Summary
Princess Cruises takes pride in offering guests enjoyable vacations and exceptional service. The brand offered a military discount and manually verified eligibility for it, but the process was cumbersome and time-consuming. Princess wanted to streamline the experience, and SheerID’s Audience Network was the perfect solution. Using our Audience Network to implement programs for teachers, military members, first responders, and healthcare workers drove a 50% verification rate for Princess Cruises’ landing page, an average of 10,000 verifications per community, and an ROI that was 18x higher than its other programs.
Challenge
Princess Cruises’ mission is to provide memorable vacation experiences that are accessible for everyone. Top-of-the-line customer service is critical—they provide every guest a coin-sized tracker that enables the crew to bring guests anything they want, anywhere, anytime.
The military is an important and loyal audience for Princess Cruises, and the company had a generous military offer. However, it wasn’t seeing the success it deserved because customer service had to manually verify eligibility for it. The process required customers to send in paperwork for review and wait up to three weeks to find out if they qualified. The brand knew it needed a better way to verify military members for their discounts.
That’s when SheerID caught its eye. Our Audience Network provided instant customer verification and would enable Princess to target a wide range of consumer groups while owning the customer data collected during verification—allowing them to achieve the customer service excellence they expect.
SheerID’s Audience Network was the best way to overcome the manual verification hurdles that were holding our military offer back from realizing its true lead generation potential.
Solution
Princess implemented our Audience Network, enabling military customers to be verified for the offer instantly and without friction. Verification required membership in Princess’ Captain’s Circle loyalty program, so the offer also drove customers to join.
The brand expanded its use of the Audience Network to include offers for other groups, including teachers, first responders, and healthcare professionals. This move aligned with Princess’ customer-first mission and was the company’s way of saying thank you for all the hard work these groups do.
Princess Cruises promoted these offers through multiple channels:
- Social media
- PR
- Website homepage
- Affiliate networks
- Paid search
Since Princess Cruises gathered and owned the first-party verification data, it could retarget customers with personalized messaging.
The data we get from SheerID enables us to nurture every customer, even if they were not eligible, and provide more relevant messaging, which helps us create stronger connections.
Results
SheerID’s Audience Network saved Princess more than 75 hours of manual verification each month. More importantly, it offered customers the exceptional experience Princess is known for. “SheerID improves the customer experience by making it easy for prospects to access our value and start experiencing all that we have to offer,” Nick said. “It’s the first step in building greater loyalty.”
For its first custom promotions, Princess Cruises’ goal was to hit 10,000 verifications, and it succeeded. Within two weeks, Princess verified nearly 10,000 teachers and a similar number of military members, first responders, and healthcare workers. For the second round of offers, Princess saw nearly 40% more verifications.
“Our SheerID programs bring in better leads and more customers than many other marketing initiatives,” Nick said. “Prospects who get verified have high intent, and 68% of those who purchased were new to file.”
Conversions saw a significant boost, with a 50% conversion rate for users who visited Princess’ offer-specific landing pages and went through verification. Since consumers need to join the Captain’s Circle to get verified, these offers also encourage loyalty and ongoing engagement with the brand.
The teacher program, in particular, had impressive results:
- 1,000 bookings
- 15% conversion rate—up to 30x higher than other campaigns
- At least 18x ROI compared to similar campaigns
Princess Cruises continues to run its successful military campaign, supplemented with occasional pulse discounts for other communities. In the future, the team plans to establish evergreen offers for other valuable consumer communities and create more material to support these offers, such as landing pages and blog articles specific to certain communities.
The more we invest into promoting these offers, the more these audiences become future Princess cruisers. The programs pay for themselves, 18x times over.