UAE: With the Middle East becoming more and more digital-first, brands are now engaging with customers through a variety of digital channels, i.e., emails, websites, notifications, and online paid ads. Out of all of them, though, email holds the undisputed record of generating high returns on investment (ROI). 

However, with customers receiving hundreds of emails daily, standing out from the competitors has become a challenge for brands. The fight to grab the customers' attention is always on.

The only solution to mitigate this problem is personalization.

According to MoEngage’s Email Benchmark Report for 2025 and Beyond, personalized emails outperform the generic ones. The report found that across 17.3 billion brand emails analyzed (in the last 12 months), personalized emails performed better in all the metrics used to determine a campaign’s success.

While this may seem like an obvious conclusion, the report also revealed some astonishing insights that can help brands supercharge their email campaigns in 2025. 

The Data is Evident: Customers Expect Hyper-Personalization From Brands

According to the report, customers in the Middle East expect brands to understand their preferences and tailor communication accordingly. 

The demand for contextualized and relevant experiences is seen across Retail and E-commerce, Travel and Hospitality, Media, Entertainment, OTT, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), and Classifieds industries. 

The report shows that personalized emails (tailored to customer behavior) convert 405x more effectively than generic emails for Retail and E-commerce brands, while the conversion rates are 93.7x more for the Media and Entertainment industry!

Here’s how we recommend brands hyper-personalize their email communications: 

  • Behavior-based personalization: Brands can analyze customers' purchase history, product preferences, and browsing patterns to understand preferences. This will help them send tailored recommendations to customers. For example, a travel and hospitality brand can suggest holiday packages to customers based on their recent searches or bookings.

  • Attributes-based personalization: Insights on customer attributes can help brands send more localized and region-specific emails. For example, Ikea, the Swedish furniture company, localized its website for each country in the region during Ramadan. Everything from currency to language and product offerings was tailored. They also launched personalized campaigns for each country, short-form cooking shows in the UAE, and in-store cooking and furnishing workshops in Egypt. This multi-pronged approach of tailoring experiences based on customer attributes helped Ikea increase its regional transactions by 23%.

  • Journey-based personalization: Brands must align their email content with the customer’s lifecycle journey. For example, media and entertainment brands can send an onboarding email to introduce customers to the app and periodically send them recommendations based on their viewing history and favorite genres. They can also send an email alert when a movie they added to their watchlist is uploaded on the app. This helps the brand build customer loyalty and a long-term relationship with the customer.

Timing Is As Crucial As The Content

Personalization is more than just what brands communicate. It is also about when they should communicate. Timing is as crucial as personalizing the content based on customers’ behavior, attributes, and lifecycle. After all, no customer likes to be disturbed by an email at midnight or while on vacation. 

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for determining the best or worst days to email customers. Regular A/B tests on all email campaigns are the only way to identify the ideal month, day, and time to reach customers and maximize conversions. 

However, all this is not possible manually. Brands need a formidable Customer Data and Engagement Platform (CDEP) to execute this seamlessly. 

An Insights-led CDEP Can Make All the Difference 

Customers interact with brands across various offline and online channels, making it essential to centralize their data. A unified view is crucial for brands to effectively personalize emails based on customer behavior and preferences. 

Therefore, it is crucial to have the right Martech setup. 

On the importance of  investing in an insights-led CDEP Kunal Badiani, Regional Head, Middle East, Turkey, and Africa said, “As digital touchpoints evolve and physical touchpoints rejuvenate, personalization will become mainstream. Brands must look at the data and focus on leveraging state-of-the-art analytics to stay relevant during these times. An insights-led CDEP is proven to fill these gaps and help brands supercharge their customer experiences.”

Emphasizing the need for a fully integrated CDEP, Raviteja Dodda, the CEO and Co-Founder of MoEngage, said, “The need of the hour is a shift from a campaign-centric approach to a data-driven, customer-centric approach. The current Martech platforms offer piecemeal solutions that are short-term and unsustainable. A fully loaded and multi-channel CDEP provides rich, holistic data coupled with actionable insights. These can help Middle Eastern brands today contextualize customer experiences to the T and actually drive bottom-line success.”

By moving from legacy email platforms to an agile CDEP, brands can supercharge their email performance in 2025. 

At a time when customers’ attention spans are getting shorter, and information overload is growing, a brand's success will now be determined by how well it engages with customers. By leveraging customer insights, effective personalization strategies, and tools like MoEngage’s CDEP, brands can turn email marketing into a revenue-generating channel. 

About MoEngage’s CDEP

MoEngage is the Middle East and Africa’s #1 Customer Data and Engagement Platform (CDEP), trusted by over 1,350 global consumer brands, including McAfee, Flipkart, Nestle, GMG, The Apparel Group, Gathern, Jazeera, Safaricom, Panda, GIG, 4Sale, Homzmart, and Mashreq Neo. MoEngage combines data from multiple sources to help brands gain a 360-degree view of their customers.  

MoEngage Analytics arms marketers and product owners with insights into customer behavior. Brands can leverage MoEngage Personalize to orchestrate journeys and build 1:1 conversations across the website, mobile, email, social, and messaging channels. MoEngage Inform, the transactional messaging infrastructure, helps unify promotional and transactional communication to a single platform for better insights and lower costs. MoEngage’s AI Suite helps marketers develop winning copies and creatives, optimize campaigns and channels that boost engagement, and help with faster execution.

For over a decade, consumer brands in 60+ countries have used MoEngage to power digital experiences for over a billion monthly customers. With offices in 13 countries, MoEngage is backed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, B Capital, Steadview Capital, Multiples Private Equity, Eight Roads, F-Prime Capital, Matrix Partners, Ventureast, and Helion Ventures.

MoEngage was named a Contender in The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q1 2024 report, and Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™ 2023 report. MoEngage was also featured as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Omni-Channel Marketing Platforms for B2C Enterprises 2023.

To learn more, visit www.moengage.com 

For more information please contact:
Pooja Poddar Jain
Lead Communications @ MoEngage