Editor’s Note: Apparel retailer Marleylilly has found success with one-to-one personalization and audience segmentation by using the AI marketing tool Attentive. Thanks to the tool’s ability to send personalized SMS and email marketing messages at the optimal time, conversions rates have doubled. CM sister pub Multichannel Marketer has the story. Below is an excerpt; go here for the full piece.
Marleylilly’s marketing team was ready to beat its AI marketing tool.
The web-only retailer of customized apparel has used SMS and email marketing platform Attentive since 2019. When Attentive debuted a new tool in June 2024 that uses artificial intelligence to customize the send time of each SMS message to each shopper, Marleylilly decided to test it out, director of marketing Elizabeth Pingry told attendees at the Attentive Thread World Tour event in Chicago in September.
Marleylilly’s team of 17 marketers had a good chance at winning, Pingry thought, as the brand knew a large cohort of its shoppers are moms who are most likely to click on a marketing message when they are waiting in the school pickup line. Despite this deep customer knowledge, the brand quickly realized it was no match for the AI.
“The AI tool crushed us,” Pingry said.
“We know how our customer acts maybe as a group, but there’s no way I can talk to each individual person,” Pingry told Multichannel Marketer in an exclusive interview. “I just can’t physically as a marketer craft that many messages and schedule them out. ‘Oh, there goes Katie, she needs hers at 3:22.’ So, the tool is looking at every single individual customer. And it’s taking what we do for our group and making sure that each individual gets the best version for her.”
With this one-to-one personalization in timing, conversion rates on the AI-send time texts are double compared with the same text at the standard send time, Pingry said.
Marleylilly doesn’t use the AI send time tool on every message — for example “Sale ends in four hours” would not be a good candidate — but when it does use the tool, it’s had great performance, Pingry said.
Marleylilly uses AI marketing tool for audience segmentation
The brand also uses Attentive’s AI Audience tool, which gives Marleylilly better segmentation for the roughly one million shoppers on its SMS marketing list. The brand sends several text campaigns in a day plus triggered messages, such as abandoned cart, abandoned browsing session or price drops.
One of the features Marleylilly found most helpful on the Audience AI tool was the ability to segment out shoppers who had a low propensity to convert on a marketing message. Because Marleylilly pays for each text it sends, it saves money by eliminating those unlikely-to-convert shoppers. While it’s only a few cents per SMS, this quickly adds up with all of the campaigns the brand sends.
Read the full piece at Multichannel Marketer.
