Case study: How two luxury cruise brands simplified email production and made it 4x faster

Building premium email campaigns shouldn't require marketers to spend hours editing HTML. Yet for many enterprise teams with limited resources, email production still involves manual coding, multiple rounds of approval, and constant back-and-forth between marketers, designers, and developers. Instead of focusing on campaign strategy and content, teams often find themselves troubleshooting formatting issues and slowing down production.

This case study explores how Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises transformed their email production process. You'll learn how one team's experience with Stripo led to adoption across both brands and how they reduced email production time from up to 2 hours to less than 30 minutes while increasing the quality of their email campaigns.

Expert

Jessica Quinones

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises

Expert

Bryce Baxter

Trade Marketing Specialist at Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Meet the companies

Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises are luxury cruise brands within Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, one of the world's three largest cruise companies. Both brands use email marketing to communicate with their audience. While they belong to the same organization, each brand has its own visual identity, audience, and communication style, making consistent, on-brand email production a business priority.

Together, the two brands operate 14 luxury ships and serve hundreds of destinations worldwide. Regent Seven Seas Cruises specializes in ultra-luxury, all-inclusive voyages, sailing to more than 550 ports. Oceania Cruises operates eight small ships, offering destination-focused itineraries to more than 600 destinations around the world. 

Challenge: Help small marketing teams create premium emails faster

For both Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises, email marketing is a key channel for communicating with travel advisors. Their teams use email to share promotions, newsletters, destination highlights, internal updates, and other resources that help advisors better understand and sell each brand. Since every email represents a luxury brand, maintaining a polished, consistent appearance is just as important as delivering the right message.

However, creating those emails wasn't easy. Although both teams were responsible for email marketing, neither had dedicated email developers handling day-to-day production.

We're not coders, we're general marketing people. And we both have very small teams and limited resources. We can't rely on a customer marketing team that's busy sending out information.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

Before adopting Stripo, the teams built and edited emails using HTML. They relied on legacy templates created years earlier and manually updated the code for every campaign. Instead of focusing on messaging, design, or campaign strategy, marketers often spend their time troubleshooting HTML.

There was a random line sitting there that you don't want there, and you can't figure out how to get it out. I would spend 30 minutes trying to remove a line that I didn't want.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

As a result, building a single email often took up to two hours, much of it spent on manual editing rather than creating valuable content. With small teams and limited resources, both brands needed a way to simplify email production, reduce their reliance on HTML, and spend more time on marketing rather than code.

Solution: Finding an email builder that marketers could use independently

Unlike many software evaluations, the decision to adopt Stripo didn't begin with a formal search. It started with Jessica's previous experience using the platform in another role. When she joined Oceania Cruises, she immediately recognized the same challenges she had solved before and knew there was a better way to build emails.

When I joined Oceania Cruises, we were hand-coding, tinkering with it, reusing old code, trying to figure out how it should look. And I realized that instead of working on emails and content, we were focusing more on the look and feel. So for about seven months, from day one as a contractor until I was hired full-time, I proposed to introduce Stripo into the work.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

Her goal wasn't to replace their current platform, but to simplify the email creation process. The team wanted to keep using their current system for sending campaigns while giving marketers a visual editor to build emails without working in HTML.

The approach proved successful. Once Oceania Cruises adopted Stripo, Jessica demonstrated it during a meeting between the two sister brands. Seeing how easily emails could be created and exported into the email program immediately caught the Regent Seven Seas Cruises team's attention.

We saw the platform Jessica showed us when she demonstrated Stripo and thought, "Oh my gosh, this would be so much better." And we really liked how easy it was to export HTML code and immediately paste it into ESP.

Bryce Baxter,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Regent Seven Seas Cruises.

For Regent, one of the biggest advantages was how naturally Stripo fit into its existing workflow. The team could design emails visually, export clean HTML, and upload it directly into ESP without changing its email platform.

For both brands, the decision came down to a simple idea: give marketers a tool that lets them focus on creating effective emails instead of editing code.

Workflow: From idea to approval in one collaborative workspace

Today, both brands have streamlined their email production, although their workflows differ slightly depending on where they are in the transition. Oceania Cruises has fully integrated Stripo into its day-to-day email creation process, while Regent Seven Seas Cruises is gradually moving more of its trade communications to Stripo.

At Oceania Cruises, the process starts with defining the campaign objective. Once the concept is ready, Jessica builds the email in Stripo herself.

I'm pretty much our email developer, even though I don't really code. So it's mostly me coming up with the copy, the design, and whatnot.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

Instead of writing HTML, she focuses on the copy, layout, and overall presentation. The visual editor makes it easy to turn ideas into finished emails without getting distracted by technical issues.

This has significantly accelerated the approval process.

My boss will send me an update, and she sees it in real time while I'm updating it. She doesn't have to refresh and say, “Go look at it again.” Approvals have become faster. Comments are easier.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

The commenting feature has also eliminated another challenge. Because forwarding test emails in their ESP could create issues with Salesforce permissions, sharing a live Stripo link became a much more practical way to gather feedback across teams.

At Regent Seven Seas Cruises, the workflow is evolving in a similar direction. Previously, creating an email involved multiple handoffs.

We're briefing it, and we send a brief to our designers. They start building an email. Then they have to send it to our email team, which tests it, because they're still doing that for consumer emails.

Bryce Baxter,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Regent Seven Seas Cruises.

As more trade emails move into Stripo, many of these steps are no longer necessary. Designers can still provide creative assets, but the marketing team can assemble the email, export the HTML, and upload it directly to the sending system.

But once we make this bigger shift, it will take more work off of us, the designers and the email team, because the workflow is cut in half. We won't need them for deployment anymore. So it's much easier, especially with the approvals.

Bryce Baxter,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Regent Seven Seas Cruises.

Although the two brands maintain separate Stripo accounts to preserve their distinct visual identities, they regularly exchange knowledge. Jessica introduced the platform to the Regent team, walked colleagues through its capabilities, and both teams continue to share best practices, discuss useful features, and help each other discover more efficient ways to work.

Stripo features that streamline email production 

For both Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises, Stripo is more than an email builder. The teams use a combination of features that help them produce campaigns faster while maintaining the premium quality and consistency expected from two luxury brands.

The key Stripo features that help them are the following:

• drag-n-drop editor: Allows marketers to build and edit emails visually instead of working with HTML, making it easier to focus on content and design rather than code;
• templates: Used for recurring email types, including newsletters, promotions, internal communications, events, and one-off campaigns. Branded templates ensure every email starts with the correct layout, colors, header, and footer;
• modules: Reusable content blocks help the team quickly assemble new emails without copying sections from previous campaigns, while keeping designs consistent across different email types;
• saved brand styles: Brand colors are saved in Stripo, so marketers can apply them with a click instead of manually entering color values, helping maintain visual consistency;
• custom fonts: The teams use their brand fonts directly in Stripo to keep emails aligned with their overall brand identity;
• responsive preview: Desktop and mobile previews help the team adjust layouts, font sizes, and content placement before sending to ensure emails look great on every device;
• dark mode testing: Used to check how emails render in dark mode and identify issues such as button text visibility before campaigns are sent.

Version History is my other favorite feature in Stripo. There have been times when I've changed an email and then realized, “Oh my God, I needed something from that past version.” Being able to go back to an email from a month ago and pull what I needed has been really helpful.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

Guide

Ultimate guide on building team collaboration in email production

 

Email examples: How the teams use Stripo in real campaigns

Let's see how the teams put their workflows into practice. 

Oceania Cruises: Internal sales newsletter

This weekly newsletter keeps the sales team informed about current promotions, product updates, and key information they need when working with travel advisors. Before moving to Stripo, the email was heavily text-based and difficult to scan. By redesigning it with a more structured, visual layout, the team made important information easier to find and received positive feedback from colleagues, who found the new format more engaging and useful in their day-to-day work.

Before Stripo

(Email by Oceania Cruises)

After Stripo

(Email by Oceania Cruises)

Oceania Cruises: Destination campaign

These editorial-style campaigns introduce travel advisors to the destinations featured in Oceania Cruises' itineraries. Since advisors can't personally experience every destination, the emails provide destination highlights, inspiration, and context to help them confidently recommend voyages to clients. For the launch of The Joy of Traveling Well brand campaign, the team quickly refreshed its email templates in Stripo to reflect the new visual identity, rolling out updated branding across its trade communications in a fraction of the time previously required.

Here is an example of Oceania Cruises’ destination campaigns after rebranding:

(Email by Oceania Cruises)

Regent Seven Seas Cruises: Regent University email campaign

This campaign encourages travel advisors to continue progressing through Regent Seven Seas Cruises' online training program. The team plans to use a series of personalized emails to re-engage advisors based on their certification level, inviting them to return to the platform and complete the next stage of their training.

(Email by Regent Seven Seas Cruises)

Results: Faster production, better collaboration, and higher-quality emails

After adopting Stripo, both teams significantly simplified their email production. Instead of spending time editing HTML or coordinating multiple handoffs, marketers can now focus on creating effective email campaigns while maintaining the premium look and feel expected from their brands.

The biggest improvements include:

1. Email production time dropped dramatically. Before Stripo, creating a single email could take one to two hours, much of that spent on manual HTML editing. Today, most emails take less than 30 minutes to build, while simple updates can take as little as five minutes.
2. The teams can produce more emails with the same resources. Faster production has allowed Oceania Cruises to increase the number of campaigns it sends without expanding the team.
    

   It's been kind of life-changing for us, especially in productivity. We've really been able to increase not only how quickly we put out emails, but how many emails we put out.

   

   Jessica Quinones,

   Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.
3. Approvals and collaboration became much faster. Sharing a live Stripo link instead of test emails made it easier for colleagues across different teams to review emails, leave comments directly on the design, and follow updates in real time.
4. The production workflow became much simpler. For Regent Seven Seas Cruises, moving email creation into Stripo reduces the number of handoffs. The marketing team can now handle much more of the process independently.
5. Email quality improved, and people noticed. Beyond operational improvements, the teams saw a visible increase in the quality of their emails and the improved designs, something that hadn't happened before.
    

   People from other departments have noticed that our emails are better. So it's definitely better email quality, and other people are noticing it. That's been an impact on us, and it kind of motivates us to keep making our emails better.

   

   Jessica Quinones,

   Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.
6. Brand updates became much easier to roll out. When Oceania Cruises introduced its new brand campaign, the marketing team updated its email templates quickly and consistently.

Wrapping up

If you're a lean marketing team, use a tool like Stripo. It makes your life much easier because you can focus on your emails instead of HTML. And whenever we've had a question or run into an issue, the support team has been there to help us in real time.

Jessica Quinones,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Oceania Cruises.

For Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises, adopting Stripo gives small teams the ability to create premium, on-brand emails without relying on HTML or complex production processes. 

By simplifying collaboration, reducing production time from up to two hours to less than 30 minutes, and improving email quality, both brands can now spend more time creating campaigns that support their travel advisor community and strengthen their marketing efforts.

If you're in marketing and don't have coding experience, don't let that stop you. With Stripo, you don't need to know HTML to build professional emails. It takes the hard, ugly parts out of the email creation process and lets you focus on the campaign instead.

Bryce Baxter,

Trade Marketing Specialist at Regent Seven Seas Cruises.