Email has evolved a lot in recent years. One big shift being from middleman between customer and website, to the implementation of microsites in the inbox. We can now browse seasonal clothing lines, configure vehicles, draft travel itineraries and so much more, right in the inbox, with a confirmation screen being the only need to open a browser.

Recently, our friends at AIDA asked us to help with sharing their latest cruise packages with their customers, including traveller type selection, destination options and then the final package selection.

In total, the email offers 12 packages, four for each traveller type – single, couple or family. While it could have been easy to simply link to the website or even to copy the website content over to a static magazine style email, our team along with AIDA agreed the content could be reworked to push for better utilisation of screen space and to give customers an interactive way to browse AIDA’s latest offers.

Oh! And the all important results of this email were incredible. More on that further down 😮‍💨

Technical details

Behind the scenes, the email is fairly complex. Each traveller type has four sets of offers, with their own sets of images, accompanying description, price and travel details.

AIDA wanted to A/B test the email by swapping steps 1 & 2 around, to gauge how their customers prefer to navigate their travel planning.

The steps for email 1 were:
1. Traveller type – Alone / As a pair / As a family
2. Destination – Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean / Western Mediterranean / Baltic Sea / Northern Europe
3. Packages

And the steps for email 2 were:
1. Destination – Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean / Western Mediterranean / Baltic Sea / Northern Europe
2. Traveller type – Alone / As a pair / As a family
3. Packages

Here is a little preview of both emails in action. Here you can see the comparison between the two.

An important feature for these two variants was the inclusion of a nav bar above the main package content, to allow users to change their mind on traveller type or destination. This was mirrored between the two variants with the same swap of order to match the reordering of steps 1 & 2 for the main content.