April 29, 2025

Nextgen Website Conversions: 3 Proven Playbooks Using AI-Powered Intent Data

Don Simpson

We’re in 2025, and the average website conversion rate is still stuck under 3%.

That's after years of pouring money into chatbots, CRO tools, AI-generated content, programmatic retargeting campaigns, and heatmaps.

So what's the disconnect?

Most conversion tactics and tools still don't know who's ready to buy.

Which means that the conversion experience isn’t aligned to the visitor’s buying (conversion) intent at that exact moment.

The breakthrough isn’t about adding more tactics — it’s about making your existing tactics smarter and more precisely timed.

Specifically, it’s using AI-powered behavioral intent data to trigger your conversion tactics when visitors are most ready to act.

Here’s what you need to know, plus 3 proven playbooks that make use of website intent data to drive nextgen website conversions.

Here’s Why You Need a Next-Gen Conversion Strategy

Here’s the problem:

88% of high-intent visitors never visit your pricing page, so targeting based on single pages miss huge revenue potential
Up to 94% of traffic that is on your pricing page isn’t high intent either, meaning you waste sales time and resources on non-buyers anyway
98% of your traffic is anonymous and won’t fill out a form identifying themselves, which many tactics rely on to work (e.g. emails)
Asking for email address too soon sabotages conversion rates by 80% (e.g. when used as the opening playbook for online chat)
All of this means the average conversion rate of most websites today is still 3%, meaning 97% of your visitors leave without converting

So traditional conversion tactics either treat every visitor the same which dilutes their effectiveness with one-size-fits-all experiences or, at best, groups visitors by simplistic criteria like pages visited which misses the majority of buyers elsewhere on the website..

These assumptions leave a lot of revenue on the table.

So before we give you the playbooks you actually need, let’s explain what you need to drive them.

The Solution: Micro-Behavioral Analysis for Website Visitors

Lift AI approaches visitor intelligence differently. It uses machine learning trained on billions of data points and millions of real-world sales conversions to detect buying intent in real time based on the micro-behaviors of each visitor.

It's like giving your website X-ray vision for the true intent of every single visitor.

Now instead of treating all visitors the same (or not treating them at all), you can:

Detect high-intent buyers in real-time, as they navigate through your site
Engage them with the right experience at the right time, on any page
Retarget them with advertising if you didn’t happen to convert them through step 2

Let’s break down the 3 most effective ways to put this power to work.

Playbook #1: Engage High Intent Visitors in Real-Time with Chat

Live chat has always been the number #1 conversion workhorse. Offering live, real-time assistance to visitors is a tried and true way to get visitors over the line. Just like a salesperson asking a customer in a store if they need help - it’s proven to get conversions.

What’s wrong with existing chat playbooks?

❌ Site-wide chat:

Placing chat on every page results in a “spray and pray” approach, with generic messaging that doesn’t resonate with the right buyers. It also ends up with your sales team talking to support seekers, competitors, or visitors just kicking tires. That burns time and morale. And there’s no possible way to engage every visitor, so the buyers get missed. Unless you use automation?

❌ Automated decision trees and conversational AI:

In theory, these are great. If your sales team can’t engage every visitor, then surely a chatbot can! But automated solutions don’t work well for sales. In fact, 65% of visitors have one-off questions that can’t be found in your FAQ or answered sufficiently by automation to close a sale. Not to mention, sometimes visitors just want the reassurance and validation of a human before they take that next step.

❌ Page-based chat:

Placing chat on specific pages like the pricing page or product page is one way to deal with the “spray and pray” approach. However, as already mentioned 88% of buyers are not on a single page like the pricing page (and in fact, 94% of visitors on the pricing page aren’t buyers anyway, so your sales team still ends up wasting time!).

With Lift AI, all of this changes.

Now you can engage only the visitors most likely to buy, and you do it in the moment while they’re hot, no matter what page they’re on. Plus, you can use automation to handle the lower intent visitors.

✅Lift AI High Intent Chat Playbook:

Lift AI scores every visitor in real time based on behavioral signals
Visitors with high intent are instantly routed to a live sales agents during business hours via your chat tool (Drift, Intercom, HubSpot Chat, Qualified, and more)
Lower-intent visitors get routed to bots that can qualify or escalate visitors to the next playbook up, or nurtured with top-of-funnel resources and support

📈 Proven Case Study: Boomi Doubled Chat Conversions

2x increase in Drift conversation-to-pipeline conversions to double opportunities
58% of pipeline came from anonymous high-intent visitors
Quarterly pipeline hit an all-time high (21.74% above previous record)
SDR sales efficiency more than doubled (3.6% → 8.7%)
Read the case study →

Pro Tip: Don’t overthink the chat invitation. For high intent visitors, try: “Hi, want to talk to an expert right now?”

Playbook #2: Optimize The On-Page Experience for High Intent Visitors

CRO tools optimize page elements, content, CTA buttons, and experiences like pop-ups. If done correctly, they can influence visitors and make it more likely for them to take that next best step (often priming them for the right engagement - see Playbook #1).

What’s wrong with existing CRO playbooks?

❌ Content personalization for returning visitors:

This makes sense - if someone is coming back to the website, why not show them something different or new? Perhaps you adjust a call to action button or a headline for something that’s further down the funnel.

The problem is, just because the visitor is returning, it doesn’t mean they have intent aligned with your assumption. The same is true for most criteria-based content personalization options.

❌ Pop-ups (site-wide or page-based):

Much like the problems with online chat, pop-ups are also subject to the challenges of being too wide and shallow, or too narrow and myopic. Pop-ups in particular are essential to get right, because they have an interruptive motion - putting them in front of a visitor with the wrong message at the wrong time may have them leave the site entirely.

With Lift AI, you can set up personalization to trigger for each intent level (low, medium, and high) and adjust the message accordingly. You can also deploy pop-ups to high intent visitors once they reach a certain score threshold, ensuring you’re strategically interrupting them and increasing conversion rates.

✅Lift AI High Intent CRO Playbook:

Show bottom-of-funnel CTA buttons to high intent visitors (free trial, talk to sales). Use personalization tools like VWO, Mutiny, Optimizely, Intellimize to do this.
Offer softer content personalizations to lower intent visitors (like a comparison page CTA for medium intent, or an educational blog post for low intent visitors).
Run pop-ups on visitors with a high intent Lift AI score over 80 with limited time offers. Use Unbounce, HubSpot, or custom pop-ups to do this.

📈 Proven Case Study: RealVNC

Increased CTR for Unbounce pop-ups by 94%
10% increase in self-serve customer revenue and 5% increase in sales-assisted pipeline creation through personalized VWO content delivery
Read the case study →

Pro Tip: Pair Lift AI intent with other CRO tactics that don’t rely on conversion intent. For example, keep your “relevant products to this” personalization, and your “adjust products shown by geolocation” personalization.

Playbook #3: Retarget High Intent Visitors

Retargeting should be your website's second chance at conversion. Someone visits your site, doesn’t convert, so you follow them around with ads until they do. Sounds simple, right? Except—it’s wildly inefficient when done the old way.

What’s wrong with existing retargeting playbooks?

❌ Blanket retargeting wastes money:
Many retargeting campaigns treat all visitors the same. Doesn’t matter if they were researching careers, looking for support, or accidentally clicked an ad—everyone gets the same follow-up. That means you’re wasting ad dollars on people who were never going to buy.

❌ Page-based retargeting is misleading:
Retargeting based on "visited the pricing page" or "looked at a product" seems smart—until you realize that up to 94% of pricing page visitors aren’t actually in-market buyers. You’re wasting budget on people who have no real intent.

❌ One-size-fits-all creative falls flat:
Your retargeting ad says “Book a Demo” but the visitor wasn’t even close to demo-ready. You’re asking for marriage on the first date. Without knowing where the visitor is in their journey, your ads miss the mark—and the buyer.

With Lift AI, you can allocate your retargeting budget more efficiently by focusing on visitors based on their level of buying intent. Instead of targeting all website visitors equally or limiting campaigns to a single page, Lift AI segments your audience into score ranges between 0-100 (or high, medium, and low intent if simplified)—so you can invest more in the visitors most likely to convert, while still engaging others with messaging that matches their buyer journey’s readiness.

✅Lift AI High Intent Retargeting Playbook:

Build and prioritize ad spend to audiences of high-intent visitors who didn’t convert, using bottom-of-funnel ad copy, offers and CTAs
Allocate budget by value: Prioritize high-intent audiences most likely to convert, while nurturing medium and low intent segments with appropriate messaging and ad spend
Maximize ROAS: Avoid wasting budget by prioritizing ad spend based on buyer intent

📈 Proven Case Study: RealVNC

67% reduction in cost per lead
200% increase in lead volume from same spend
33% increase in click through rate on high intent ads
Read the case study →

Pro Tip: Pair Lift AI intent scores with dynamic remarketing ads. Show product-specific offers or book-a-demo CTAs to high-intent traffic based on what pages or categories they interacted with.