Attentive February 2024

Bespoke Shopping Experiences

Roles

Researcher
Designer

Problem

In their first year with Attentive, retail brands experience rapid subscriber growth through our SMS and email sign-up units. However, after this initial success, growth often plateaus — new sign-ups slow, and existing subscribers are rarely re-engaged while browsing a brand’s site. This presented an opportunity to rethink how brands connect with both new and returning visitors. Our challenge was to design personalized, on-site experiences that not only convert first-time visitors but also re-engage existing subscribers in relevant and meaningful ways.

The Solution

With the introduction of AI, we unlocked new ways for brands to grow their subscriber lists and re-engage existing audiences. By using AI-driven personalization, we designed on-site experiences that adapt in real time to each shopper — recommending tailored offers, content, and sign-up opportunities. These intelligent interactions create a truly bespoke shopping experience, allowing brands to connect with customers in more meaningful and dynamic ways.

To support this, we built an editor interface that gives marketers full control — enabling them to preview, fine-tune, and deploy AI-powered creatives directly within Attentive’s platform. The result is a seamless system where creativity, automation, and control coexist, driving both subscriber growth and engagement.

Setup your variants

AI creatives display personalized content based on shopper previous behaviors. Marketers can customize variant display rules, look and feel, or regenerate for different content, all in one place.

Boost sign ups with AI Creatives

AI creatives display personalized content based on shopper behaviors.

Research Overview

To understand what makes an on-site experience feel personal and engaging, we conducted 100+ shopper interviews across a range of retail verticals. Through these conversations, we tested different creative concepts to learn which messages, formats, and visual elements shoppers found most successful and delightful.

The research revealed that personalization plays a defining role in how shoppers perceive a brand — from the tone of messaging to the relevance of offers and timing of interactions. These insights helped us identify distinct shopper motivations and behavioral patterns, which we then translated into core shopper personas. Each persona represented a different mindset, level of brand familiarity, and engagement intent, guiding both the design of our AI-powered creatives and the marketer editor experience.

Outcome

Following design handoff, the creative builder for these AI-powered sign-up units entered development with the Engineering team and launched just in time for Black Friday–Cyber Monday 2024 — the most critical sales period for our customers.

The new bespoke sign-up units were adopted by 50+ of Attentive’s top retail customers, resulting in record-breaking engagement across the platform. Compared to traditional static units, the AI-powered creatives drove significantly higher sign-up conversion rates and contributed to greater overall sales performance than any previous year.

This launch validated the value of personalization at scale — proving that AI-driven, adaptive experiences can both strengthen shopper engagement and deliver measurable business growth for our customers.