Successes on the sea.
Silversea Cruises creates tailored digital experiences that reflect luxury, bespoke on-board accommodations and services using Adobe Experience Cloud.
40%
Reduction in site development times
Objectives
Personalise digital interactions to mirror brand and on-board experiences
Improve visibility into customer behaviours and preferences to drive optimisations and personalisation
Increase marketing agility to deliver more of the content that customers want most
Results
Developed insights into customer behaviours and preferences to deliver personalisation across channels
Reduced cost per acquisition by 15% while increasing site conversion by 20%
Cut site development times by 40% and accelerated new content development by 30%
Enhanced content, creative, navigation, and more to improve customer journeys
“Adobe Experience Cloud helps us address every step in the customer journey and create a world that revolves around what customers want.”
Xavier Bussonnais
Director of Digital Marketing, Silversea Cruises
Online and at sea
Modern cruise ships are largely regarded as floating cities, carrying thousands of people to far-flung destinations, exotic islands, or even around the world. What makes Silversea Cruises stand out from the crowd is that it eliminates the hustle and bustle of oversized, overloaded ships and delivers a premium, boutique experience. Each ship within the company’s fleet takes only a few hundred guests at a time to more than 900 destinations, letting guests focus on their vacations instead of the crowd.
The Silversea Cruises brand is built around delivering personalised experiences that enable guests to get the most from every trip and enjoy every location exactly the way they want.
“We are a leader in ultra-luxury cruises and, as tastes change, we want to be ahead of the curve for every individual,” says Xavier Bussonnais, Director of Digital Marketing at Silversea Cruises. “A complete digital transformation was the answer to identifying the ever-changing behaviours, habits, and preferences of our discerning clientele.”
One trend among customers is that more are coming directly to the Silversea Cruises site to research cruise options and understand the value they get from the voyage—regardless of their preference to purchase directly or through a travel agent. This means that Silversea Cruises needed to raise the quality of its digital properties to match on-board experiences. Additionally, the cruise line needed to personalise content and interactions, focusing on the destinations, accommodations, excursions, and other options that individuals want most.
“Our guests expect personalised service at every step of their journey, from booking and boarding to the dining room and transport,” says Bussonnais. “Incorporating personalisation into digital interactions was a natural next step with how we are evolving customer experiences and mirroring the high standard of what guests can enjoy while on board.”
Adding to the challenge of personalizing experiences, customers are reviewing cruise information across multiple sources—social media, review sites, and more—to make decisions about purchases, making developing a complete view of a customer more difficult. In turn, Silversea Cruises needed a better way to track, measure, and leverage customer data to maximize the usefulness of every insight it can capture. This pushed Silversea Cruises to retire its disparate, legacy platforms and adopt a unified solution for creating innovative customer interactions.”
“We were agnostic with how we adopted software until lack of integration became problematic and we started to lose scalability and performance. Adobe Experience Cloud solves all of those issues, as well as boosts our visibility into customer activities and agility so we can respond to changing customer demands.”
Xavier Bussonnais
Director of Digital Marketing, Silversea Cruises
Changing with the tides
“We were agnostic with how we adopted software until lack of integration became problematic and we started to lose scalability and performance,” says Bussonnais. “Adobe Experience Cloud solves all of those issues, as well as boosts our visibility into customer activities and agility so we can respond to changing customer demands.”
Over a nine-month period, Silversea Cruises’ digital team of 12 partnered with Adobe Customer Solutions and completed a dramatic digital transformation, employing Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, and Adobe Advertising Cloud Search within Adobe Experience Cloud. By adopting an integrated platform, the cruise line knew that it could not only quickly deploy the new technology, but spin up new marketing activities rapidly, accelerating insights and wins.
At the core of the Silversea Cruises marketing ecosystem, it chose Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager to tie together customer data from onsite activities and media channels. “We knew that all of our personalisation efforts were going to rely on high-quality, trusted data,” says Bussonnais. “Adobe Analytics Cloud solutions work together seamlessly to communicate clear insights in real time, delivering accurate data and creating defined audience segments.”
By diving deep into data, Silversea Cruises now has clear insights into the basic details a travel company needs to begin tailoring a travel experience. It can see which guests are traveling alone, with a partner, or as a family, as well as which destinations, activities, and other general interests a customer has.
“Adobe Experience Manager enables us to make changes quickly and deliver a better customer experience. We’ve cut our development times by 40%, letting us focus more on bigger challenges that face our business.”
Xavier Bussonnaisg
Director of Digital Marketing, Silversea Cruises
A personal touch
Using Adobe Target, the company regularly deploys tests to better understand which new experiences resonate best with audience segments. Testing is also helping Silversea Cruises to optimize creative, layouts, content, navigation, and more to eliminate roadblocks within customer journeys to boost engagement, clicks, purchases, and other KPIs.
Automated Personalisation capabilities within Adobe Target are also serving as a bridge between insights and delivering the experiences that customers want. Leveraging algorithms that are improved upon daily, customers receive personalised content, images, offers, and more that speak to their unique profile, raising the relevance of every interaction.
“Attention to detail is one major element that sets our brand apart from the rest of the industry,” says Bussonnais. “Our goal is to have staff know an individual by name before they even set foot on a ship. By weaving information about specific destinations, ship accommodations, and other features that an individual is interested in into digital communications using Adobe Experience Cloud reinforces that idea and sets the right tone for a trip.”
In the future, Silversea Cruises expects to amplify its existing personalisation and recommendations by taking advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities powered by Adobe Sensei. As a result, the company can scale its efforts to put a finer point on targeting experiences.
Hailing customers
In addition to setting the right expectations for customers that already know the brand, Silversea Cruises wanted to focus its advertising efforts on customers that would most likely be interested. Using Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target, along with Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, Silversea Cruises creates personalisation across display, social media, and search channels to attract customers.
The combination of personalisation and targeting content within its advertising strategy has not only helped Silversea Cruises attract more engaged customers, but also save money. Overall, the company has reduced cost per acquisition by 15% and boosted conversion by 20%.
“Everything that we do now revolves around data and personalisation—starting with the first impression to the point where a customer steps off of the ship to go home and when they decide to book again,” says Bussonnais. “Adobe Experience Cloud helps us address every step in the customer journey and create a world that revolves around what customers want.”
Related content
/it/fragments/customer-success-stories/contact-footer
