Can AI help your marketing? Absolutely. From content creation to conversion rates, there are plenty of ways AI can transform your entire operation and help you get stellar results. If you’re not sure what tools are available, or what it looks like when you apply them, take a seat. We’ve rounded up some fantastic AI case studies to show you what’s possible.
10 AI Case Studies Across All Industries
Whether you’re a B2B SaaS platform or a local business, these case studies show you how much you can accomplish by implementing simple AI-powered tools and solutions across your marketing organization.
1) Crabtree & Evelyn Sees a +30% Improvement in ROAS with Albert AI’s Insights
It’s tough to know how to break out of a rut, especially when your campaigns are seeing decent success but could be so much better.
Luxury bath brand Crabtree & Evelyn knew their targeting and retargeting campaigns were seeing moderate success, but the brand was looking to break through stagnation to drive growth and improve ROI by reaching new audiences.
To address this, they enlisted Albert AI, a self-learning digital marketing platform, to manage their Facebook paid social program, aiming to ramp up testing, improve cost efficiency, and gain more audience and creative insights. By analyzing performance and optimizing audiences, ad sets, and lookalikes, Albert used a multivariate test-and-learn approach to improve campaign results and maximize spend in major ways.
In less than two months, Crabtree & Evelyn saw notable results, including a 30% increase in return on ad spend (while keeping media spend flat). With the AI-powered platform, they can now easily manage prospecting, retargeting, and retention, creating a customer-led process for developing products, creative content, and branding.
Takeaway: Sometimes it’s important to mix things up when you’re stuck. (This is why we’ve always held “experiment often” as a creative philosophy.) Although AI tech can seem intimidating, small and specific experiments can yield big results.
2) TheCultt Raises Conversion by 37% Using Chatfuel’s Chatbot
How do you grow your brand without losing that personal touch? That’s exactly what TheCultt, a resale platform, was struggling with.
With a small team, they were hitting a wall in two key areas:
- They wanted to engage customers with personal communication at key touchpoints, but crafting that communication ate up a lot of time.
- They had a lot of ideas for new ways to engage with customers—but no bandwidth to follow through.
To free up time, they experimented with a Chatfuel chatbot to handle communication for welcome messages and auto-replies, as well as auto-responses for an experimental online Instagram contest.
Over three months, these two simple experiments generated huge results.
- Response time decreased by 2 hours, helping improve customer experience/loyalty.
- The social contest attracted 300 participants, who became a part of a larger retargeting campaign that resulted in a 37% increase in conversions (with a client cost of less than $2).
Despite initial concerns about losing that personal touch, TheCultt’s use of automation not only improved efficiency but also engaged more customers and increased sales, helping the team focus on the most effective ideas and ways to use their time.
Takeaway: It’s important to cultivate an emotional connection with your customer, but you don’t have to spend hours and hours doing it. With AI tech, you can improve your relationship by creating an easy and stress-free experience for the customer.
3) Bloomreach Increases Traffic 40% With Jasper’s AI-Assisted Content
One of the biggest benefits of AI is its ability to reduce menial labor and tackle cumbersome tasks.
With a 4-person content team, e-commerce platform Bloomreach struggled to keep up with internal content demands. The team was responsible for creating everything from long-form content and ads to emails and web copy, which took away focus from the team’s larger SEO strategy, so they needed a solution to handle various content needs.
Jasper’s AI-assisted content feature allowed them to address those needs without a heavy lift, empowering their own team (as well as other teams) to produce on-brand, copyedited content to serve a variety of marketing needs. This reduced workload helped the team scale their content strategy without sacrificing quality, ultimately increasing blog output by 113% and traffic by 40%.
Takeaway: It’s always helpful to audit your department’s responsibilities to spot opportunities to streamline or reduce workload. We also recommend auditing your tech stack at least once every 6 months to make sure you’re equipped with the right tools to work effectively.
4) Stick Shift Driving Academy Increases Traffic 72% and Inbound Calls 120% with Market Muse
It can be tough to reach a niche audience, especially when they only need your product/service at specific times.
That was the case for Stick Shift Driving Academy, a school that teaches people how to drive manual transmission. They rely on inbound marketing to reach their niche audience, but identifying the right subjects to write about and producing a high volume of quality content to grow search rankings was incredibly time-intensive.
To reduce time and improve their strategy, they used MarketMuse to get content ideas, generate briefs for writers, and eliminate subjective decision-making in content creation. By utilizing MarketMuse’s algorithm-driven recommendations, they saw a 72% increase in organic traffic, a 110% increase in form completions, and a 120% increase in inbound calls.
Takeaway: AI can be a huge help for SEO, especially if you’re not sure which keywords to target. If this is something you struggle with, see our guide to choose the best keywords to build an AI-driven content strategy.
5) Itson Sees 2,000% ROI with Recombee’s Email Personalization
How do you provide personalized emails and product recommendations when your product list is increasingly overwhelming? Itison, a popular Scottish events and deals website, struggled to sort through their constantly changing (and growing) product and event lineup to parse out the right things to promote, based on their audience’s interests.
To solve this, they used Recombee’s AI-powered machine-learning solution to synthesize, sort, and send weekly personalized emails that offered each audience member unique coupons and discounts based on their preferences. This level of personalization ensured that Itson’s recommendations were always relevant, leading to a 25% increase in e-commerce conversion rate and a 20% increase in traffic, with a total 2,000% return on investment.
Takeaway: Email is one of the most valuable channels, but you need to deliver the right content. Use AI-powered tools to test subject lines and email copy to optimize your content.
6) Novo Nordisk Gets a 24% Increase in Open Rate With Phrasee
Email marketing is challenging for all brands, but Novo Nordisk faced a particularly unique challenge, as they needed to educate their audience about diabetes risks while ensuring their email campaigns were tone-sensitive, compliant, timely, and effective.
To scale their messaging and compel people to open and engage with their emails, they implemented Phrasee’s AI-optimized content solution, which helped generate high-performing email subject lines through natural language generation and deep learning models.
Novo Nordisk also used the platform to ensure rapid and seamless delivery, which allowed them to consistently interface with their audience while meeting FDA regulations and legal requirements in the pharmaceutical industry. This simple strategy increased click rates by 14% and open rates by 24%, helping Novo Nordisk reach more customers with life-saving information.
Takeaway: From audience segmentation to send time, there are more ways to improve your email marketing than you might realize. Try these science-backed tips to do email better.
7) Influencer Marketing Factory Uses Reply to Score News Coverage
Earned media is one of the best ways to build your authority and credibility in an industry, but the outreach required to get news coverage can be time-intensive.
Influencer Marketing Factory helps brands and companies with influencer marketing in a variety of industries. But to build brand awareness for their own company, they use Reply (a platform that helps you automate and scale multichannel outreach) to get media coverage.
The team set up a Google Alert to find out when journalists write about topics relevant to their business. Then they use Reply to find and validate journalists’ email addresses, offer their expertise on any relevant topic for future articles, and even schedule follow-up emails. With this strategy, they’ve garnered 70 mentions in major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Adweek, Ad Age, and more.
Takeaway: So many AI tools have a built-in use-case, but you can get creative with how you use them. For example, we use AI to synthesize research and briefs, outline meeting agendas, etc.
8) Ivanti Builds a $263.2 Million Pipeline with 6Sense
Data is the secret to great marketing, but when your data is incomplete or fragmented, it doesn’t do you much good.
Ivanti, a leader in IT software with 40,000 customers and 80 products, faced challenges merging customer data after several business acquisitions. With no cohesive customer data or single source of truth, it was difficult to track metrics or make data-driven decisions about sales and marketing.
To fix this, they implemented 6Sense’s customer data platform to consolidate data and identify priority accounts. With this tech, they could identify customer interests based on past purchase history, intent keywords, competitor research, and profile-fit data. These insights helped them optimize sales outreach and craft smarter paid media campaigns (with varying messaging and assets), helping them maximize their efficacy with a 71% increase in opps created (a $263.2 million pipeline) and a 94% increase in opps won (generating $18.4 million in revenue).
Takeaway: Data is the key to everything, but only if you know what to do with it. Look for tools to integrate your platforms and make the most of your insights.
9) Bidwells Sees a 93% Increase in Customer Sessions with Optimizely
If you want to attract and convert the right audience, you need to create an intuitive buyer journey to move people to the next step—and a strong UX website is a huge part of that.
Bidwells, a leading UK property consultancy, realized that its website needed a revamp, as it didn’t reflect the brand’s energetic culture and delivered diluted messaging that didn’t direct clients to the solution they needed (or frame the company’s value effectively). To turn things around, they used Optimizely to create a more intuitive user journey, including content recommendations based on visitor interests, compelling messaging, and a more secure, optimized website that led to a 93% increase in customer sessions and a 300% increase in leads.
Takeaway: Creating a cohesive customer journey is one of the biggest challenges in marketing. If you need to rehab yours, use our free template to map your customer journey and identify ways AI tools can help you deliver the right message at the right time.
10) Buzet Uses Scalenut to Increase Organic Traffic by 25%
SEO content is its own challenge, as it needs to be written by experts, deliver value to readers, and be appropriately optimized for search engines. But not everyone has the time or expertise to do it all.
Buzet, a marketing agency focusing on B2B, edutech, and e-commerce industries, struggled to research and scale their content marketing. It required a ton of time-consuming research, which prevented them from increasing their publishing volume or coming up with new ideas.
Scalenut’s SEO and content marketing platform helped the team overcome these challenges by performing a competitor analysis, automating SEO-related research, providing content templates and outlines, producing long-form content, and offering additional suggestions to improve quality.
By leveraging these features, Buzet quickly mastered scalability and research, garnering a 25% increase in organic traffic with less effort and shorter timelines.
Takeaway: Like Buzet, many brands struggle to generate quality SEO content that will actually rank. But don’t rely exclusively on AI to generate your content. While AI can help you tackle the more menial parts of content creation, you still need to use research and expertise to deliver value. For more tips on that, find out how to manage SEO in the age of AI.
How to Use AI in Your Marketing
No matter what your biggest marketing challenges are, there are plenty of ways AI can help you work more effectively. If you haven’t experimented with it before (or are overwhelmed by all things AI), here are some easy ways to start.
- Choose the right tools. See our roundup of 50 handy marketing tools to experiment with options that might help your marketing.
- Learn about AI marketing applications. We know AI can be intimidating, so we created a handy guide for everything you need to know about AI marketing that answers all your burning questions, from use cases and risks to tips and tricks.
- Experiment with prompts. If you want AI to work for you, you need to tell it what to do. Download our roundup of 75 AI prompts to help you build a better marketing strategy.
And if you need a helping hand to craft an AI-supported strategy (or someone to run the robots), let’s chat. We’ve been experimenting with new test-and-learn approaches that have helped our own marketing, and we’d love to share them with you. (Hey, we’d love to make you one of our next AI case studies, too.)
Either way, know that you need to master AI if you want long-term success, so plan measured experiments, test, tinker, and tweak. It’s the only way to learn, grow, and win.
