Athletic fashion retailer Hibbett faced a challenge that’s familiar to many marketers: getting lost amid the flood of promotional emails in customers’ inboxes. But by combining modules of a Movable Ink solution — which uses AI to determine which creative “story” each customer receives in their email, and also fills the supporting product grids with items that align with this creative — Hibbett has boosted email revenue per send by 46%.
Not only that, but Hibbett also achieved. a 30% improvement in click-through rate, a 40% lift in conversions overall and a 100% conversion increase among its lowest-spending consumer segment.
“We expected an increase [with the new solution], but we didn’t expect this much,” said Kayla Brown, Director of Customer Lifecycle at Hibbett in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It’s been a pleasant surprise.
“We compete with a lot of retailers in the inbox, so we determined that our segmentation needed to be more personalized — one-to-one versus a batch,” Brown added. “We’re sending more impactful emails now, because these solutions allow us to get the right message to the right customer at the right time.”
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AI Analysis Feeds Story Selection
Movable Ink Studio has been in use for eight years, whereas Hibbett’s use of Da Vinci started in 2025. Da Vinci provides the AI-powered creative decisioning to identify the right creative for each email recipient, while Studio surfaces top apparel, sneakers and new arrivals in the product grid that harmonize with the chosen story.
“These AI models are taking a lot of things into account” in optimizing the email content, including “the shopper’s website behavior, their email engagement, what type of creative they’re responding to, their past purchases and what the audience looks like,” said Brown.
The Hibbett marketing team has been able to increase the number of creative email options available from 50 to more than 100 unique versions, and the dynamic setup allows the retailer to send more than 5,000 unique versions of an email every day, well beyond the capacity of any manual workflow.
The Studio module saves on email creation time as well: “It’s a feed from our website and it auto-crops the images,” said Brown. “Some are ‘set it and forget it,’ for example the new arrivals section” of the emails.
Time Savings Empower Hibbett Marketers
These AI-powered emails are certainly proving effective, and as an added bonus, use of the Movable Ink modules together has allowed the Hibbett marketing department to reclaim seven hours per week, allowing employees to focus on testing, strategy and growth versus email creation.
The lighter workload also allowed Brown to promote one member of her “small but mighty” team to a more strategic role. “I was able to completely reorganize my team,” said Brown. “Before I had a digital marketing team and a person responsible for email, but now I have a [combined] retention marketing team. That’s pretty great.”
