Enabling Increased Acquisition, Loyalty and Retention

Emaar Properties is an Emirati multinational real estate development company located in the United Arab Emirates. The company operates internationally providing property development and management services. With six business segments and 60 active companies, Emaar has a collective presence in 36 markets.

Emaar Properties is the premiere entertainment company in UAE. Most of the most popular destinations were designed, built and operated by Emaar, but they faced certain problems with the customer loyalty program. With a need to reactivate existing users as well as grow their user base, they turned to Valtech to help update their U by Emaar offering.

Even though the loyalty program offered by Emaar wasn’t new to the market, it needed strong digital upgrading. The program was mostly administered in an offline fashion at first, with new users being onboarded exclusively through the physical spaces (stores, restaurants, etc.) Emaar operated.

In addition to the need to digitize the offering, Emaar had a goal to grow the user base of the loyalty program as well as to reactivate dormant users. The push for digitization as well as a renewed focus on personalization was determined as the best path forward for both of those ambitious goals.

Informed by a new digital strategy Valtech launched a new website with an optimized user experience that personalized the experience in real time based on user behavior and preselected preferences. Prior to this update, the offers being pushed to users of the loyalty program weren’t specialized by preferences. In order to increase retention, we gave users the ability to setup a profile, select their preferences, and then delivered offers to them based on their past behavior and the locations they listed as their favorites.

We also added clearer definition to the rewards and what they could be used for, creating a kind of upsell for points by allowing users to log into their user portal, see how many points they have, clearly detailing what those points could be used for, and how close they were to acquiring enough points for even better rewards in the future. Telling people the potential uses of the points they’ve earned has had a significant impact on returning customers’ use of the platform.

• +27% Increase in traffic
• +32% Increase in loyalty & retention
• +47% Increase in member acquisition

Using numerous facets of data, (Online Analytics, Loyalty platform data, CRM and POS) we implemented a holistic digital strategy that created a personalized user experience based on user behavior in real-time to ensure ongoing user engagement. The new site was built on Sitecore 9.1 and fully integrated with Emaar’s loyalty CRM as well as numerous hotel and F&B booking systems. By using all this data, we were able to personalize the experience for the user, based on their tier level, spending and past behaviors.

“We are super excited on the launch of our new website and we couldn’t have done this without having the best agency behind this!”

Chayya Bassi, Director of U by Emaar