult even to match what company that they come from. So typically, what ends up happening is you use this information in your marketing automation tool, or your CRM tool to do outreach activities, but there are not that many companies that can effectively use it in real-time, on their website, in their chart program. So what a lot of companies have done, the traditional approach of getting somebody to, getting a prospect to fill in a form, so that you can qualify them and have some information before your sales team is going to follow up. A lot of people just mimic that process, and now they ask for an email as part of their bot engagement. It's almost like they're using the bot as a talking form, but that chases off far too many visitors who are going to be unwilling to provide you with their email address before you've given them any indication that you can help them solve their problem. So it kind of leaves you in the situation where, what do you do? You have now this company information, but how much are you really able to get out of it? What are you able to do with it? What you really need is, you need to be able to understand the opportunity with each visitor and you need to understand what their buying intent is, then you get a little bit deeper, you start to look under the surface. And that really comes from, the answer for how to engage those visitors to create more out of those anonymous visitors; you need to know what the buying intent is upfront.
So, buyer intent is a metric really, which determines how likely someone is to convert; real-time buyer intent is their likelihood to convert while they're on your website. So, unfortunately, people don't come with this intent stamp to their foreheads, you have to infer it somehow. and this happens all the time in real retail shops. Think about an experienced Rep at Nordstrom. They're going to go in and you're going to look at the behavior of all of the shoppers, and they're going to approach the shoppers, the right ones when the time is just right. If you shop at a store like that where you have a seasoned rep, they can predict your intent based on your body language, and they know when to help. Well, the problem is on your website, you don't have that visibility; you don't have that body language. So how can you understand a website visitor's intent and do something about it? The answer really lies in AI and in machine learning, because now with the right tools, you can process hundreds of 1000s of complex variables that make up the digital body language of a visitor, and you can turn that body language into an intent score. This isn't something that a human can do, but the score can then be used in real time behavior, but it's based on historical data and patterns of 1000s, and millions, and billions of visitors, where you can make a prediction based on the behavior of this anonymous visitor, this is their likelihood to convert. And once you have that information, now you can start to say, "Okay, well, now I can do something based on an individual's behavior, instead of trying to have a one size fits all buyer experience", so then you can start with the right experience. Now what you do is, now the old way, you would look at what most people are doing today because I think there's something like less than 5% of organizations have actually adopted any type of AI into their business activities. So, you can look at the scenario where you have all of these random, anonymous visitors on your site, they all get engaged with your bot, and then there's a very small subset of those people that will end up getting through the bot, and end up engaging with your live sales route. So low purchase intent, and there's few and far between that actually reached the salesperson, where a salesperson and said, "Well, this is a really good qualified opportunity". So this is why you end up in a lot of situations where people may deploy chat, and then it just, it doesn't live up to the promise, they don't get where they want to be, the sales reps complaining, and they and turning it down instead of turning it up, and really expanding and getting the value out of everything that's available with what's on your site, and with the chat tool.
So the new way, the way we approach this with lift AI is, we look at the conversion intent of every visitor. So we can see that on a typical website, there's about 9% of visitors and traffic who are of high intent and about 16% that are of medium and talented, it's actually 74% is the number for low intent. So when you look at this on aggregate, it allows you and gives you the ability to make some different decisions about how you want to deal with your website overall, but then on an individual basis, it enables you to go and say, "Okay, well, this is how we want to have a different type of experience for a different type of person". High intent goes right to a salesperson, immediate intent visitors are going to go, and have some type of quick qualification before they get to a salesperson, and a low intent, you're going to want to have a self-contained bot experience that really makes it difficult for that customer or prospective customer to get to a salesperson until you've had the opportunity to qualify them to some degree. And then once you get into that kind of scenario, now you've reached out to a much larger percentage of your potential audience that's on your website, and what you do end up engaging with your sales team, they're going to embrace because those opportunities are much more qualified, and it really acts like a flywheel to make the entire process much more effective and much more lucrative for your organization.
Now, if you're able to do this, and you have an ABM-type strategy, you can also leverage and take advantage of the capability and the technology. I'll give you an example of that, so when you have a fairly sophisticated environment, you're using tools like zoom info, or clear bit, you're using Mark Keto, or your sixth sense and demand-based or really, to get some rich information about your prospective customers, and you take all of that data. There are chat platforms that are available, that you can start to really customize the experience, and the type of thing, and how you want to engage a particular visitor based on what you know about them and what you think that conversion opportunity, their fit and intent, and all of the things that you would go into in order to define what you think are the best prospective customers for your offering. You can take that information and you can say, you can come up with different playbooks. You might have high intent, ABM type playbook for those that are the best prospects, you have a mid-intent for those that, you know, they don't quite reach the highest level in your segmentation, but they're still very good prospects, and then you've got all a lower type, that might be a mass-market or general market type customer. You really, you know something about them, you don't know a lot about them, and you can't define them as being the best of the best, but they're still you want to engage them in some fashion, and then there's the support deflection process. So as an example, you know, once you get through, and you filter, all of that, you got 100,000 visitors that come to your site in a month, maybe 30,000 of them; you're able to glean this type of information, come up with some different types of segmentation, in order to get, and in this scenario, we're saying we got 224 visitors that are engaged, and now are in your pipeline, and then your funnel and your sales process, some of them will be sales, depending on how long your sales cycle is, and things like that.
This is a pretty sophisticated approach, to be able to leverage all of those tools, to leverage your chat platform; and there are companies that are advanced and are using all these tools in this fashion. Even for these companies, there's a big opportunity that they're leaving on the table with those anonymous visitors. So with lift AI, you take the other 70%, arguably so the 70% that we can't match, we don't know who they are, we don't have an email address, we don't know any of them. It's usually typically higher than that, but let's says, 70%, to be conservative. So then you look at and say, "Well, now I've got all these anonymous visitors that now I know something about. I've got a score, that lift AI is tracking their behavior on my site in real-time. So I'm looking at, now all of a sudden, I've got all these things I would put in a bucket as being an anonymous visitor, I don't know what to do, there's nothing really I can do to own scores, and you're able to go, that you've got information about visitors on your website, that, you know, they might be a key account. They may be an individual from a key account that you know, is on your website. And we know based on how their behavior and how they're operating in real-time. You can have this person is as a very high conversion intent score, based on the way they are behaving on the website, at the moment. So you could feed that into your chat platform that you could notify your could your A, your sales, rep your BDR for a particular key account, buyer visitor intent scores and combine it when you've got a very sophisticated ABM program, and you were able to do these things in your chat platform.
But what it also does is, it takes what historically, again, you know, a sophisticated implementation, where somebody would say, "Well, there's really nothing we can do with this, we're going to take these anonymous visitors and we're just going to put them aside". What you can do now with lift AI is you can go in and say, "Well, there are a number of visitors that have high medium and low intent based on their real-time behavior on the website, and we can provide them with a different type of chat experience, based on what their conversion opportunity intent is". And essentially, what you end up doing is you've just got a much wider funnel, a much bigger bucket at which you're starting with an opportunity. So instead of saying, "Well for 100,000 visitors, we end up having 224 that are in our pipeline, you're adding another 773; and these numbers are you know types of scenarios that we see with our clients where you end up getting four times the opportunity.
So you know, sales is a numbers game, you have finite resources, but if you're able to engage, and qualify and move four times as many people through your funnel because you've opened up a whole new opportunity with these anonymous visitors that historically you really didn't know what to do with, and there was nothing you could do with them. Now, you can have a dramatic increase in your pipeline and revenue as a result of using this capability that before AI just didn't exist. There was no way that you could get out this information. Well now, you can deliver on the promise. You know the buyer's intent and conversion potential of every visitor. You can prioritize those conversion-ready visitors for your sales team, and deliver the right experience for each visitor, and convert more visitors and generate more revenue. You can also, with this process, maybe for the first time, you can forecast the full revenue potential on your website. One of these we like to say it's like, "You go from fishing off the dock to having a fish finder for the first time, instead of going well, we're intermittently catching the odd fish that bites, now we're able to look and see, well, what is every visitor on the website? What do they look like? What is the conversion intent, and if we had an engage them in and provide a different experience, how much potential revenue could we generate and glean from those customers"?
We see ultimately, you know, there's somewhere between depending on how sophisticated organizations are, and how sophisticated they are in using chat, we can see anywhere between 2 to 10 times more conversions as a result of using lift AI. And recently, we had a client that was able to achieve a 4x increase in the first 90 days. I know we've also recently contracted with a new client, where we've actually put a 5x increase in place as part of the contracting process because when we analyze their site, we saw a 10x potential, and so we're very confident we'd be able to reach 5x very quickly; and so we actually incorporated that right into the contract and the service offering. So it really is, it can be a game-changer, and really brings that, chat does become that superpower, you know, on what the promise was, and coming out of the gates.
Sometimes people can get discouraged with the reality, but the reason for that, as I said earlier, is because it's not easy, and putting up a one size fits all does not get you where you want to be, but once you combine all of the capabilities of some of these amazing tools that are on the marketplace and chat tools, with lift AI, and with expertise, the results can be really dramatic.
Now, a little bit of background, we didn't just stumble on this, and this capability. We spent 15 years building our expertise. One of the things that we like to refer to as one of our clients, Norton, we started, they were doing 150,000 a year in live chat revenue, then based on our analysis and forecasting, and using our tools, we said, "We think of 15 million in revenue potential", and we ended up doing 16 and a half million in the first year, and that's the background and where we come from. It's not just something that we produced and delivered overnight. It was all a long time of trial and error to get to the stage where we were able to build this capability. But now that we've built it and taken this lift AI and this amazing product and AI tool to the market, we're able to see some dramatic increases for our clients in a very short period of time. We are able to take whatever chat tool that you're using; and wherever you're at, we think we can have a significant impact and helping you boost and grow your revenue. And we're offering a free website revenue assessment as part of the demand Gen summit, so you can see how much money you're leaving on the table, and what the conversion opportunity is on your website. We'd love to hear from you and get an opportunity to show you how we can help you grow your business. And you can go to www dot lift dash AI dot com backslash revenue, and get yourself signed up.
And we'll roll our sleeves up and go to work for you and demonstrate how much opportunity there is on your website, and hopefully, we can help make a dramatic impact on converting those anonymous visitors into revenue for you.
So thank you for spending some time with me and thank you for the opportunity; good luck in your businesses and your careers, and hopefully, we'll look forward to the opportunity to do business with your 24:37 [Inaudible], thank you
