Princess Cruises entertains new audiences with personalized messaging through Adobe Experience Cloud.
65%
Savings through intelligent audience suppression
Objectives
Introduce travelers who are new to cruises to experiences that will inspire them to book a cruise
Reach diverse audiences with personalized, relevant messages
Combine disparate data sources to gain an overall view of the customers
Results
65% Savings through intelligent audience suppression
Deployed in three months with Adobe Professional Services
300% increase in identifiable audiences
Web insights — tested and quantified the impacts of website changes, increasing traffic and revenue.
Growing cruise fans.
In years past, many people pictured cruises as slow-paced travel reserved for senior citizens and retirees. Today, that image is changing rapidly. Cruises are gaining new popularity among travelers of all ages. Part of this sea change is due to the great variety in activities. Whether it’s a family looking for all-day action or a couple hoping for culinary adventures from top chefs, cruises now appeal to new demographics.
Princess Cruises is the third largest cruise line in the world, carrying two million guests each year to destinations around the world. As the number of activities and experiences offered by cruises continues to expand, Princess Cruises sees an opportunity to introduce more travelers to the joy of cruising.
“At Princess Cruises, our mission is to create unforgettable moments for our guests, from the initial booking all the way through a trip’s end,” said Gordon Ho, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and North American Sales, Princess Cruises. “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. We are able to have an authentic understanding of our guests and their preferences, enabling us to better customize individual experiences and help ensure that any content we put forth is contextually relevant across different channels.”
“The greatest benefit of Adobe Experience Cloud is the fact that everything is linked together with a universal Adobe ID across all channels”
Shelly WiseVice President of Integrated Marketing, Princess Cruises
Creating a digital foundation with Adobe.
With millions of passengers traveling every year on Princess Cruises or one of its sister Carnival Corporation brands, Princess Cruises has a wealth of information from first-party data about what type of people are taking cruises and what they are interested in. But the difficulty was coming up with an easy method of gathering, managing, and analyzing all the data to provide relevant, actionable insights and drive personalization.
After looking at several data management platforms (DMPs), Princess Cruises decided to deploy Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe’s DMP, as the foundation of its data management efforts. Using Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics, both solutions in Adobe Analytics Cloud, Princess Cruises can analyze information from multiple sources to develop audience segments. Integration between the solutions creates a unique 360-degree view of customers based on real-time analysis and deep customer behavior insights. By feeding this data into Adobe Target, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Princess Cruises can personalize experience and better market cruises to different types of audiences.
“Ultimately we need to reach high-value segments with the right messages,” says Ho. “The solutions in Adobe Experience Cloud provide us with valuable tools that help us identify and reach audiences. We’re very excited to see how we can build upon this digital foundation in the future.”
Getting to know audiences.
The first step to embracing personalization was pulling together customer data through a DMP. With the help of Adobe Professional services, Princess Cruises deployed Adobe Audience Manager and onboard data from different systems in just three months. With a focus on the business needs and timelines of Princess Cruises, Adobe Professional Services brought deep detailed product knowledge of the stack and worked closely with the internal team to deliver the solution.
Adobe Audience Manager acts as a centralized warehouse for anonymized customer data from numerous sources across Princess Cruises and its sister brands. This includes not just booking data and CRM databases, but also detailed notes from staff aboard cruise ships. By analyzing this customer data, Princess Cruises can tease out insights into who is taking cruises, and what types of activities, experiences, and services these travelers are enjoying on their cruises. The marketing team can then leverage lookalike modeling to find more customers similar to the customers who are already converted, increasing the size of the cruise line’s addressable audience.
Working with Adobe Audience Manager allows us to activate data and bring teams together to target audiences with specific messages,” says Shelly Wise, Vice President, Integrated Marketing, Princess Cruises. “We can be more dynamic and creative in our efforts, and we can target high-value audiences with more efficient marketing campaigns.”
“By showing high-value customers experiences that will speak to them, we’re hoping to grow our cruising audience while increasing return on ad spend and marketing investment.”
Gordon HoSenior Vice President of Global Marketing and North American Sales, Princess Cruises
Greater campaign efficiency.
Through Adobe Audience Manager, Princess Cruises marketing and media teams use audience profiles to efficiently target prospects and climate waste. Pushing information about cruise packages to customers who have just booked a cruise is usually a waste of time and money. With frequency management through Audience Manager, marketers can identify recently booked customers and suppress campaigns towards those customers. Audience suppression allowed Princess Cruises to save 65% on cost per landing page across properties.
Adobe Professional Services helped Princess Cruises solve one of the biggest headaches for its marketers: low authentication rates on its website. Without authentication, personalization and targeting can be much more difficult. However, email campaigns tend to have a high level of interaction. By working with Adobe Professional Services, Princess Cruises teams deployed an email pixel to connect email traffic data with website data. As a result, Princess Cruises increased its identifiable audiences three-fold and gained deeper customer insights.
“The greatest benefit of Adobe Experience Cloud is the fact that everything is linked together with a universal Adobe ID across all channels,” says Wise. “There’s no need to stitch together different tools and have people struggling to talk to each other. It’s one seamless system”
Embracing personalization.
With Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics gathering, analyzing, and segmenting customer data, Princess Cruises marketing teams are ready to move into full-fledge personalization. Adobe Target will use the audience data and performance results to connect audiences with the most engaging information and offers across channels.
“Marketing has become complex, with touch points across digital, social, and traditional media,” says Ho. “We’re excited about how Adobe Experience Cloud can help us identify valuable customers, perhaps even customers who we didn’t think would be prospective cruisers. By showing high-value customers experiences that will speak to them, we’re hoping to grow our cruising audience while increasing return on ad spend and marketing investment.”
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