Our Origin Story, Part 5: The future of personalization - how Curator™ AI redefines email marketing automation

This is the final installment in a multi-part series of posts highlighting the journey from Scratch-it to where we are today with Zembula Dimensions™.

(Want to know our origin story? Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 in our series.)

What we know so far

If there’s anything we know, making major changes to your daily email workflow should be done carefully — at the right time and with the right strategy. One lesson all marketers understand is variety can boost performance, but the effect rarely lasts.

Anytime you change your email program, there’s an initial spike in performance. It feels like a breakthrough. But, over time, performance tends to return to baseline or even drop slightly. 

The challenge is finding sustainable ways to maintain and grow those gains, especially when variety and fresh content are crucial to keeping customers engaged.

That goes for email content and product imagery. That’s where Curator™ AI comes in. 

What we’re incubating

With Curator AI, our focus is on evolving beyond the limitations of traditional product photography to help marketers achieve sustainable performance boosts. The evolution we see is solving the limitation of product catalog photography by reimagining product recommendations with dynamic visuals — changing the backgrounds of product images to keep content fresh and engaging while boosting performance. 

Our customer, Forever 21, is a perfect example of the success of this approach. Check out the Media.Monks case study that details their results.

Our hypothesis was that we’d see better performance if we combined models and products into a single unified background image (it might be a single color, texture, or photo of a city, beach, etc.). 

However, the bottleneck to variety is product photography. It’s expensive to do a photoshoot. If marketers had truly unlimited budgets, they would create infinite product and lifestyle photography shoots. 

The reality is, that wasn’t feasible…until now. 

It’s true what they say: Generative AI is changing everything. Now, you can take a product photograph, cut out the model or item, and then perfectly blend the cutout into a new background with generative AI, creating the right lighting and shadows. We’re at the very beginning of this era, and with continued advancements, it’s only going to get better from here.

You can do the basics with generative AI now for things like variety in product recommendation backgrounds, and combining multiple products into the same background.

But this is just a starting point for what’s to come. The future could deliver a new workflow that marketers are actually excited about because it revolutionizes how we create. The future is making the marketer the curator, with the power to deliver on their vision without any limitations. 

That’s Zembula’s goal with our new Curator AI solution.

What’s next?

We make new data-driven discoveries every hour, every day, and we can’t wait to share and empower you with what we learn.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our five-part origin story about Zembula and our Dimensions product. Continue to follow along by subscribing to our newsletter to get the latest Zembula Insights, so you can learn from our tests and observations within enterprise retail marketing:

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