Little Sleepies Uses Attentive AI Pro to Identify and Target 43% More Visitors

Developing a more personalized strategy for SMS marketing

In 2020, Little Sleepies was looking for a way to connect with their increasingly mobile-first customer base of parents with young children. They partnered with Attentive to launch and grow their SMS program, counting on the channel's list growth and engagement rates to catch their attention.

In the beginning, the main purpose of SMS for the children's clothing brand was to grow their list of subscribers and promote new products. By 2023, the channel had become a key source of revenue and customer engagement. The brand had amassed a list of over 500,000 subscribers and was sending out one to two product announcements per week to their entire list. 

While they were thrilled with the growth and impact of SMS, their strategy had become impractical. Sending the same message to their entire list was becoming less efficient, and there was a risk of reaching uninterested customers who'd then disengage or worse–unsubscribe. 

As the role of SMS at Little Sleepies grew, they built automated journeys to provide more frequent customer touchpoints, sending relevant messages triggered by certain subscriber behaviors or actions. To continue their success, they were looking to take their automation and performance to the next level with the help of AI. 

Partnering with Attentive, they were excited to be early adopters of AI Pro. This advanced suite of tools, including Identity AI, Audiences AI, and Send Time AI, was designed to help brands like Little Sleepies identify their most valuable subscribers and deliver highly personalized messages when they are most likely to engage. It presented Little Sleepies with an opportunity to further refine their SMS strategies and enhance the personalization of their customer interactions—all without placing additional burdens on their marketing team.

"As a brand, we're very customer-centric and that expands into our marketing strategy as well. It's all about optimization at this point, we have the basics down but there's always ways to improve what we're doing. That's where AI comes in, it's a way for us to achieve what we wouldn't have been able to before and create the best experience for our customers and for us as marketers." - Christine Taylor, Senior Retention Marketing Manager

Recognizing and learning about site visitors with Identity AI

The first step in creating more personalized messages was to find ways to identify more visitors on their site and learn more about them. To accomplish this, Little Sleepies used Attentive’s Identity AI. This feature is built to compliantly capture and use first-party data and behavioral information outside the usual cookie lifespan. 

Using Identity AI allowed the brand to recognize more site visitors as existing subscribers, meaning they could send more triggered messages and more quickly re-target those subscribers, driving more of them to return to the site and take action.

"With Identity AI, we're identifying more people. Over the last 30 days, we've identified 43% more visitors so we were able to send 43% more messages which is fantastic. It also enables us to re-target them right away versus waiting for them to come back and take another action that would allow us to identify them." -Christine Taylor, Senior Retention Marketing Manager

In addition to recognizing more site visitors, Identity AI enabled the brand to gain valuable insights about their subscribers and tie more actionable data to their profiles. 

"Being able to recognize customers while they're on site when we might not have been otherwise is enormous. The more information we have about them, what they're looking at or may be interested in, the better our segmentation can get. With this feature, we can better serve our customers with releases or promotions that they might be interested in"- Christine Taylor, Senior Retention Marketing Manager

Optimizing lists with Audiences AI

Little Sleepies was interested in moving from full-list sends to targeting segments for their product releases. To improve their segmentation, they used another feature of AI Pro called Audiences AI. This feature helped them reach a larger audience for their campaigns. Audiences AI suggests subscribers to include outside the defined segment who have similar behavior or want to buy similar things. The brand was also able to exclude those in the segment who the AI determined were less likely to engage and convert. Using AI, Little Sleepies refined their segment lists in ways they couldn't have done without AI support. The brand was thrilled with the results—the AI-driven segments drove stronger message performance. 

To confirm the effectiveness of their efforts, the marketing team conducted A/B tests comparing full-list sends to a segment enhanced by Audiences AI. The outcomes were impressive: In the promotion of their latest 'Play' line, the AI-augmented targeted segment accounted for 85% of the total campaign revenue.

Finding the perfect time with Send Time AI

Lastly, the children's clothing brand began testing out an AI Pro feature, called Send Time AI, for non-urgent messages such as follow-ups and holiday promotions. 

Send Time AI uses past behavior, data analysis, and machine learning to determine the ideal time for each subscriber to receive a message, and then automatically sends it at that time. 

The brand had a consistent schedule of releasing new products every Tuesday and Thursday at 9am, and initially assumed that this was the optimal time for customer engagement. However, they were surprised to discover that most of their customers were engaging in the late afternoon. This insight was a game-changer that could help them build higher-performing promotions in the future—without any additional effort.

The payoff of increased personalization

Since implementing AI Pro into their SMS program, Little Sleepies has significantly enhanced the level of personalization of their customer interactions, leading to higher engagement rates and increased purchases. With these tools, the brand has been able to:

• Identify and re-target 43% more site visitors with Identity AI
• Bring in 31% more revenue from journeys and boost campaign revenue by 27% with the support of AI Pro
• Increase engagement by 6% on messages sent with Send Time AI

As Little Sleepies continues on their journey of enhancing customer personalization, they're eager to explore new opportunities to innovate with Attentive’s AI tools. Going into the holiday season, they're excited to benefit from Attentive AI's ability to improve their customer experience and drive higher performance when it matters most.

Attentive AI™ Pro makes our current strategy more granular than we could ever do on our own. That's going to be especially important as we look to ensure we're reaching more people at the right time with a relevant message during the holidays, our busiest season. Why not let AI support us, especially when it can deliver such great results?"- Christine Taylor, Senior Retention Marketing Manager

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