How to Cut Lead Response Time with AI

4 Proven Strategies to Outpace 63% of US Businesses

Does your business depend on collecting leads through an online form and following up? Harvard Business Review says you’re probably missing out on revenue - because you’re too slow. But there’s good news. AI is here to change that.

What is Lead Response Time?

Lead Response Time is a crucial sales metric for purchases done through online channels. In this day and age attention has become the most fiercely contested resource on the internet.

Therefore, speed is becoming the single-most important differentiator for any business. The trend will become even more clear in the future. More and more content and distractions are being published to the web day by day.

Lead Response Time measures the time span from when a lead expresses interest (e.g., through submitting an online form) to when the business responds to that lead. Considering how fast leads can lose interest, it is therefore a key metric for understanding how well a business performs in todays attention economy.

”In the attention economy, every second counts.” - Emilia Kirk, Forbes

How AI gets you ahead

Thanks to significant recent advancements in AI technology, narrowing the gap between lead interest and addressing it through your sales efforts has become significantly easier as well.

With language and reasoning capabilities, AI unlocks a whole new set of possibilities for personalizing customer interactions and automating responses in your sales processes. It not only improves the efficiency of the sales process but also enhances the overall customer experience by providing timely and relevant communication to your leads leading to higher conversion and customer satisfaction.

Embracing this new paradigm in sales technology will distinguish you from your competitors by magnitudes in terms of cost, speed and scale.

Be mindful: Many businesses are still unaware or do not fully grasp the extensive impact this emerging technology already has and will continue to have on our daily continually.

Therefore, don't fall behind; begin to leverage AI for your advantage.

Best ways to leverage AI

Here’s 4x proven and unprecedented applications for AI to cut down your Lead Response Time and bump conversion by leveraging the time and attention of your leads to the fullest.

1. Phone Calls

Among all communication methods, speaking directly to a lead over the phone offers a unique quality that cannot be replicated through any other means. These are only a few of its unique key advantages:

• Instant communication
• Trust
• Clarity
• Wider adoption among older customer segments

Out of all means of communications phone calling is the only one that allows for instant communication, cutting down lead response time to an absolute minimum. Building trust as well as clear communication are not the same via text-based channels as with phone calling.

Demographics

Also keep in mind, for a broad segment of the population (especially the older generations) phone calling is still the number one way of communication. In 2023 over 64% of 45 to 75 year old Americans report that they prefer the phone for asking product or service related questions (Read more).

While it has in the past been a sole priviledge to businesses offering high-ticket services due to the high cost nature of phone communication (hiring a team of appointment setters, receptionists, sales people or employing call centers), AI is completely changing the landscape of sales outreach by phone.

Talk to a phone AI now

Convince yourself by trying talking to our conversational AI at Setter AI right now via our free interactive phone demo. Just enter your phone number receive a call within less than 60 seconds.

Setter AI enables you to spin up a fully functional conversational phone AI customized to your own business in less than 5 minutes. It can make thousands of calls per day and never gets tired. Integrate with the tools you already know and love (Zapier, Google Calendar, Calendly, …) and start with instant lead follow-ups today.

2. Email

If your business operates within industries such as real estate, financial services, or insurance (to name just a few), it's likely that creating lead responses is a time-consuming process. This complexity usually comes from the need for highly personalized communication, due to the intricate and high-value nature of the services offered.

Creating hyper-personalized, detailed reports, proposals and the like, based on extensive inputs from your leads might already be giving you a high conversion rate. This is largely due to the significant time investment leads and prospects make when interacting with your business. From a business perspective, investing heavily in your response processes makes sense when the stakes are high.

However, creating relevant responses that capture your leads' interest and attention is not only time-consuming but can also be a costly operation.

Email stands out as the main channel for this type of lead engagement. Its capabilities allow for attaching extensive files and long format texts such as case studies, white papers, testimonials, etc. The wide adoption of email across organizations and individuals alike highlights its obvious benefits:

• Asynchronous nature
• Broad acceptance
• Potential for personalization and customization

Email enables asynchronous communication, offering a convenient and flexible way for leads to interact with your business. Theoretically lead response time can be reduced to nearly zero, allowing leads to engage with your email at their convenience. Given that most people check their email at least once daily, email serves as a natural extension of daily communication.

”99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning.” - Porch GROUP MEDIA

On top of that, the abundance of easy-to-use CRM and email integrations today make personalizing and customizing your responses simpler than ever.

In the context of automated marketing email is recognized as the most automated channel with 65% of marketers acknowledging its importance. The availability of email automation tools is vast, including platforms like Unbounce, HubSpot, and MailChimp, among others.

Yet, if your business relies on a high degree of personalization and manual effort to convert leads into high-paying customers, you might be missing out on leveraging these technologies.

This is where AI's language and reasoning capabilities come into play, promising to change this process forever. AI can generate extensive, hyper-personalized and relevant lead responses quickly and cost-effectively.

Hyper-Personalization

Upon receiving a lead's information sophisticated language models will immediately process their inputs and come up with engaging and captivating responses. For instance, if you collect a lead's business website URL through a form, AI can analyze the site to gain insights about the lead's motivations, desires, and future plans. It then crafts a lead response unparalleled in detail and speed—a feat unmatched by competitors not yet utilizing this transformative way of serving their customers.

3. Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are drastically changing lead response strategies by offering an immediate and continuous communication channel. Unlike conventional approaches chatbots engage with leads the very minute they show interest — sometimes even before they complete the lead form.

Compared to other text-based communication methods such as email, chatbots offer unparalleled accessibility to leads, capturing their attention directly on your website, right where they land after submitting their information.

24/7 Availability

AI chatbots operate 24/7, ensuring no lead is left unattended. They provide prompt answers to common inquiries, advancing leads through the sales funnel efficiently and providing high value for a rich customer experience and satisfaction. This not only saves precious time for both the lead and your sales team but also automatically qualifies and educates your leads, automating a key part of your qualification process.

Dynamic Collection of Lead Information

Knowledge is power, and in the context of lead generation, more information is always better. While the initial lead forms capture already collects essential data for prospecting, integrating chatbots can further enrich your CRM giving you an edge over your competition.

With AI's adaptability chatbots are able to respond to a lead's willingness to share information, dynamically probing for details as appropriate, carefully calibrated. This capability enables chatbots to optimize each interaction for maximum engagement and conversion potential, leveraging every opportunity to gather insights and tailor the experience to the lead's needs.

4. Social Media (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, …)

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer native lead capture forms that allow leads to submit their information without leaving the app. This strategy is clearly aimed at increasing user screen time and keeping users' attention focused within their platforms.

By leveraging this feature and aligning it with your own business strategy, you can tap into a continuous and highly relevant source of leads depending on your industry and niche.

As with other communication channels discussed earlier integrating with AI to reduce lead response times on social media is a strategic move. Instead of crafting manual responses via direct messages, consider implementing an AI system to instantly follow up on people's social media activities. Hyper-personalization can easily be achieved by tailoring your responses to include references to an individual's recent social media activity, ensuring your leads are pleasantly surprised and deeply engaged (e.g. LinkedIn Outreach Automation with Koneksi).

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