Generating quality leads is the lifeblood of your company. Without new customers, your company will stagnate and lose ground to competitors.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped thousands of businesses evolve in ways that make them more competitive and cost-efficient. And AI is now being used to help firms with their lead generation.

No, it isn’t incredibly expensive. In fact, you can deploy cloud-based platforms with AI baked-into the coding. Machine learning is finally accessible to companies of all shapes and sizes.

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how AI is shaking up the world of lead generation!

AI Powered Contact Databases

Having a long list of potential leads might sound exciting. But the minute you start combing through them, you’ll quickly realize that you’re drowning in data.

AI has the power to quickly filter through a massive database and discover the leads that are most relevant to you. Most AI lead-generation platforms allow you to set specific parameters – including position, location, industry and company size.

Quickly finding qualified leads allows you to pair your interactive marketing with outbound email marketing. This has proven to be the secret combination to outbound marketing success. For example, a follow-up email sent after an interactive experience 6 times more likely to be opened by the recipient.

Automated, Customized Outbound Marketing

The really exciting part about having a fine-tuned list of potential customers is that you can continue leveraging AI to reach your prospects. Unleash the cloud to do the time-consuming task of sending custom messages to each of your contacts.

Thanks to AI, the preconfigured email marketing chain doesn’t have to look boring, standardized or impersonal. Marketing platforms can learn alongside your team. As you communicate with individuals, or mine new social databases, additional context is gained. Just as you would personalize a message to the likes and dislikes of the person reading your marketing material, AI can enhance every aspect of your automated email marketing push.

Computer learning can generate algorithms based on your emails, texts, contact lists and phone call log. Every interaction is a new data point to add to the web of existing information.

Big data was exciting, but AI gives machines the ability to act on that data. The time-intensive tasks that were once the domain of data scientists and high-performing sales reps can now be offloaded to the machine.

Enhancing the Customer Journey

Think about how you choose to purchase things. You take time to do, at minimum, a quick google search about the product or service you’re interested in. You might pick up the phone or visit a store to talk to a knowledgeable sales rep. You’ll probably visit more than a few comparison sites. And you’ll definitely ask a friend or two what they think.

There’s a real opportunity for AI and big data to partner up and create a compelling cognitive system that delivers actionable sales cues. Industry experts are betting that cognitive solutions will increasingly shape our future purchasing decisions.

The cognitive solutions of the future will be able to reach cross-platform to identify the individual that’s interacting with their marketing material. Imagine a web browser cookie system on steroids. And because the platform knows who you are, it can avoid showing you the same information as before. Instead, it will delve into what you’ve already interacted with, and how you reacted, to enhance the future presentation of data required for you to confidently make a buying decision.

Lead generation is reaching far beyond the traditional email list. Every aspect of the new customer journey can be customized, enhanced and personalized thanks to AI. And all of those personalized enhancements will lead to an uptick in customers helping you to identify them.

In conclusion, as a marketer, there has never been a more exciting time to be alive. We are seeing computers begin to partner with humans, instead of simply serving as a tool. The marketing arsenal is evolving. Are you ready?