Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines uses Marketing Automation for smooth sailing
The Company
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines transports guests from the UK to far-flung destinations in style, elegance, and luxury. Operating three ships, its crew takes pride in getting to know each traveler and delivering personalized touches that create a memorable journey. Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines was established in 1848, when three brothers from the Olsen family began a shipping enterprise to move ice and coal from Norway to the UK. Today, the Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines team prides themselves on channeling 175 years of experience.
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' schedule of carefully curated itineraries, comfortable ships, fine dining, luxurious cabins, and personalized touches ensure an exceptional experience that is unrivaled in the cruise industry. Nicki Gordon, CRM Manager at Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, shares with us how the solutions provided by Zoho have transformed its operations.
Using Marketing Automation, we can monitor our open and click rates so we can see how successful a campaign has been, and we can even tie it back to our booking data.
The Challenge
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines was already using Zoho CRM alongside a longstanding cruise operating system. The CRM had been set up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Gordon found that some modules had not been fully aligned, limiting its potential. "When we were gathering our requirements, the COVID outbreak took over everything. It almost made us forget what those real-life circumstances were and what we were hoping to achieve," she explains.
As a result, the CRM that Gordon inherited had silos between the guest and booking data, which made it hard to completely understand each customer's booking history, hindered reporting, and limited the segmentation possibilities of marketing campaigns.
At the 2022 Zoholics user conference in London, Gordon met the team from A2Z Cloud, a Premium Zoho Partner. "They were really interested in understanding our current suite and how we could improve," she recalls. Mapping out the cruise lines' requirements as a blank canvas, together they forged a strategy to make the CRM work harder and align more closely with the cruise operating platform. Gordon knew a consolidated CRM would also provide critical BI insights for Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' leadership.
The company wanted to enhance reporting to visualize customer trends and highlight areas for improvement, automate their email campaigns, and drive increased ROI across email campaigns by improving data segmentation.
The Solution
A2Z Cloud's stem-to-stern enhancement of Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' tech ultimately delivered not just an improved CRM platform but a further rollout of Zoho solutions within the business.
They recognized the potential of Zoho for Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' marketing and customer service software, too. To uncover which aspects of a cruise its guests love most—as well as those that could be improved—A2Z Cloud plugged Zoho Survey into the CRM.
But it's not just direct mail campaigns where Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines is seeing more bang for its buck—by connecting Zoho Marketing Automation to the firm's software stack, A2Z Cloud also boosted the success of its email campaigns.
Benefits and ROI
The overhaul of Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' CRM paved the way for huge advancements in its marketing activities. Knitting together its guest and booking data has helped its marketing team hyper-segment customer data and create tailored, relevant postal campaigns.
"Now that we can deliver more targeted campaigns, we have reduced the amount of printing we're doing by 68%, and, by reducing the cost, we've increased the ROI."
She highlights a recent campaign in which promotional mailers were sent to 42,000 targeted addresses pulled from Zoho CRM. When the same campaign was run in 2023, mailers went out to 115,000 homes. Despite slashing its audience by more than 63%, Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines' recent campaign achieved the same revenue.
Using Marketing Automation changed the way they communicated with their customers and by leveraging the CRM's newly integrated guest and booking data, the team has been able to automate campaigns at different stages of a customer's vacation. "Using specific triggers, whether they are date-driven, previous destinations, or previous durations, we can determine the type of campaigns that go out," she explains. For instance, the "Welcome Home" email is triggered one day after a guest returns home and contains an incentive for them to rebook while the cruise is still in the front of their mind.
"It's been an opportunity to learn so much more about the customer journey and how we want to communicate with our guests both pre-arrival and post-departure."
Marketing Automation allows the team to easily track and refine these emails to entice new bookings. "We can monitor our open and click rates so we can see how successful a campaign has been, and we can even tie it back to our booking data," says Gordon.
With this suite of sales, marketing, and customer service applications on board, Fred. Olsen has deepened its understanding of its customer journey, improved marketing ROI, and increased its NPS score.
To know more about Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, visit their website
- Industry Type Hospitality and Travel
- NO OF EMPLOYEESAbove 500
- Type of businessB2C
