Case Study: Emirates NBD

Emirates NBD is among the leading banks in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey region. Headquartered in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, it has a significant retail banking franchise in the UAE and is a key player in the global digital banking industry.

As part of its continued efforts to deliver customer-centric digital-first banking solutions, Emirates NBD has introduced an entirely digital approach to customer acquisition and bank account creation via its mobile banking app. Under this Digital Account Opening (DAO) process, users can now download the Emirates NBD mobile banking app and complete the entire process of opening a bank account from the comfort of their smartphones without ever entering a physical banking branch. This digital process has proven to be especially useful post COVID-19 and has helped pivoted the bank into a new era of innovation and technical advances.

Post launch of DAO, the digital acquisition team at Emirates NBD were tasked with increasing the number of bank accounts opened digitally. To achieve this goal, the team worked on an extensive marketing strategy covering multiple platforms (including Google Search, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Display etc.).

While the presence on multiple platforms helped in increasing acquisition via the new DAO proposition, it became imperative to not only track and attribute the sources of app install, account opens and drop offs, but also close the performance feedback loop by pushing this information back to respective platforms in real time.

In January 2020, Emirates NBD started using Adjust as their attribution and mobile app analytics provider. They used Adjust to track based on key events in Digital Account Opening Journey on Emirates NBD mobile banking app including:

• Account opening journeys started
• Accounts opened
• Users requiring call center assistance to open an account

Post event tracking, Emirates NBD used Adjust’s real-time raw data callbacks for campaign optimization. To begin with, they could compare campaign results from various platforms side by side and allocate their budgets per platform depending on each one’s performance. This proved to be extremely helpful in optimizing campaigns.

Additionally, Emirates NBD leveraged Adjust’s tracker URLs, to see 4 levels of data; network, campaign, ad group and creative. This provided Emirates NBD with granular data to understand where their users were coming from, which ads they were engaging with and which campaigns were working. This level of granularity empowered them to A/B test several creatives to see which ones engaged users more.

Thanks to being able to track more granular analytics for their digital account openings, Emirates NBD was able to optimize their campaigns with more precision. With the launch of new platforms, continuous campaign optimization, A/B testing of creatives and in-app action integrating with Adjust, they’ve

• Increase contribution of digital share of account opens by 130% in first 5 months
• Reduced cost per acquisition by 80%
• Improve Ad click to App install rate by 154%