Strategy

When two momentous occasions collided, the spark of opportunity was presented.

First, the arrival of Cunard’s newest ship, Queen Anne, created a huge amount of excitement, with an influx of potential new guests entering their digital landscape, all curious to learn about the ultimate cruise.

Second, Cunard’s brand was evolving to ensure their iconic identity would continue to impress today’s audience. A beautifully immersive above-the-line campaign was launching along with a rich new visual language to infuse their channels with the same elegance as their ships.

Their CRM channels – particularly email – needed a refresh. Our task was to review their enquirer journey, then identify a strategy to make sure it was working as hard as possible to welcome new guests to the brand, convert new enquirers into bookers, and create a journey that felt worthy of Cunard’s long heritage in the world of luxury.

Analysis of Cunard’s previous enquirer journey, in engagement and creative, led us to identify three opportunities:
1. There was a disconnect between what a customer saw when they enquired versus what they received in their inbox. Our creative could make CRM feel as luxurious as the rest of the brand.

2. The emails themselves weren’t connecting with potential guests to drive engagement with the content. 
We could introduce innovative and immersive interactivity to encourage action.

3. There was a perceived irrelevancy, turning potential guests off from making what is often a major financial decision. We could provide relevant, resonant personalisation to make guests feel valued.

This helped us land our strategic proposition:

Reassuringly Cunard, refreshingly restyled from the start of your journey.

And it helped form our comms plan, too. We set out to plug the gap between brand and direct comms by implementing the rich new visual language in our creative. We’d increase engagement with innovative, immersive content. And we’d perfect the cadence with five emails to hit the sweet spot of storytelling, relevance and driving action.

Creative

Our first task creatively was to translate Cunard’s beautiful new brand into a performance channel. We took the chance to break away from that templated look and feel to deliver a bespoke solution that felt truly immersive.

Cunard is no ordinary brand, and so the regular rules didn’t apply.

While we may often strive to be concise and impactful, this is a brand that demanded something different – and so our approach was to embrace big, full-bleed images, and turn long-scrolls from a potential challenge into a huge strength – elevated through seamless interactivity that gave every element of the Cunard brand room to breathe.

We stretched the functionality of established email elements to turn them into something truly engaging, introducing exploratory interactivity within carousels to allow guests to see a breadth of content within a short space, all at their own pace.

And we also found beautiful ways for Cunard to build a better image of their potential guests with zero-party data capture, learning where, what and when they wanted to travel to inform later sends – while giving them immediate recommendations personalised to their choices.

That zero-party data wasn’t just captured for later campaigns – it automatically personalises this journey too. For example, the destination our guest selected in email three transforms the content in email four, tailoring the imagery and copy to inspire them towards their dream voyage.

And ultimately, we get to email 5 – one final push to get potential guests over the line. Here we become much more direct, with concise copy underpinning the above-the-line campaign to drive our guests to book. We also introduce an incentive for on-board spend, just to sweeten the deal.