Jennifer O’Brien has more than a decade of marketing experience but said she still finds value in tapping AI when promoting her fine jewelry company.
“As a solo entrepreneur, I do not have time to wear so many different hats. AI has helped me replicate the work of a marketing department,” said O’Brien, who started Calms Jewelry a year ago.
Beyond saving time, AI can unlock creative ideas and workflows that some solopreneurs said they would not have discovered on their own. “Leveraging AI to see the things that I can’t see or think outside of the box has been really helpful,” said Liane Agbi, the founder of a boutique web design studio called Beautifuli Digital.
Agbi and O’Brien shared the surprisingly simple and AI-driven improvements they used to boost marketing in their solo businesses.
AI as a creative partner
In her previous work in marketing, O’Brien used to spend hours rewriting variations of the same email subject line to optimize performance or brainstorming the best image to capture for social media. Now, she uses AI to generate multiple test versions in minutes, allowing her to run more experiments faster and significantly increase click-through rates, she told Business Insider.
When writing the subject line for a marketing email about a big sale, for instance, O’Brien might go to an AI chatbot (she switches between Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and write about the campaign and goal. She shared an example: “I’m in the fine jewelry industry, I’m looking to send out a marketing email for the biggest sale of the year, and I want to figure out what subject line will perform the best for sales.”
“It’s still a dynamic, back-and-forth conversation, even after I’ve typed a long prompt,” she said. For instance, she’ll drop in some ideas of her own and AI will suggest swapping two words so the more impactful one doesn’t get cut off in the subject line. O’Brien added that she sometimes has to push back when AI’s suggestions don’t match the brand guidelines she provided it.
She said this process makes her creative work easier because she has more time for the hands-on work of jewelry-making that AI can’t replace.
Plus, she’s found that her AI use leads to successful results: For one social ad promoting a ring, she launched with two of her own ideas, then asked the AI for additional variations. One of its suggestions, a video of the ring being held in a hand, ended up having the strongest performance, with a click-through rate increase of 291%.
AI can help customize and streamline customer outreach
For Agbi, generative AI helped to streamline the process of nurturing leads.
Formerly, the process involved a lot of manual work: Remembering to follow up with people, copying and pasting template messages, and rereading their previous emails to personalize them, said Agbi.
To generate basic responses more quickly, she started with the AI capabilities built into her CRM, called HoneyBook. After providing templates she wrote, HoneyBook’s AI suggests tone and context adjustments for each contact based on previous emails, making the outreach feel more intentional and less like an email blast, Agbi said.
She said she can quickly review the message, make small tweaks to ensure it sounds like her, and then send it off much more quickly than starting from scratch. “Since implementing this, I’ve seen a 25% increase in new business from abandoned contacts and dormant client relationships I would have otherwise let go,” Agbi told Business Insider.
For tougher cases, like when a client says they’re interested and then goes quiet, Agbi said Anthropic’s Claude is valuable for offering solutions. She’ll drop the whole conversation into the chat and ask what’s going on.
In one instance, it flagged that her message was sent around the holidays, and suggested she follow up with some empathy for the business of the season and a gentle nudge to pick the conversation back up. She ended up landing the client.
“It’s allowed me to really review certain conversations or gain alternative context to what might have been going on,” Agbi said.
For other business owners looking for simple but impactful marketing improvements that AI can help them with, Agbi suggests mapping out your current customer journey with an AI tool and asking it to identify small gaps in how you’re getting clients or building relationships. “Start small instead of jumping into something big,” she said.
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