With all the attention that artificial intelligence is getting, I’m sure that you are looking for new ways to use AI on your WordPress website. Lead generation should be your top priority if you want new customers for your business.
Many marketers are already using ChatGPT or one of its alternatives to get new leads. Meanwhile, my team and many other WordPress developers have been adding AI features to our plugins to make them smarter and more helpful.
Incorporating these AI-driven tools and strategies into your lead-generation campaigns is a game-changer. It’s not just innovative, it’s essential.
Get started with these tips on how to use AI to skyrocket your lead generation campaigns.
Note: This is a guest post by Thomas Griffin, the co-founder of OptinMonster, the #1 conversion rate optimization tool. This is an expert column that we publish every other Thursday, where we invite a WordPress expert to share their experiences with our readers.
I will cover quite a few topics in this post. Here’s a handy list so you can jump to the section you are most interested in:
1. Interact With Website Visitors Using AI Chatbots
An AI doesn’t sleep, take lunch breaks, get distracted, or go on vacation. You can count on AI chatbots to engage with your website visitors and potential leads 24/7.
It can automatically answer common questions, help visitors find content, improve user experience, and generate leads. And it does this in a friendly, conversational format.
Besides that, AI chatbots can qualify leads by asking pre-programmed questions, offering product demos, and so much more.
This can free up time for you and your team to work on your business’s top priorities.
You can add a chatbot to your website simply by installing a WordPress plugin like ChatBot or Heroic KB. It uses machine learning to continually improve the live chat experience and make sure the responses are accurate.
That being said, AI chatbots are not the answer to every problem. That’s why we continue to use human experts to engage with leads on the OptinMonster website.
But you don’t have to choose just one or the other.
The biggest advantage is that chatbots can work together with human agents. You can set them up to refer certain questions to a real human support person from your business for the best of both worlds.
2. Automatically Score the Value of Individual Leads
Some of the best WordPress lead generation plugins and CRM apps use machine learning to give each of your leads a score. These scores are really useful because they tell you who is actually ready to buy and who isn’t.
This is called ‘lead scoring’. It lets you easily prioritize your most valuable leads out of a long list.
You can think of a lead score as a measure of how likely a user is to become a customer. The higher the score, the higher the chance of conversion.
Focusing on the leads with high scores is one of the easiest ways to increase conversions. Unfortunately, 79% of marketers are not taking advantage of this huge advantage.
You can get started today by reading the comprehensive guide to lead scoring.
3. Use Sentiment Analysis to Identify Priority Leads
You will also want to prioritize leads who are angry or frustrated and have unmet needs. This lets you reach out quickly to diffuse the situation and offer a solution.
Artificial Intelligence can analyze written communication to tell how a person is feeling. This includes emails, social media interactions, form and survey responses, support tickets, and much more.
This is sentiment analysis, and it can classify a mood as negative, neutral, or positive. This lets you find and address negative feedback quicker and improve your online reputation.
WordPress automation tools like Uncanny Automator can integrate with OpenAI to access sentiment analysis. This lets you use it as a trigger for various automation actions on your site.
Let’s take the example of when someone leaves a negative product review. You can use automation to create a help desk ticket tagged ‘Urgent’ so someone on your team can reach out.
For more information, you can see this guide on how to use OpenAI in WordPress.
Our entire business at OptinMonster is website popups. We’ve spent over a decade helping businesses generate more leads and make more sales using our drag-and-drop builder.
That’s why we added a new Smart Optimizations feature that uses artificial intelligence to help you optimize the content of your OptinMonster campaigns.
This feature lets you easily improve any piece of copy in your campaign with 2 clicks. It simply takes the text you added to your popup and asks the ChatGPT AI to suggest improvements.
These suggestions are listed for you right on top of your popup. You can simply select your favorite version or ask for more variations.
This will allow you to connect more effectively with your leads and help convert them into paying customers.
5. Intelligently Write and Improve Landing Page Copy
Landing pages are the most effective way to capture leads. They have a very high average conversion rate of 26%.
However, writing landing page copy can be a big chore, and not everyone is a confident writer. That’s why I recommend using AI to improve your landing page copy for even higher conversions.
You can ask generative AI chat apps like ChatGPT and Google Gemini (formerly Google Bard) to improve your copy and just paste it in. It will provide a fresh, optimized version.
Or you can ask them to write the first draft. You can be as detailed as you like. Learning how to write the best prompts is the key to getting precise results from a generative AI service.
Here’s an example of a very detailed AI prompt:
Here’s a screenshot of the landing page copy that ChatGPT wrote in about 10 seconds.
Alternatively, you could use a WordPress plugin to AI-optimize your copy without needing to leave your website.
For example, you can use SeedProd’s powerful AI Assistant to instantly generate engaging copy for your landing pages, including headlines, descriptions, calls-to-action, and more. It’s as easy as clicking a button.
6. Generate Content Marketing Ideas
Are you looking for new content marketing ideas?
I’ve found that adding interesting and helpful blog content to a website is a great way to attract new visitors and collect leads. In fact, studies show that 29% of marketers use content marketing to get more leads and customers, and 50% of business owners plan to grow their content marketing this year.
If you are planning to do the same, then you’ll need to find a list of topics that potential customers want to read about.
You can simply visit an AI service like ChatGPT or Google Gemini and type in a prompt like the one below:
The AI will then generate a list of SEO-optimized article ideas relevant to the topic.
Alternatively, you could combine AI and automation to generate a list of content marketing ideas right from your website.
7. Get an AI to Draft Your Blog Posts
Once you have the topics you need to write about, you can draft your posts using an AI content generator. This can help you quickly come up with a first draft or overcome writer’s block when you are having trouble getting started.
But make sure you treat the AI content as a first draft. You will need to fact-check the copy and edit it to suit your own style and branding.
You can simply visit a generative AI website like ChatGPT and use a prompt like this:
The AI will then create a blog post for you:
With experience, you’ll learn how to customize the prompt to generate the types of posts you need. You can then edit and improve this content before publishing it on your WordPress blog.
You can also use the AI features of tools like SeedProd, Divi AI, and Uncanny Automator to generate new blog content directly from your WordPress website.
8. Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions
If you want to capture leads, then you will first need to get visitors to your website. A big part of this process is getting organic traffic from search engines like Google.
Have you SEO-optimized your website so your content appears on the first page of search results pages for relevant keywords? The sad truth is that 4 out of 5 people still won’t click on your blog post.
The answer is to craft engaging, high-quality post titles and meta descriptions that people can’t resist.
In my experience, one of the easiest ways to get more clicks is to add flavor to your titles using AI. Artificial intelligence learns the ingredients that make up the most effective titles and suggests how you can optimize yours.
For example, you could ask ChatGPT to read your post and quickly suggest SEO-optimized title ideas using a prompt like this one:
Use the focus keyword ‘dog grooming’ at least once in each title and description. Use a persuasive and intriguing tone. Make sure that each title is no more than 60 characters long and each description is no longer than 160 characters.
The AI will then come up with some content for you:
That being said, my team’s preferred way to write powerful headlines using AI is with All in One SEO. We find it’s the best plugin for optimizing blog content for search engines.
All in One SEO can take your current post title and automatically suggest 5 better ones. You can choose the one you prefer, or ask it to generate another 5 title suggestions.
9. Generate Carefully Worded Email Copy
Sending emails to your leads requires careful wording that conveys the right information clearly and in a friendly way. This takes time and care, whether you are emailing a specific person or creating an email newsletter.
AI can help you write emails that are clear, concise, and engaging. It can write the email for you or make suggestions about how you can refine your own message for greater impact.
You ask the AI to polish your email copy using a prompt like this:
Or you can simply ask the AI to write an email for you after giving a brief description:
10. Generate Intelligent Ad Copy
Like a dramatic movie trailer, effective ad copy acts like a magnet, attracting high-quality leads to your business.
Generative AI can help inject creativity and data-driven insights into your copy. This software can even take inspiration from your competitors’ ads and come up with something better. You can then ask it for multiple versions and test which one works best for your business.
Simply visit the AI tool of your choice and ask it to write the ad for you. You can be very specific in the way you ask to get a result that matches your brand and says what you want.
If you are not sure about the best way to word your prompt, then just ask the AI for advice about the different ways you can ask it to write ad copy. I did this with Google Gemini:
You can even mention popular frameworks used in advertising, such as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution), and FAB (Features, Advantages, Benefits).
So, let’s ask for an ad using a prompt based on Gemini’s first example above and specify that it uses the PAS framework:
This is what the AI gave me in response:
Now, you can make some changes to match your preferred sentence structure, add some relevant keywords, and edit in some on-brand and product-specific language.
11. Create Lead Magnets From Your Existing Content
Lead magnets are incentives like eBooks that you offer users in exchange for their contact details. My team and I have found that they are a really effective way to generate new leads.
Beacon, an easy lead magnet magnet creator lets you create lead magnets using templates and drag-and-drop. Best of all, it can turn your best blog posts into lead magnets with a few clicks of your mouse.
But what if you don’t have enough quality blog posts on a certain topic? You can get Beacon’s AI Copywriter to write your lead magnet for you.
Either way, it does all the hard work for you.
Now, you can offer the lead magnet as an incentive in your lead generation forms and popups to build your email list more quickly.
For more details, you can see this WPBeginner guide on how to do lead generation in WordPress like a pro.
12. Create AI Images for Your Content
Images play a very important part in grabbing the attention of your leads and getting them interested in your products and services.
Fortunately, you can quickly generate AI images for your blog posts, popups, ads, and more. These are unique images created on the fly in response to a written prompt.
I simply asked Google’s Gemini whether it could help me create an image. I was surprised to see it immediately generated a series of images that I can use in the PuppyBrite vitamin supplement ad. It helpfully remembered that I asked about the ad campaign earlier.
With OpenAI, you can’t create images using the ChatGPT interface. Instead, it offers a versatile AI image-generation tool called DALL.E that can create beautiful images using text prompts.
While they no longer allow new users to sign up for DALL.E 2, the updated DALL.E 3 is available for ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users. It features higher-quality images and will allow you to edit the images it generates.
I hope these practical tips help you learn how to use AI to boost your lead generation campaigns. You may also want to see tips on speeding up WordPress performance and the best social proof plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce.
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