Retailers spend heavily to bring shoppers to their websites, but converting that traffic into identifiable customers remains a challenge. Attentive is trying to close that gap with AI Grow, an AI-powered subscriber acquisition product that analyzes visitor behavior in real time and determines when to present email and SMS signup prompts.

The first interaction between a shopper and a retailer increasingly happens before a purchase, and Attentive wants artificial intelligence to influence what happens next.

The company has made AI Grow generally available, adding real-time AI-driven subscriber acquisition to its omnichannel marketing platform. Rather than showing the same email or SMS signup invitation to every visitor according to a fixed rule, AI Grow analyzes browsing and shopping behavior to determine when an individual visitor is most likely to engage.

The idea targets a familiar problem in marketing technology (MarTech): retailers can spend significant amounts acquiring website traffic but have limited opportunities to establish a direct relationship with visitors who leave without buying.

Email addresses and mobile numbers remain valuable because they give brands an identifiable audience they can reach through owned channels. But traditional pop-ups and signup forms often rely on static triggers such as time on page, scroll depth or exit intent.

Attentive’s approach is to replace some of those fixed rules with continuous optimization.

AI Grow evaluates visitor behavior and performance data, then adapts when and how signup invitations are presented. Attentive says the product continuously tests and learns from shopper behavior without requiring marketers to manually run those experiments.

That is a meaningful shift in how AI can enter the marketing funnel.

Much of the current discussion around generative AI in marketing centers on content creation—writing email copy, generating SMS campaigns or producing creative variations. AI Grow applies machine learning to a different part of the stack: deciding when a customer should be asked to become a subscriber in the first place.

From content generation to decision automation

The distinction matters for enterprise marketing teams.

A generative AI system can produce ten versions of an email. But if the marketer cannot determine which customer should receive which message, or when the customer is most receptive, content generation alone does not solve the optimization problem.

AI Grow is positioned as a decision layer sitting at the beginning of the customer journey.

Attentive says its system analyzes both identified and logged-out visitors, using behavioral signals to estimate the likelihood of engagement. The product then works with a retailer’s existing signup experience rather than requiring a completely new acquisition workflow.

This places the technology closer to conversion optimization, customer data platforms (CDPs), personalization and marketing automation than conventional generative AI tools.

The company says each deployment is measured using cohort-level A/B testing against the retailer’s existing configuration. That is important because subscriber growth can otherwise be difficult to attribute to an AI system when traffic, promotions and seasonal demand are changing simultaneously.

According to Attentive, beta customers recorded a median 25% increase in email and SMS signups from existing website traffic and a median 35% increase in welcome-series revenue.

Those figures are company-reported results rather than independent market research, and performance will inevitably vary by retailer, audience and implementation.

Still, the approach illustrates where marketing AI is heading: from assisting marketers with individual tasks toward making more decisions automatically.

Yankee Candle and other retailers test the model

Attentive cites several early customers.

Yankee Candle reported a 52% combined increase in SMS and email subscribers during its first deployment, according to Attentive. In a later steady-state experiment, the company recorded a 20% increase in welcome conversion across both channels.

Clove reported a 19% incremental increase in email and SMS subscribers alongside a 48% increase in welcome revenue. MANSCAPED, meanwhile, captured 2,167 SMS and email opt-ins during a Super Bowl traffic surge, which Attentive says was 5.4 times its previous week’s daily average.

These examples highlight an important characteristic of the technology: AI-driven acquisition can become more valuable when traffic volume is unusually high.

During events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, product launches or major cultural moments, retailers can receive large bursts of visitors. Static signup rules may treat that traffic uniformly even though shoppers have very different levels of intent.

A real-time optimization layer can theoretically adapt as those conditions change.

AI enters earlier in the customer journey

AI Grow also fits into Attentive’s broader effort to connect AI capabilities across its marketing platform.

The company’s AI Journeys product is designed to personalize communications with subscribers, while AI Pro focuses on improving broader email and SMS marketing performance. AI Grow extends that AI layer upstream, toward the moment a visitor becomes a known subscriber.

Attentive has also introduced Brand Voice 2.0, which gives marketers more control over how AI-generated SMS, email and RCS content represents their brand.

Taken together, the products point toward a marketing stack in which AI handles multiple decisions across acquisition, segmentation, messaging and optimization rather than existing as a standalone copywriting assistant.

That puts Attentive into competition with a much broader ecosystem.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud and HubSpot, for example, already combine customer data, personalization, automation and analytics. Commerce platforms and customer-data providers are also increasingly embedding AI into audience activation and conversion workflows.

Attentive’s differentiation is its concentration on conversational and owned-channel engagement—particularly SMS and email—and the identity layer connecting acquisition to subsequent messaging.

Holiday shopping raises the stakes

The timing is deliberate.

Attentive says its July 2026 Consumer Pulse research found that 83% of consumers begin planning holiday purchases before Black Friday, while 71% expect to start shopping earlier.

For retailers, that makes the period before the traditional holiday peak increasingly important. Capturing a visitor’s contact information in September or October can create weeks of additional opportunities for personalized email and SMS engagement before Black Friday arrives.

But that also raises the bar for AI personalization.

Consumers are becoming more accustomed to algorithmically generated experiences, and increasingly aggressive signup prompts can damage the very customer relationship brands are trying to build. The strongest implementations will therefore need to balance conversion rates with frequency, relevance, consent and customer experience.

For enterprise marketers, AI Grow is less interesting as another pop-up optimization tool than as an example of a broader transition: AI is moving from generating marketing assets to autonomously optimizing the decisions surrounding those assets.

That shift could ultimately matter more to the MarTech stack than another AI copy generator.

Market Landscape

The marketing AI market is moving toward decision automation.

Platforms from Salesforce, Adobe, Google and other major vendors increasingly use AI to automate audience segmentation, campaign optimization, content generation and customer journeys. Retail media and commerce platforms are also investing heavily in predictive technologies that determine which customers, products and messages deserve attention.

Attentive’s AI Grow targets a narrower but commercially important problem: converting anonymous website traffic into an addressable first-party audience.

Its advantage is the connection between acquisition and downstream engagement. Once visitors become subscribers, their data can feed into AI-powered journeys and messaging within the same platform.

The competitive challenge is differentiation. Email and SMS signup optimization is already served by conversion-rate optimization platforms, personalization engines and commerce tools. Attentive’s opportunity is to make the signup decision part of a broader AI-powered customer journey, rather than treating it as an isolated conversion event.

For enterprise teams, evaluation should focus on incremental subscriber growth, attributable revenue, consent management, experimentation methodology, integration with existing customer data and whether AI decisions can be audited and controlled.

Top Insights

• Attentive AI Grow uses real-time shopper behavior to determine when email and SMS signup prompts should appear, targeting higher-quality subscriber acquisition.
• The product shifts marketing AI beyond content generation toward autonomous conversion decisions, giving retailers another way to optimize existing website traffic.
• Attentive reports median beta gains of 25% in email and SMS signups and 35% in welcome-series revenue, based on company-run testing.
• AI Grow connects website acquisition with Attentive’s AI Journeys and AI Pro, creating an integrated path from visitor conversion through personalized customer engagement.
• Retailers preparing for earlier holiday shopping could use real-time optimization to capture more subscribers before Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic peaks.

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