Emirates NBD increases customer engagement by 92% with Sitecore personalization

Emirates NBD has around 4,000 deals for restaurants, cafes, hotels, stores, auto repair, and rental companies, as part of its reward-based incentive scheme that offers discounts to customers. The scheme is designed to encourage customers to use their cards on these deals, increasing transactions and revenue for the bank. But with thousands of deals on offer, Emirates NBD needed to prioritize relevant content. Deepakchandran R., Head of Retail Assets and Cards at Emirates NBD says, “The concern we had was that if users keep seeing deals and offers that are of no interest to them, they won’t spend and may even delete the app.“

Emirates NBD turned to Sitecore and its business partner Horizontal Digital for help.

Emirates NBD has already used Sitecore to launch a mobile account management mobile app Liv., which is the first of its kind in the UAE region. Now it has developed More, an e-commerce app that offers customers highly targeted and relevant deals, an overview of card benefits, and features such as a shop, flight and hotel booking, and tickets to shows.

Horizontal uses Sitecore personalization to target deals relevant to each customer. Several data sources are used to build profiles based on known customer information like affluence and earnings; customer-selected preferences during app onboarding; ongoing preference choices during app use; in-app behavior; and location. The app’s UI shows a vertical list of deals with personalized offers at the top, interspersed with horizonal lists related to customer preferences.

Personalization is achieved by using a system of scored tags. Each deal has several categories like food or travel and sub-categories such as Italian or Arabic food and Dubai or Qatar destinations. Tags are linked to each category so that when a customer searches for, saves, or chooses a deal, Sitecore applies a relevance score based on the strength of interaction. For instance, if a customer has already said they like Italian food during onboarding, that carries a higher score because it is a known preference rather than one gleaned from app behavior. A check-and-balance system – rotating category choices and occasionally incorporating ad-hoc preferences, ensures customers do not keep getting the same deals. Customer feeds are also updated and changed so they are not shown the same deals each time they log in.

Since its launch, the Sitecore-powered More app has seen a 92% increase in user engagement rate and a 40% increase in new user sign-ups.  There have been 16,000 unique visitors to the app, while 58% of users have been acquired from direct channels. The app has a 4.3+ rating on the Apple App store, having racked up 47,000 downloads.

Over time, Sitecore will enable Emirates NBD to build a stronger and more accurate picture of customer interests and preferences so that it can increase and enhance personalization, fine-tune deals to individuals, and increase card transactions.