New Persado Study Quantifies Revenue Lift from Pairing Marketing Teams with Generative AI

Marketers on their own choose the highest-performing language option only 33% of the time, according to “Better Together: Generative AI + Human Creativity” Report

Marketers — and their brands — have tangible revenue to gain from enlisting a strategic AI partner, according to a new study from Persado, the Motivation Artificial Intelligence (AI) company. The study found that when digital marketers rely on their experience and creative intuition alone to choose marketing campaign language, they don’t always achieve the best possible results—translating into missed revenue opportunities. These and other findings are available in the new report, “Better Together: Generative AI + Human Creativity.”

The study, administered by data and analysis firm Momentive, presented more than 250 retail marketing leaders with at least five years of experience with three different versions of a dozen consumer marketing campaigns. One of the versions was a human-authored control message and the other two were the median-performing and highest-performing AI-generated variants of the control message.

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Key takeaways include:

• Human creativity is essential but insufficient: Human marketers are essential to the creative process. Yet without added insights from AI, 100% of survey participants were unable to consistently identify the highest performing message.
• Even experienced marketers still need a strategic AI partner: Marketers with ten or more years of experience were no more likely to choose the highest performing message as those with five to nine years of experience.
• Marketers’ choices have real financial impact: The highest-performing messages achieved a 2.5% click rate, representing a 68% uplift from the human-authored control message (1.5%). This translates to an incremental revenue opportunity of $5.8 million across the 12 campaigns.

The campaigns chosen for the study were randomly selected from more than 2,000 real-world retail campaigns on the Persado Motivation AI platform between December 2021 and November 2022. Each of the selected campaigns included AI-generated email subject lines or text messages created for a retail enterprise brand, which were received by thousands of consumers in the real world.

Retail marketing leaders have a lot of money at stake in digital marketing campaigns. Not only do they spend an average of 58% of their budgets on them, but they also count on digital channels to fuel company growth. The study demonstrates how Generative AI can augment experienced marketing teams, using personalized language to generate higher-performing content that not only catches consumers’ attention, but also motivates them to act.

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“Our study found that marketing teams leave dollars on the table when they don’t empower their human creatives with AI-driven insights about the language that works to motivate customer engagement,” explained Michele Nemschoff, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Persado.

Persado is the only generative AI company that enables personalized communications at scale. Persado Motivation AI is a specialized class of enterprise generative AI technology that uses advanced machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning transformer models to create individualized, emotion-informed messages proven to drive action. The top 30 brands using Persado, including many iconic retailers, have collectively generated more than $1.5 billion in incremental revenue with Persado in the span of four years.