The challenge: Smartly, a digital marketing automation platform, faced a hurdle with their client Emma, an e-commerce company specializing in sleep products. Emma's catalog images had embedded backgrounds that clashed with the design concepts for paid social campaigns. This limitation hindered their ability to scale campaigns and achieve optimal performance across multiple channels.
Our solution: After considering various options, Smartly discovered Photoroom's AI-powered Remove Background API. The tool provided a high-quality and instant solution to remove backgrounds from Emma's product images, enabling seamless integration into existing catalogs without disrupting dynamic elements like price updates.
The results: Since adopting Photoroom API, Smartly has seen significant improvements in Emma's campaign efficiency and performance. They launched six campaigns with an 18.42% increase in the return on ad spend and a 72% increase in click-through rate, while saving 20 hours of work, improving image quality, and expanding reach across multiple channels.
From manual editing to Photoroom’s AI-powered API
Smartly is a leading automation tool in the digital marketing industry, enabling customers to grow and scale their ad campaigns. With a strong emphasis on media buying, creative solutions, and optimization tools, Smartly has consistently delivered outstanding results for a diverse range of clients. When Smartly started working on campaigns for their client, Emma, they quickly realized the limitations they faced: the catalog images had backgrounds that were not visually appealing. This was going to be a problem because a good marketing campaign is as good as the visuals used.
The team at Smartly initially attempted to solve this challenge with an internal solution, but this required creating target images for each product image manually, a time-consuming process per catalog. This approach also wasn't scalable due to the varying nature of product images and the complexity of automating keywords for different products.
“We were spending around 30 hours per catalog on manual background removal. It was time-consuming, especially when we needed to launch campaigns quickly across multiple channels” - Hamza Abdou, Customer Success Manager at Smartly
When Smartly discovered Photoroom’s API, they were immediately impressed by its capabilities. The API easily integrated with Smartly's existing systems, maintaining the dynamic elements of Emma's catalogs.
“We tried the Photoroom API, and it was just a much smoother experience. It allowed us to launch in a much shorter time, and we scaled from having one catalog advertised to having seven different catalogs being done all at once, on TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest." - Hamza Abdou, Customer Success Manager at Smartly
How Photoroom API saved 20 hours of Smartly’s campaign creation workflow
The Photoroom API allows you to automatically remove and replace image backgrounds and batch edit thousands of images at once. There are multiple APIs depending on your needs such as Remove Background API for neatly erasing image backgrounds and Image Editing API for other editing needs.
Smartly primarily relies on the Remove Background API, which they find quick and easy to use. The API's reliability in delivering quality results in less than 300ms was a game changer for Smartly’s campaign creation workflow. This instantaneity, combined with engaging creative content, significantly boosted Emma's social media engagement and conversion rates, leading to substantial improvements in Emma's campaign performance:
An 18.42% increase in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), indicating more efficient ad spending and higher revenue generation.
A 236% increase in Average Order Value (AOV), showing that customers were not only more likely to purchase but also to spend more per order.
A 73% increase in Click-Through Rate (CTR), demonstrating that the visually enhanced ads were much more engaging to potential customers.
Reduced the time spent on image editing from 30 hours per catalog to approximately 8-10 hours, freeing up valuable resources for other aspects of campaign management.
By streamlining the image editing process, Smartly has been able to focus more on creating and optimizing campaigns, leading to improved ad performance and consistency across different platforms. These improvements allowed Emma to explore new revenue streams and allocate more budget to high-performing campaigns. The efficiency gain has enabled Emma to run six distinct campaigns across three channels (Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok), totaling 18 campaigns with consistent image quality.
Expanding the use of AI in future ad campaigns
Smartly sees great potential in further AI-driven innovations, with their partnership with Photoroom playing a crucial role in this vision. "Features such as scene generation and video editing are anticipated to revolutionize content creation, offering even more personalized and engaging ad experiences," Hamza explains.
The ongoing collaboration between Smartly and Photoroom is expected to drive continued advancements in image and video processing capabilities. This partnership ensures that Smartly remains at the forefront of digital marketing technology, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in ad creation and optimization.
If you are a business looking to reduce your photography costs and automate post-production editing, try Photoroom's Remove Background API at $0.02/image.
