• by Jess Nelson , November 13, 2017

Celebrity Cruises, a premium cruise line and subsidiary of Royal Caribbean Cruises, saw a significant uptick in email engagement and revenue after it incorporated customer data into loyalty emails for added relevance. 

Loyalty members are the starting roster of a marketer’s dream customer team. They are faithful fans who often make larger purchases when shopping at their preferred destinations, and brands would be remiss not to tap into that market by offering loyalty members an exceptional customer experience. 

Email can be a conduit to offering online customers the same experience they expect in-person, says Hannah Jag-Nathan, email marketing executive, UK & Ireland, Celebrity Cruises. 

“Email is an incredibly valuable tool for loyalty marketing since we can create such a personalized experience that really helps tie the whole customer journey together and truly advances brand affinity,” she says. “Email will always be such a cost-efficient and powerful tool -- a great way to easily communicate to our most loyal guests about exclusive loyalty offers and important news that they get to hear about first.” 

Cruises are seasonal, peaking in January and February, so Celebrity Cruises’ UK-based marketing team wanted to drive bookings around that critical time. Jag-Nathan partnered with Liveclicker, an email platform, to create a highly personalized email campaign for loyalty customers that featured their entire history sailing with Celebrity Cruises.

Celebrity Cruises incorporated customers’ interests and purchase history into the email, personalized every aspect of the message from the header to the footer. The guest’s first name was highlighted at the top of the email, rendered as a stylized image at open-time. The email also included the number of ships the guest had previously sailed on, the number of nights cruised in total, the type of accommodation the guest stayed in most frequently, and the destination of the guest’s most recent cruise. 

The personalized email also included the guest’s hometown, which Jag-Nathan says inspired a “wanna get away” feeling.

“Including the subscriber's hometown was another good way to demonstrate that we are close to our customer while evoking emotion around that ‘wanna get away’ feeling,” she says. “It was also a great way to sign off the email with a personal touch.”

The Liveclicker-powered campaign tripled email revenue when compared to Celebrity Cruises’ business-as-usual emails, producing £282,044. Furthermore, Celebrity Cruises also saw an uptick in email engagement and click-through rates.

“There was a lot of positive internal feedback which had a ‘halo’ effect around the email program in general,” says Jag-Nathan.