Uncover the science behind achieving near-perfect AI-powered marketing messages.

Which has come up more in marketing conversations over the last few years: AI or the phrase “do more with less?”

Fortunately, AI helps with the latter. It allows you to do more with each message for every single subscriber. AI has transformed personalization, segmentation, timing, and campaign creation in marketing. And it can often do all of this at the same time, and in real time.

‍Attentive’s AI Journeys tailors every aspect of your triggered messages, based on subscribers' behaviors and your branding. As a result, no two subscribers receive the same message. Every facet of your message—from the best time to send a message, how many messages to send, and what the content of the messages should be—is personalized for individual subscribers to achieve the highest possible engagement.

Want to know how we build these true 1:1 messages? In this post, we’ll delve into the nuances of maintaining a brand’s unique voice, using subscriber data accurately, and the meticulous process of improving AI prompts that power every AI Journeys message.

What input creates an AI message

As our AI Journeys Engineering Manager explains it, there are three dimensions to consider when generating an AI-powered marketing message. 

• Brand: Needs to sound like the brand and takes into account the brand’s identity, personality, and writing style.
• Product: Needs to talk about the product’s features, use cases, or materials accurately.
• Subscriber: Needs information about the subscriber like their behavioral patterns, purchasing history, and events (e.g., past purchases, when they became a customer, when they abandoned a cart, etc.)

These three data sources combine with the outputs of other Attentive models and are transformed into a sequence of hyper-targeted prompts used in LLMs that produce a final message.

It takes a level of creativity and expertise to figure out how to actually make use of AI. Attentive is leading the charge here, both for SMS and email. By making the most of our data, AI Journeys is changing the game for us—with a 600% increase in total revenue. 

- Alex Sienkiewicz, CMO at SwimOutlet

How the AI models and messages evolve 

The AI puts out a generated message based on the three dimensions of brand, product, and subscriber. The message is then evaluated for spelling, grammar, tone, and suitability. These messages have to be good and read like a human wrote them. 

And just like human writers, sometimes ‌AI needs a few drafts to get it right. Millions of messages are sent through AI Journeys each day, and they need to get it right the first time when conversions are on the line. Our engineers went to work to build a system that would refine the AI model and its capabilities to produce on-brand messages.  

These enhancements include taking a closer look at:

• Data: Marketing and AI both run on data and solutions were put in place to ensure the data was clean and useful to the AI model. 
• Context: There needed to be additional context, but only if it was relevant. There needs to be just enough context for the AI to understand but not overwhelm it. 
• Prompts: We changed the language and structure of the commands to get the AI to pay attention to what really matters in the prompt. 
• Post-processing: If needed, we would fix the output in post. 
• Regeneration: If all else fails, the AI is prompted to recreate the message. 

The end result? On-brand, AI-written messages. 

A unique brand needs to send unique messages: How Hot Topic uses AI Journeys

Known for their diverse merchandise and niche pop culture products, Hot Topic’s cart abandonment strategy was still following a one-size-fits-all approach. They wanted to boost conversions and revenue through their SMS journeys by crafting 1:1 experiences for more than 2M subscribers. They also wanted to stay true to their distinct brand identity while scaling these efforts. 

Hot Topic launched AI Journeys to improve personalization. The AI used real-time data from past messages, subscriber activity, and product information to tailor every element of their triggered messages. This created unique follow-ups for each customer, changing elements like content, send time, and frequency, to improve the likelihood of conversion. 

Hot Topic saw a significant lift in its abandon-cart journeys after implementing Attentive AI Journeys. Conversion rates increased by 45%, and revenue was up by 39%.

AI-powered journeys have enabled us to stand out from other retailers and build loyalty by delivering an experience to each customer that’s unique to them.

- Terry Mata, Email Marketing Analyst at Hot Topic

See our AI in action in OLLY’s marketing campaigns

We’ve shared how our AI is built, but if you want to see it used on a tactical level, then you’ll want to save the date for May 8. 

Join us for a conversation with OLLY’s Director of DTC, Jennifer Peters, and Email & SMS Marketing Specialist, Becca Tran, to learn step-by-step how they’re using AI Pro to improve customer identification and segmentation, resulting in a 15% lift in incremental revenue per month and 5x higher program ROI. You can get an exclusive look at exactly how they use AI Pro in an upcoming webinar.  

Register for the webinar on May 8, AI in Action: Behind the Scenes with OLLY.