An In-Depth Analysis of 17.3 Billion Emails Reveals a Key Insight: Middle Eastern Consumers Demand Deeper Personalization

As the Middle East continues to embrace digital-first experiences, brands are increasingly reaching consumers through various digital channels, including emails, websites, notifications, and paid online ads. Of these, email stands out as the most effective in delivering high returns on investment (ROI).

However, with customers inundated with hundreds of emails daily, it has become increasingly difficult for brands to capture attention amidst fierce competition. In this crowded space, standing out is a significant challenge for marketers.

The solution to this problem? Personalization.

According to MoEngage’s Email Benchmark Report for 2025 and Beyond, personalized emails consistently outperform their generic counterparts. The report analyzed 17.3 billion brand emails sent in the past 12 months and found that personalized messages performed better across all key metrics used to evaluate campaign success.

While the conclusion that personalized emails work better may seem obvious, the report uncovered several surprising insights that can help brands enhance their email marketing efforts in 2025.

The Demand for Hyper-Personalization in the Middle East

The data highlights that customers in the Middle East expect brands to understand their preferences and tailor communications accordingly. There is a strong demand for relevant and contextualized experiences across a wide range of industries, including retail, e-commerce, travel, hospitality, media, entertainment, OTT services, banking, financial services, insurance (BFSI), and classifieds.

The report reveals that personalized emails—those customized to a customer’s behavior—achieve conversion rates 405 times higher than generic emails for retail and e-commerce brands. For media and entertainment industries, the conversion rates are 93.7 times greater.

How Brands Can Implement Hyper-Personalization

Here are some strategies for brands to personalize email communication at a deeper level:

1. Behavior-based Personalization: By analyzing customer data such as past purchases, product preferences, and browsing behavior, brands can send more tailored recommendations. For instance, a travel brand could recommend vacation packages based on recent searches or bookings made by a customer.

2. Attributes-based Personalization: Brands can use insights into customer attributes to deliver region-specific and localized emails. For example, IKEA localized its website for different countries in the region during Ramadan. The brand adapted everything from language and currency to product offerings and ran campaigns such as short-form cooking shows in the UAE and in-store workshops in Egypt. This approach helped IKEA increase its regional transactions by 23%.

3. Journey-based Personalization: Brands should align email content with where a customer is in their lifecycle. For instance, a media company could send an onboarding email to introduce new customers to its app and then send periodic recommendations based on their viewing history and preferred genres. This not only enhances user engagement but also fosters long-term customer loyalty.

The Importance of Timing in Personalization

Personalization isn’t only about what brands say, but also when they say it. Timing plays an equally crucial role as content personalization. No one wants to receive an email in the middle of the night or while they’re on vacation.

There is no universal formula for the best time to send emails to customers, but regular A/B testing of email campaigns can help determine the optimal timing—whether by month, day, or time of day—to maximize customer engagement and conversions.

However, executing this level of personalized email marketing manually is not feasible. Brands need a robust Customer Data and Engagement Platform (CDEP) to streamline these processes and improve efficiency.

How an Insights-Driven CDEP Enhances Email Marketing Performance

Customers now interact with brands across both online and offline touchpoints, making it essential to centralize their data for effective personalization. A unified view of customer behavior is critical to ensuring that email content is tailored based on individual preferences and actions.

Kunal Badiani, Regional Head of the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa at MoEngage, emphasizes the importance of investing in an insights-driven CDEP: “As digital touchpoints evolve and physical touchpoints rejuvenate, personalization will become mainstream. Brands must leverage advanced analytics to stay relevant. An insights-led CDEP helps fill these gaps and enhances the customer experience.”

Raviteja Dodda, CEO and Co-Founder of MoEngage, highlights the necessity for a fully integrated CDEP: “We need to shift from a campaign-centric to a data-driven, customer-centric approach. Legacy Martech platforms provide fragmented solutions, but a comprehensive, multi-channel CDEP offers holistic data and actionable insights that help brands in the Middle East create highly contextualized experiences and drive business success.”

By transitioning from outdated email platforms to an agile CDEP, brands can optimize their email performance and achieve better results in 2025.

Leveraging Customer Insights to Enhance Email Marketing

As customer attention spans shorten and information overload increases, a brand’s success will be determined by how effectively it engages with its customers. With the right tools, such as MoEngage’s CDEP, brands can leverage customer insights to implement effective personalization strategies and turn email marketing into a revenue-generating channel.

About MoEngage’s CDEP

MoEngage is the leading Customer Data and Engagement Platform (CDEP) in the Middle East and Africa, trusted by over 1,350 global brands, including McAfee, Flipkart, Nestlé, GMG, The Apparel Group, and Mashreq Neo. The platform integrates data from multiple sources to provide brands with a 360-degree view of their customers.

With MoEngage Analytics, marketers gain deep insights into customer behavior, while MoEngage Personalize helps brands orchestrate personalized journeys across web, mobile, email, social, and messaging channels. MoEngage’s AI Suite empowers marketers to optimize campaigns, improve engagement, and boost performance.

For over a decade, MoEngage has empowered brands in 60+ countries to deliver digital experiences to over a billion monthly users.

Source: www.moengage.com.