• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, February 8, 2017

Discerning luxury shoppers can buy bras and undies from Cosabella in many places — Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales and Amazon. But it also wants to sell more in its stores and on its own Web site, and it felt stuck.

So back in October, it left its ad agency and signed on with a new artificial-intelligence platform, and increased email-led sales by more than 60% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. The move also doubled its subscription base, and powered large gains in its social-media sales, especially on Facebook.

“Before this, we’ve struggled with how to use the data we had, how to turn it into insights that could shape not just our marketing, but our products,” says Guido Campello, Cosabella’s CEO. He says the AI-enabled marketing automation platform -- from Emarsys, the Austrian-based cloud-marketing B2C software company -- has done that.  

One of its biggest collections, for example, is the Never Say Never line, which can run from $26 thongs to $80 bras to $120 baby-dolls, including dozens of colors, sizes and pricing variations. “We often wondered, 'Are we doing too much? Introducing too many new colors? Too many prints? Should we use this many photos?’ It turns out customers love to see the new colors, and it helps keep them in love with the whole collection.”

The insights, which combine AI with raw data into a “highly personalized” customer experiences, are also delivered much faster than its previously data-scraping methods, he tells Marketing Daily. “The fashion calendar is about 18 months, which is a long time. But Millennials want looks that are on trend, and they share them quickly through social media. So we need to be able to do things in three months, and this helps.”

Cosabella is hardly alone, as retailers scramble to find new ways to use AI to attract and keep customers. Gartner Research predicts that by 2020, 50% of retail customer service requests will be conducted at least partially through conversational AI applications, for instance, and that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human.

The new technology has also “given us some important marketing insights,” says marketing director, Courtney Connell. “For example, it became clear that if a customer hasn’t bought something from us in 62 days, we’re losing them. And the data is showing us trends about what products are most engaging, and that our high-spending customers react better to more emotional appeals, while lower-spenders are more involved in what’s promotional.”

And while the gains in email have been considerable, social is also growing fast, ahead of the Florida-based company’s predictions. “We’ve seen exponential growth in social commerce,” Connell says. “It’s almost matching revenues gained from search and display spending.”

In January alone, she says Facebook accounts for 30% of revenues from all its paid marketing efforts. “If it had been 15%, we would have been happy.”