All Aboard for Personalized Campaigns

Princess Cruises is one of the best known cruise lines in the world, striving to provide its guests with unforgettable experiences as they take travel by ship to global destinations. To deliver these types of experiences, the company needed to collect, manage, and analyze customer data from its many first-party data sources to better understand its customers and their preferences.

At the time, the company’s customer data, and that of its sister cruise lines, lived in disparate systems and included information like booking and CRM data, but also notes about guests taken by cruise ship staff. After evaluating several different data management platforms (DMP), Princess Cruises determined that Adobe Audience Manager was the ideal solution. The company turned to the expertise of Adobe Professional Services to assist with deploying the platform and bringing together these disparate data sources — a task that was accomplished in just three months.

The company then turned to lookalike modeling in Adobe Analytics to derive insights about customers who converted, including the types of activities, experiences, and services they liked. Princess Cruises used these insights to identify new high-value audience segments for targeting with more personalized messages using Adobe Target.

In addition, Princess Cruises wanted to use its marketing budget efficiently by targeting customers who were more likely to convert. The company used frequency management in Audience Manager to identify customers who had recently booked a cruise, and were therefore unlikely to book another in the near future. They then removed these customers from campaigns, saving the cruise line 65 percent on the costs associated with the landing pages of its digital properties.

One of the cruise lines biggest barriers to delivering personalized experiences was few visitors authenticated on the website. Authentication definitively identifies the customer, which makes personalization to them much easier and more precise. Again working with Adobe Professional Services, the cruise line deployed a pixel within customer emails that tied email recipients to subsequent website visits. This tripled the number of visitors that Princess Cruises could identify for personalized messaging.

Gordon Ho, senior vice president of global marketing and North American sales at Princess Cruises says, “Delivering a great experience really begins with the data. We use Adobe Audience Manager as our central data warehouse, acting as the foundation for us to drive customer insight.”

Now that the company has those great customer insights, its marketing teams plan to move toward deeper personalization across all channels using Adobe Target. Such deep personalization will enable them to deliver the unforgettable moments that keep customers coming back again and again for another cruise. See the case study here.