The Creative Conundrum
Behind every new campaign or seasonal promotion are hours of strategizing and crafting the perfect creative to nail that first impression. However, no matter how much time, effort, and resources have been poured into a creative asset, it’s usually filed away only a few short weeks after it’s deployed, leaving creative teams feeling short-changed for their hours of effort.
The solution to this problem lies in AI, and not by simply generating more non-branded creatives in a short amount of time. Instead, marketers can look to AI to repurpose their existing creative assets and give them a far longer shelf-life than a single promotion or campaign, ultimately increasing the value of their investment.
Insights to Score with Customers
Before focusing on increasing the value of a creative investment, marketers must first determine which assets to produce. How to design on-brand assets is clear, but generating creatives that are proven to drive results can be a little more murky.
While marketers are familiar with analyzing campaign results to see which ones are performing well, the majority of emails feature more than one creative—how are marketers to know which individual assets are driving engagement and revenue, and which ones simply aren’t? After all, a poorly performing campaign could still contain a successful creative asset.
AI is a game-changer for this type of analysis, as tools like Da Vinci can uncover key metrics such as open, click-through, and conversion rates for a single asset. Additionally, each creative is automatically given an effectiveness score to give marketers greater context for those performance metrics. For example, a creative asset that is a low performer on average may still prove to be extremely effective with a niche audience. Or, as seen in the example below, a creative asset could have both a high click-through-rate and a low conversion rate.
What could be the cause of such a low number of conversions when customers seem to love the asset and keep clicking on it? Through deeper analysis, marketers discovered an entirely different problem: when customers clicked in, they found that the exact item was not actually for sale on the website. This resulted in a poor customer experience and low conversion rates, despite the fact that customers loved the asset.
Data-Driven Decisions
With this new stream of creative-specific data, marketers can trade in guesswork and gut instincts for data-driven decisioning. When strategizing about future campaigns or shooting footage for new assets, marketers can use the AI-driven insights to inform future decisions. Ultimately, this forms a content feedback loop that helps marketers to invest in higher-value, better performing creatives.
Victoria’s Secret already uses AI to guide its creative decision making. The apparel company analyzes which assets perform best across email campaigns and then leverage that data to fuel strategic decisions and perfect campaign deployment.
Long Live Your Best Creatives
When all of the data is in, it becomes clear which existing creatives are the most successful and worthy of further reuse and investment.
By decoupling branded creatives from campaigns, Da Vinci is about to help brands extend the lifespan of creative assets. With all of the assets collected into one library, the AI will use content decisioning to choose the best creative for each customer, despite the usual trends and schedules of the traditional marketing calendar. Taking into account each customer’s individual habits—such as which emails they’ve engaged with and which ones they’ve ignored—as well as their current and predicted preferences, the AI will choose the creative that is most likely to resonate.
Lands’ End succeeds in gaining more value from each creative, as seen in these demand-driving emails that feature off-season products. Here, Da Vinci leverages the brand’s entire creative library to deliver the right content to the right customer at the perfect time, effectively reusing relevant products that may have appeared in previous emails. In this case, despite swimsuits and other seasonal items being past their promotional cycle, Da Vinci knows that this particular customer will still engage best with the older content.
Stay On Brand, Stay On Track
It can seem a little off-brand to send an email about winter coats in the heat of summer. Just like any other martech solution, it is of course critical to have the marketer work hand-in-hand with AI and not take a complete set-it-and-forget-it approach. Not only can marketers step in and override AI outputs when needed, they can set brand guidelines and input creative guardrails before the AI takes any action. Marketers can take advantage of AI’s time and resource efficiencies while preserving their brand image in every single email—no franken-emails will arise with this partnered approach.
Creative Efficiency, Unlocked
Image generation is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI’s impact on creative assets. By using AI insights to inform strategic decisions and extend the life of their best-performing assets, marketers can drive far greater value from their existing creative library. To learn more about AI’s impact on marketing campaigns, explore the related resources below.