Apparel retailer Marleylilly’s new AI marketing tool allows the brand to send messages at the exact time each of its shoppers is most likely to open and click on it.
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.
“That bucket of those messages we didn’t send adds up to cover the costs of some months of the additional (cost) we pay for that AI tool,” said Pingry without revealing the cost of the tool.
SMS vs. email at Marleylilly
Marleylilly has double or more the number of shoppers in its email marketing program, compared with its SMS marketing list, Pingry said. But, shoppers are becoming more apt to join the SMS marketing list.
“Our phone could feel a little more personal than an email inbox. But over the last couple years, I feel like it’s become so much more of the norm,” she said about consumers sharing their phone number with brands. “Customers are really excited to have brands they connect with, talk to them in their text message inbox because it feels like a friend you want to have a text from anyway.”
In fact, shoppers text Marleylilly back frequently. Often, it’s the grocery list, Pingry said.
“Some I think are an accident, but some I think you’re trying to remember a note and you just need to text it to somebody. You can text it to a brand,” she said.
Attentive plans to bring all of the AI tools it has available for SMS marketing to email marketing in the coming quarters.
When Attentive tested the AI SMS tools with hundreds of its customers in 2024, on average, the AI send time yielded a 10% increase in click through rate, and the AI audience tool generated a 15-20% increase in revenue, Attentive said.
2024 holiday season at Marleylilly
The holiday season is always a key time for Marleylilly because many of its shoppers purchase gifts, and a subset of shoppers only purchase gifts at Christmas or Mother’s Day, Pingry said. The brand plans to lean heavily on its new AI marketing tools going into the 2024 holiday season.
“We always talk to our holiday customers a little bit differently and the AI tools just help make sure that everyone who should be in those groups are in those groups,” she said.
Marleylilly launched in 2012 and is based in South Carolina. The brand has grown to 100-150 employees and it generates more than $10 million in annual revenue.
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