The UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) are projected to see significant increases in online shopping over the next five years.

With smartphone penetration being exceptionally high at 97%, customers in both countries enjoy the convenience of mobile-first shopping.

However, this has also led to increased competition within the eCommerce sector and hence, the need for brands to provide exceptional digital experiences that focus on:

And that’s where the Dsquares and Infobip partnership comes in. 

Dsquares, a leading loyalty solution provider in the region, partnered with us to deliver innovative conversational loyalty experiences. 

By combining Dsquares’ expertise in creating tailored reward programs with our omnichannel conversational experience capabilities, we’re able to offer clients engaging and personalized loyalty solutions that drive customer satisfaction, retention, and ultimately loyalty.

To deep dive into the importance of conversational loyalty experiences and our partnership, we spoke with Hazem Shorbagy, VP Partnerships at Dsquares who shared his insights.

The Middle East’s eCommerce market is already valued at billions of dollars and is poised for exponential growth. 

Leading this is KSA and UAE who are the regional leaders, with customers increasingly embracing digital shopping. Making loyalty programs a cornerstone for businesses looking to thrive in this competitive landscape.
 
When it comes to mobile spending, according to The Future Shopper report, both UAE and KSA have seen a 32% increase in online shopping done via mobile devices. And leading the channels for these conversations is WhatsApp with the highest mobile channel penetration:

For brands, this represents a golden opportunity to uncover new touch points and incorporate the latest technologies that will enhance the shopping experience, and foster brand loyalty.

To build a loyalty program that clicks with customers, you need experiences that are different and unique. There are billions of customers, and each one expects a personalized conversation, on a channel of their choice.

(Source: Think with Google)

“I see the most important aspect of a loyalty program is to be different from other loyalty program in the market. Otherwise, the customer will never feel special about your loyalty program. So, personalization is a key component of building your loyalty program,” says Shorbagy.
 
He adds, “You have to be different in offering unique experiences to your customers and also make sure that the way of communication between you and your customers is efficient with high quality.”

Loyalty programs should provide easy point tracking, reward redemption, and real-time updates on exclusive deals, ensuring a convenient and engaging experience. And to do this, redemption should be as easy as chatting with a friend, and that’s where conversational experiences over WhatsApp can help differentiate your loyalty program.

Imagine this scenario: a customer has a chocolate wrapper with a unique QR code that can be used to redeem a loyalty coupon. They decide to use a WhatsApp chatbot to redeem the coupon.

The technology powering the personalized conversational experience:

By using a WhatsApp chatbot, the chocolate company can provide a convenient and personalized way for customers to redeem their loyalty coupons, while also building stronger customer relationships.

But just providing a QR code and chatbot experience isn’t enough. A strong loyalty program must be backed up by:

To assess the effectiveness of your loyalty program, focus on these key metrics:

Shorbagy says: “We have different metrics in the loyalty programme and the loyalty programme consists of several elements and factors. You can judge if this loyalty programme is working well or not. So, for example, if you have a seamless customer experience and you have great value are giving to the customers personalization in place, unique rewards, everything in place, but you don’t communicate well on that programme, at the end of the day, the customers won’t know about your programme. So, it will affect directly the redemption rate.

“That’s why when we are saying this program is working well, we must check the redemption rate, engagement rate, churn rate, and the spend development of the customer. Any retailer having a loyalty programme must keep a close eye on those metrics to make sure that the loyalty program is really working.”

The Dsquares and Infobip partnership is a testament to the power of collaboration. 

Together, we’re excited to continue co-creating groundbreaking conversational loyalty solutions that drive customer engagement and satisfaction in the Middle East and beyond.

Delivering personalized interaction across multiple marketing channels is the key to a strong customer experience. Looking for innovative ways to engage your customers and deliver personalized experiences? Combining the strengths of two leading solutions, Infobip SMS and Adobe Journey Optimizer, could be the solution you’re looking for.

In this blog, we’ll cover the benefits of using Adobe Journey Optimizer to deliver and manage creative, authentic customer campaigns. We’ll also explain how Infobip’s Adobe Journey Optimizer integration can connect the dots for you to engage with your customers through SMS integration, wherever they are.

Whether you’re new to omnichannel marketing or well-versed in creating a cohesive user experience across all your brand’s touchpoints, Adobe Journey Optimizer is sure to open the door to improved campaigns that connect with your customers across all channels.

Adobe Journey Optimizer is an application that allows you to manage scheduled cross-channel campaigns for millions of customers. Even better? The entire journey is optimized for you to gain valuable insights. Its integration with Infobip allows you to seamlessly integrate SMS into your omnichannel marketing strategies to encourage consistent, impactful customer experiences across all channels. You’ll unlock two-way communication between your brand and your customers, as well as real-time reporting and analytics for you to keep track of your messages and their effectiveness.

Adobe Journey Optimizer’s integration with Infobip SMS platform can help you connect with your customers wherever they are in their customer journey. After all, it’s a top-quality platform – it’s only right that you match it with a reputable SMS service provider.

Here are just some of the benefits of integrating the two platforms:

Looking to take your customer communications to the next level? Integrating Adobe Journey Optimizer with Infobip SMS can ensure your customer experience is consistent across all channels.

Infobip is an Adobe partner which makes integration a breeze. We have the expertise and experience to support your SMS needs, with 24/7 help if you need it. SMS is considered a personal channel – after all, you’re messaging your customers directly to their phone, so it’s important to choose an SMS provider that you can trust. You can rely on Infobip to deliver speed, security and a reliable service, so you can build meaningful connections with your customers.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to integrate Adobe Journey Optimizer with Infobip SMS:

First, you’ll need to set up the integration between the two platforms. Log in to your Adobe Journey Optimizer account and open the integration settings. There, you’ll need to select the Infobip SMS integration option and follow the prompts to connect your Infobip account to Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Once your integration is complete, you can start creating SMS templates in Adobe Journey Optimizer. These are the templates you’ll use to send SMS messages to your customers. Make sure the templates you build align with your brand guidelines and tone of voice. Consider the ways you could personalize your messages to appeal to different customer segments. You can also use dynamic fields to customize your content based on the recipient, to appeal to their needs and values.

Once you’ve created your SMS templates, you can go on to incorporate them within your customer journeys with Adobe Journey Optimizer. This allows you to trigger the sending of SMS messages once a customer completes a certain action or specific stage of their journey. For example, you could send a discount code SMS on their birthday, or a reminder SMS for an upcoming event.

To engage with your customers on a deeper level, it’s important that your SMS messages are sent at the right time and to the right audience. To do so, you’ll need to set up specific rules and triggers within Adobe Journey Optimizer. These rules define the conditions that must be met for an SMS message to be sent. For example, you could specify that a promotional SMS should only be sent to customers who have purchased your product within the last 30 days. These triggers can be based on customer behavior, demographic data, or any other relevant criteria.

Before launching your SMS campaigns, make sure you test them to ensure everything works how you want it to. You can use the testing features within Adobe Journey Optimizer to simulate different scenarios and see how your SMS messages are being sent. From there, you can make any necessary changes to the templates, rules and triggers based on your test results. Once you’re happy with your setup, you can launch your SMS campaigns to interact with your customers on a global scale and build deeper connections.

Take advantage of the unparalleled reach and high open rate of SMS to achieve the best possible results for your use cases:

Managing a digital marketing agency isn’t easy, but keeping up with the latest technologies and ensuring its continued growth is even tougher! Digital marketing agencies today face an ongoing challenge of staying relevant and scaling growth. And although traditional marketing techniques are still valuable, they are no longer sufficient to captivate and retain audiences.

The pace of digital transformation, of which Conversational AI is a component, has picked up in the last few years. Consumers are now seeking hyper-personalized, interactive, and real-time experiences.

As a digital marketing agency, you need to navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital transformation and adapt your marketing strategies to meet your customers’ rising demands. One powerful approach that is revolutionizing business-customer relationships is the integration of conversational experience solutions.

In this blog, we cover how conversational experience solutions can help digital marketing agencies thrive and grow, the current challenges faced by the industry, and what strategies you need to overcome those challenges and scale growth.

As service providers, digital marketing agencies can sometimes struggle to drive growth. Why? Simply put, growing the business means either gaining more clients or increasing the customer lifetime value of existing ones. And with the current economic client, you need to solve the following challenges:

Increasing client churn  

As digital marketing agencies strive to scale and grow, they often encounter an unwanted obstacle, the dreaded ‘client churn’ affecting revenue, growth, and reputation. So, why do clients choose to bid farewell?

There are several reasons, one often cited and stands out is poor results that fail to deliver the desired impact/ROI/ROAS, higher conversions, and improved brand visibility. In addition, the market is very competitive and customers are constantly looking for the best prices and offers.

Therefore, it is crucial for digital marketing agencies to address these issues ahead of time, ensuring that clients stay on board and the agency can thrive in a fiercely competitive market.

Competitive market

The digital marketing industry is becoming more competitive and complex. This means your chances of gaining new customers become very slim. And as the industry becomes more competitive, service pricing continues to drop. In turn, you’ll find yourself using all your resources for smaller returns.

Reduced budgets and proven ROI

Let’s face it, everyone is trying to cut costs. As a digital marketing agency, you are always required to validate the return on every penny spent in a campaign. And so, not every customer will allow you to do whatever you want with the budget they set, therefore, proving the ROI becomes very difficult.

This is why you need to look for more cost-effective ways to take your clients’ customers through the marketing funnel – from awareness all the way to conversion.

For example, you can help your clients use cost-efficient advertising methods that provide detailed insights into their customers’ demographics and interactions, thereby maximizing their ad investment.

To overcome these challenges, digital marketing agencies should focus on harnessing the power of conversational experience and its remarkable ability to deliver personalized and timely interactions.

By leveraging this approach, agencies can ensure that their clients’ customers receive the tailor-made experiences they crave. Ultimately, this contributes to the agency’s growth and profitability and solidifies its position as a trusted partner.

To get started, here are a few strategies to scale your digital marketing agency:

The future of digital interactions is now and with our conversational experience solution, it’s possible over any chat app of your customers’ choice.

With us, digital marketing agencies can help their clients engage with customers across all touchpoints in their customer journey on any channel and all from a single intuitive interface, equipped with many solutions such as an AI chatbot and a customer engagement solution.

A conversational AI chatbot is a subset of artificial intelligence that works to simulate a human conversation between chatbots and people. These bots are built and trained to sound more human and less robotic. AI chatbots rely on machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand human speech and craft appropriate responses.

Leveraging AI chatbots offers you and your clients a wide range of business benefits, including providing customers with end-to-end conversational experiences that foster personalized interactions.

This helps businesses deepen customer relationships, increase lifetime value, and become market leaders in digital experience.

Other benefits for your clients include:

Your clients can unlock unprecedented growth by harnessing the power of chatbots, AI, and conversational experiences. Offering these transformative solutions positions your agency as a leader in the digital marketing space, granting you a competitive edge that drives your business forward and exceeds your client’s expectations.

Advanced real-time insights are the key to informed decision-making and strategy improvement. They provide a deep understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and trends, precisely guiding marketing efforts.

Analyzing this data allows businesses to gain actionable insights into their customer’s needs and preferences to help them optimize their campaigns, identify new target audiences, and make informed business decisions.

Real-time data is extremely valuable, allowing businesses to be agile, responsive, and actionable. The benefits of data insights span across different aspects of digital marketing, such as: 

By effectively leveraging data, you can elevate customer experiences, outpace the competition, and drive remarkable business growth for your digital marketing agency and clients

Investing in new conversational technologies is essential for scaling your digital marketing agency. You can improve performance and deliver exceptional results by providing digital interactions that are automated, conversational, channel-agnostic, and hyper-personalized.

Take a look at Bolt for example, the ride-hailing company wanted to optimize their driver registration process by introducing a new sign-up channel and using automation to drive efficiencies and increase the percentage of drivers who complete registration.

Here’s what they did:

As a result, Bolt increased their conversion rate by 40%.

Infobip’s conversational experience solution is available on any chat app your customers choose. With us, digital marketing agencies can cover all the touchpoints across the journey from a single intuitive interface equipped with a customer engagement solution, chatbot building platform, and a cloud contact center solution—all underpinned by a customer data platform.

Everything can be built over your customers’ favorite digital channels, from simple use cases to the most complex conversational scenarios. And as a leading CPaaS provider, we make it simple for you to integrate any channel into your communication stack.

By leveraging Infobip’s solution, your agency can unlock the potential of conversational technologies, automate tasks, and deliver personalized experiences. Its fast authoring and deployment capabilities enable quick adaptation to market needs, keeping you ahead of the competition.

Conversational marketing tools offer an effective way to scale your customer relationship and build meaningful connections through personalized experiences and seamless communication across all channels. Tools such as chatbots, customer data platforms and customer engagement platforms enable real-time conversations, allowing businesses to address customer needs and build trust promptly.

Conversational marketing is a two-way approach to marketing that uses real-time conversations to engage with customers and quickly move them across the purchase journey.

Infobip’s conversational marketing solution can help digital marketing agencies deliver valuable campaigns that drive loyalty and revenue.

Offering these solutions can help your clients deliver personalized recommendations, offers, and experiences based on their customer’s preferences and behavior. This level of personalization fosters a deeper connection and makes customers feel valued – ultimately leading to long-term loyalty and satisfaction.

Increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) is a key objective for sustainable business growth. To achieve this, digital marketing agencies can focus on maximizing revenue from existing customers through the following:

By implementing these strategies effectively, you can strengthen customer relationships, increase revenue per customer, and drive long-term success.

Start boosting client’s Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) with these steps:

By following these steps and continuously refining campaigns, your clients can easily increase ROAS and achieve higher returns on advertising investments.

Becoming a market leader in digital experience offers significant benefits for your agency’s growth.

Here’s why it’s important:

Becoming a market leader in digital experience drives revenue, visibility, and customer loyalty, and positions your agency as the one-stop shop for digital services.

Implementing upselling and cross-selling strategies can increase customer lifetime value, benefiting your business in multiple ways. Here’s how:

Partnering with the right technology platform enables digital marketing agencies to keep up with the latest trends and technologies, monetize revenues, boost customer engagement, improve lead generation, and enhance scalability.

The conversational era represents a significant opportunity for digital marketing agencies to grow and thrive. With a conversational experience solution, you can successfully overcome budget constraints, increase profitability, expand your digital marketing efforts from customer engagement campaigns to additional services, and build lasting relationship with customers.

Combining the power of conversational channels, AI, and our customer engagement and data platforms, you can simplify the customer journey and ultimately drive more conversions.

It’s time to unlock the full potential of conversational experiences and help shape a holistic omnichannel conversational journey for your clients.