Evernote turns AI-driven discovery into paid subscriptions

Giving new users a reason to start

Evernote⁠(opens in a new window) helps people capture, organize, and retrieve the knowledge they build over time. For longtime users, that collection of notes and ideas becomes a “second brain,” growing more useful as they add to it.

That challenge is also a question of relevance. Many people already know Evernote by name, but may not know how the product has evolved. As it develops AI capabilities, the company wants to show prospective users how its approach to capturing and organizing knowledge fits the way they work today.

ChatGPT Ads offered a way to introduce that evolving product to people already using AI to create and work with information.

Connecting AI workflows with a place to keep knowledge

Evernote’s starting point was a practical need: keeping information useful after it has been created. People working with conversations, notes, and transcriptions may want a place to organize that material and find it again. The team saw a natural role for Evernote in that workflow.

Its initial ads highlighted Evernote as a place to save and organize notes and transcriptions, drawing on messaging from strong-performing search campaigns. That gave the team a practical starting point for testing how those use cases resonated in ChatGPT.

Ads directed people to Evernote’s website, including its homepage, with conversion campaigns optimized for new-account registrations. Using its own web analytics and subscription records, Evernote could follow that initial interest through to a free trial and a first subscription payment.

Seeing interest carry through to subscription

Evernote built its core campaigns—its primary group of ChatGPT Ads campaigns—around a single product feature. In the first month, around 25% of desktop visits from those campaigns resulted in a new account, giving the team an early indication that people were willing to try the product.²

Evernote also saw promise in the step that mattered most to its subscription business. New users from those same campaigns converted from free trial to paid subscription at a rate about 10–20% higher than the historical average earlier this year across its paid acquisition channels.¹ For a team focused on helping new users discover enough value to subscribe, that was a meaningful early finding.

Evernote is treating those first-month results as encouraging and directional while it tests whether the performance can hold as the channel grows.

Helping more users discover where Evernote fits

Evernote’s next step is to make the connection between its product and AI workflows more tangible. The team plans to explore additional use cases and develop creative and dedicated landing pages that show people how Evernote can fit into their own work.