How Natural Life Brings Its Personality Across AI-Powered SMS, Email, and RCS With Attentive

A brand customers love hearing from

For Natural Life customers, discovering a new print, a colorful gift, or something for their home is part of the experience. Across apparel, home, gifts, and other categories, the brand’s products and creative storytelling give people a reason to keep exploring. Its marketing team wants every message to reflect that personality and help customers find something they’ll love.

For a lean team at a fast-moving business, that takes careful planning and room to adapt. New product launches, seasonal campaigns, promotions, and priorities across teams keep the calendar changing. The team needs to move quickly and grow efficiently while staying true to the brand voice customers know and love.

Natural Life has built its messaging program around those priorities with Attentive, from its first SMS campaigns to newer tests with RCS and AI.

“We operate with a strong "do more with less" mentality, so the goal isn't necessarily to send more messages or spend more money. It's to make every message work harder and continue finding opportunities to drive incremental growth.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

From a Thanksgiving launch to a leading revenue channel

Natural Life launched SMS with Attentive during Thanksgiving week in 2020. By 2022, SMS had become the brand’s fastest growing channel. During Black Friday through Cyber Monday that year, the program drove an increase of 20% year over year.

SMS gave the team a direct way to reach customers who already knew and loved Natural Life. It also marked the start of a partnership that continues as the brand tests new ways to grow its subscriber base, personalize messages, and improve performance.

“Attentive is actually the only SMS partner we've ever had! We've evaluated and changed platforms in other areas of our technology stack over the years, but we've never considered moving away from Attentive.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

With an established program in place, Natural Life is focused on making it more effective. The team measures engagement, conversion, revenue per send, and list health alongside attributed revenue to understand how messaging contributes to overall demand.

For leadership, that comes down to practical questions: Is Natural Life reaching customers more effectively? Is it generating more revenue from the audience it’s already built? Can it do both efficiently while keeping promotions in balance?

“For me, the biggest win is building a program that consistently drives meaningful revenue while continuing to become more efficient and sophisticated.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Give every channel a clear role in the customer experience

Natural Life starts with the customer experience, then gives each channel a clear role.

SMS reaches a highly engaged audience in the moment. The team describes these customers as especially “product-obsessed”: they love being the first to know about new arrivals, bestsellers returning to stock, and exclusive offers.

RCS stands for Rich Communication Services. RCS for Business brings features such as high-quality images, product carousels, and interactive buttons into a customer’s text inbox, giving Natural Life more ways to express its visual identity and guide product discovery.

Email creates space for storytelling, product discovery, and personalized lifecycle communication.

With SMS and email in Attentive, the team is continuing to explore how those channels can work together.

“The biggest benefit of bringing these channels together is creating a more connected customer journey. We're thinking less about sending another message and more about reaching the right customer, with the right content, through the right channel, at the right time.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Grow an audience that wants to stay connected

Natural Life approaches subscriber growth with three things in mind: how many people join, how sign-up units affect the shopping experience, and the long-term value of each subscriber.

The team uses AI Grow, the Attentive AI tool that helps turn website visitors into SMS and email subscribers through personalized SMS and email sign-up forms.

“That's one of the things we like about AI Grow. We can be smarter about when and where we show signup units rather than treating every website visitor the same way. We want to maximize acquisition without unnecessarily interrupting the shopping experience.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

During a 60-day test in early 2025, AI Grow drove:

• 31% more SMS sign-ups
• 29% more email sign-ups
• 39% more purchases
• 38% more revenue

The team also measures what happens after someone joins. In a separate sign-up test, subscribers who joined through a QR code generated 8.6% more welcome revenue per person.

Even small details are worth testing. At the time of the interview, Natural Life was comparing sign-up units that collected birthdays with units that left the field out. A birthday gives the brand a reason to send a personal message. The team wants to understand whether asking for that information creates enough friction to meaningfully reduce sign-ups.

The team brings the same curiosity to subscriber quality and message frequency. It’s examining how often to communicate and how that cadence affects engagement, churn, and profitability over time.

“Would sending fewer messages actually create a healthier, more valuable audience in the long run? Or is the incremental revenue we're generating worth the tradeoff? Those are the types of questions we're working to answer.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Grana keeps the longer-term goal in view:

“Ultimately, we're not just trying to build the biggest list possible. We're trying to build an engaged audience that continues to love hearing from Natural Life.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Use AI to refine targeting, with people guiding the creative

Within AI Pro, Natural Life uses its identity solution to recognize more website visitors and Audiences AI to refine campaign audiences based on subscribers’ likelihood of purchasing.

Two favorites are the identity solution, which helps recognize more website visitors, and Audiences AI, which refines campaign audiences based on subscribers’ likelihood of purchasing.

In 2024, Natural Life’s identity solution delivered approximately 14x ROI. Audiences AI added 24% more revenue by sending to the subscribers most likely to buy.

Creative decisions call for a different approach.

“On the creative side, we're much more protective of the Natural Life brand voice and customer experience. We have a really distinct personality, and our customers have a strong emotional connection to our brand. We never want personalization or automation to come at the expense of that.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

The team is comfortable giving AI more responsibility for refining audiences and targeting. People continue to guide creative, messaging, brand voice, and promotional strategy.

“And we're always testing! We want to understand where AI is genuinely improving performance and where our own judgment still adds the most value.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Bring Natural Life’s visual personality into RCS

As one of the earliest adopters, Natural Life approached RCS with the same willingness to test that guides the rest of its program. The team wanted to explore what richer messaging could mean for both customers and performance.

“We're an incredibly visual brand. Our prints, colors, products, and creative storytelling are such a big part of why customers love us. Traditional SMS has been a really strong channel for us, but RCS gives us the opportunity to bring more of that brand experience directly into messaging.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

During the June 2025 alpha, RCS outperformed Natural Life’s SMS controls with:

• 42% higher click-through rate
• 39% higher conversion
• 42% higher revenue per send

By September 2025, RCS remained ahead of SMS, delivering 29% higher click-through rate and 23% higher conversion.

“We're still learning where RCS makes the biggest difference, but the early results have given us a lot of confidence in the opportunity.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Make Cyber Week feel valuable to subscribers

Cyber Week is Natural Life’s biggest week of the year, and messaging plays a central role in reaching customers who already have a relationship with the brand.

The team wants SMS subscribers to feel like VIPs, whether that means early access to an offer, exclusive perks, or an extended promotion for people who haven’t purchased yet.

Its promotion creates several opportunities to be useful: explain how the offer works, help customers discover products, and remind them of the savings available as they build their carts.

“We also think a lot about balancing urgency with the customer experience. During Cyber Week, everyone is sending more messages, and we want ours to feel relevant and valuable rather than just adding to the noise.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

With Attentive, Natural Life can move quickly, segment its audience, and use remarketing to decide who should receive another message. The goal is to capture demand while keeping additional sends relevant and avoiding unnecessary oversending.

Respond to changing demand with campaigns the team can launch quickly

That flexibility matters all year. In a typical week, the team reviews performance, identifies what resonates with customers, plans campaigns, and adjusts as business needs change.

During the interview, the team shared an example of a weekend promotion tracking below forecast. It decided to extend the offer exclusively in the Natural Life app.

Without developing new creative, the team quickly built and sent separate SMS messages for iOS and Android users, directing customers to download or open the app. The campaign gave Natural Life a way to try to close the forecast gap and encourage app downloads ahead of the holiday season.

“That's the kind of flexibility that's so valuable to us. We can identify an opportunity, make a decision, and execute quickly without needing a ton of additional resources.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Attentive also reduces manual work across personalization, audience management, and lifecycle messaging. That gives a lean team more room to act on its decisions as the calendar changes.

Follow up when customers browse a product or abandon a cart

Natural Life uses broadcast campaigns to share what’s happening across the brand, from new arrivals and seasonal collections to promotions. Triggered email automations let the team respond to what individual customers do.

When someone browses a product, abandons a cart, or shows interest in a category, the team has an opportunity to follow up with a message that reflects that interest.

“And from an operational perspective, it's incredibly valuable because those experiences are working for us every day without requiring someone on our team to manually execute them.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Next, Natural Life wants to add app push notifications to its journeys and introduce apparel shoppers to products they might like in other categories .

Helping customers make those connections could deepen their relationship with Natural Life and contribute to long-term customer value.

Grana is also looking ahead to the post-purchase experience:

“I'd also love to build out more thoughtful post-purchase experiences, especially around returns. If a customer returns a product, could we better understand why and recommend something else that might be a better fit? That way it’s not just about recovering a sale. It's about understanding the customer and helping them discover more of what they'll love.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Spend less time gathering data and more time deciding what to do

Natural Life sees reporting as another opportunity to make more time for strategy. Gathering the data can take substantial effort before the team even begins its analysis.

With access to a beta reporting agent, the team is exploring the possibility of asking questions in everyday language and getting accurate, actionable answers without building a report, exporting data, or involving an analyst each time.

In a live, hands-on test with its team, Natural Life connected Claude to its Attentive data using the Attentive MCP connector. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets AI assistants access external data and tools within existing permissions. With that connection, Claude surfaced an anomaly the team hadn’t identified in its data, pointing to the potential to uncover opportunities it might otherwise miss.

The team is also beginning to use AI to pull weekly data and turn it into performance summaries.

“For me, the biggest opportunity is moving beyond simply reporting what happened to understanding why it happened and what we should do next.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Her expectations for AI extend beyond reporting:

“I'd love for the technology to do more than help us execute what we've already planned. I want it to help identify opportunities we might be missing, flag underperforming experiences, and recommend what we should test next.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Grana ties those ambitions to the needs of her lean team:

“The more time our team can spend on strategy, creative thinking, and understanding our customers instead of pulling reports and managing execution, the better.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

Keep growing with a partner invested in the team’s success

Natural Life values partners that move quickly and bring new ideas to the table. The team likes to test, learn, and improve, and it needs technology that helps it automate, personalize, and improve performance without adding a heavy workload.

Asked why the brand runs on Attentive, Grana says:

“I'd say it's a combination of the technology, the innovation, and, most importantly, the partnership.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

She describes what that partnership looks like in practice:

“We genuinely see the team we work with as an extension of our internal marketing team. They're knowledgeable, proactive, and invested in helping us grow.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing

That partnership continues as the program evolves: from SMS becoming a leading revenue channel to testing AI Grow, refining targeting with AI Pro, and bringing more of Natural Life’s visual identity into RCS.

At each step, Natural Life keeps the same priorities in view: improve the value of every message, give customers a reason to stay engaged, and make more time for the work that calls for the team’s judgment and creativity.

“The platform is incredibly strong, but the quality of the people and the partnership is what makes it so special. They're one of the best technology partners we've worked with.”

— Carolyn Grana, VP of Digital & E-Commerce Marketing