So, Carnival. What makes you different from the other cruise lines or travel agencies that are out there, doing email?
One of the biggest things is that our main vision is to have fun and embrace who you are — every aspect of who you are. And we really push that. We push the being crazy and laughing a lot and enjoying time together whether it’s your family or a couple of friends. We have this irreverent, fun brand tone that we can do a lot of more edgy stuff with than the other cruise lines can. Plus, we’re approachable.
So, give us an example of maybe something you guys do that other brands don’t.
Our new campaign is rooted in choosing fun and being yourself. You look at the vast ocean (no pun intended), of ships out there in the travel space… they tend to want to elevate it and make it seem kind of high-brow. We’re more about, “this is for you, this can be personalized to your needs in your life. This is an invitation to be among friends or like-minded individuals.”
How are you conveying that message into those emails — to get the branding across, versus being just like anyone else?
We like to use really engaging images. Images that not only make you want to say, “I wish I were there,” but that also make you smile. And we focused that in our copy, too, where we like to use quirky, fun, personable copy that gives you that little smirk when you read it.
The Carnival Cruise email that really caught our attention.
We also like to use really bright colors. We’re rebranding, so we’re introducing new colors to our brand and playing with the layout. We’ve been trying to give more airiness, a more fun flow to things.
Also, the chances the team takes — the email that caught your eye [note: RGE fell in love with the long scroll email pictured above], a lot of companies would have said, “You know what? We’re not willing to take this chance, because the CTA has to be here, and we have certain rules and protocols that we’ve established over time.”
The team here feels confident enough to embrace the brand philosophy and to take those kinds of chances. And it turns out, it actually works. I think that might really set these folks here in the room apart.
What’s the thought process behind your design, and how does your team go about thinking about design, both from a marketing perspective and transactional perspective?
It’s very important to think of our design in terms of a mobile format, because a lot of our subscribers are opening our emails through mobile. It’s really important that that experience is great, intentionally.
What we have here are not rules but principles. So there are times that there will be things that we know work, but we give ourselves flexibility to test and experiment, to try things out that may or may not work, and we learn all the time. If it doesn’t work, we’ll analyze why and move forward.
What’s a design that didn’t work and how did you change it to work?
We tested redesigning our header and footers. Through testing, we saw what our subscribers liked, what they didn’t like, what they reacted better to. With that information, we’ve really been able to accurately create a header and footer that is nice, but also works well.
