Zafer Akyel, Director of Solutions Engineering and Architecture for EMEA at WebEngage, has spent the past years watching Middle East retailers struggle with a singular problem: their customers move faster than their systems can respond. Shoppers browse across five devices, expect real-time personalization, and punish friction instantly. The brands winning aren’t cutting deeper discounts—they’re building infrastructure.
On hyper-personalization in a speed-driven economy
The Middle East has become a place where customer decisions form faster than most teams can respond manually. What’s changed is the expectation that the experience should keep up with the shopper. When a website rearranges itself based on what a customer has just browsed, or when a cart recovery message arrives before a user switches apps, conversion lifts naturally.
You see this pattern clearly in homeware and electronics retail across Saudi Arabia, where brands that tailored recommendations in real time during high-traffic days saw disproportionate gains. For instance, one KSA’s top home decor brands shifted from broad promotions to segmentation built around user purchase affinity, which led to a 43% year-on-year increase in repeat purchasers. Once their web and app signals began informing what customers saw, monthly engaged users rose by 32%. And a leading real estate company in the UAE saw a 4x increase in conversions quarter-on-quarter due to targeted Whatsapp campaigns and lead nurturing.
Those results were driven less by discounts and more by timing and relevance, which is why AOV uplift during Black Friday often sits in the 25–40% range for brands that operate with real-time logic.
On retention becoming the real battlefield
Acquisition spikes come and go but retention compounds. What’s interesting about the region now is that brands are treating repeat behaviour as a design problem rather than a marketing one.
In segments like QSR, classifieds, and fashion retail, the strongest results are coming from teams that rebuilt their lifecycle journeys end-to-end. A large fashion retailer in Saudi Arabia, for example, ran over 300 campaigns a month but only started seeing sustained gains when most of them were automated and personalised. The uplift in repeat purchases from first-time buyers was measurable within weeks.
Africa’s second-largest telecom operator, operating across 14 countries, built its engagement model around micro-segments and behavioural triggers shaped by expiry cycles, bundle usage, and wallet actions. When measured against a control group, targeted automation delivered a 45% uplift in conversions quarter-on-quarter, driving a 2× increase in repeat purchases of data and calling packs. These same flows also lifted recharge frequency by 8%, grew monthly active wallet users by 17%, and pushed conversion rates past 30% on several key journeys.
So an event like Black Friday may bring people in, but your retention OS always determines what the next quarter looks like.
On how MENA shoppers behave during peak season
Shoppers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia behave like a mobile-native segment even when they’re on desktop. The browsing pattern is fragmented – perhaps a few swipes on the metro, a price check during lunch, and a return visit late at night. That rhythm is why WhatsApp consistently outperforms email during high-intent moments. It accommodates the user’s momentum quickly.
But the same shoppers also mute aggressively. They don’t tolerate duplicated messages across SMS, push, email, and WhatsApp. The brands that maintain engagement are the ones with logic that prevents overlap and adjusts communications once a user responds on a different channel.
On AI automation during traffic spikes
High-traffic periods in the Middle East behave like compression events. A flood of activity can hit in minutes, and every weak point in the funnel gets exposed at once. When that happens, manual optimization can become irrelevant quickly. No team can rewrite journeys, reprioritise channels, or adjust frequency with the same speed customers move.
AI-led orchestration has become the stabilising layer in those moments. They adjust recommendations, protect users from message overload, and route engagement through channels that are performing best in real time. The customer’s experience doesn’t deteriorate just because volume suddenly spikes. The real value of AI here is continuity.
On e-commerce UX as a differentiator and cost centre
In this particular region’s “tap now, decide now” behaviour cycle, small UX gaps can lead to large revenue leaks. Slow recommendations, irrelevant banners, or checkout friction can be more expensive than a poorly placed discount.
A slow-loading page, a recommendation that feels off, or friction at checkout can derail a purchase faster than any pricing decision. Customers aren’t comparing your UX only to retail competitors, they’re comparing it to the smoothness of food delivery apps, mobility platforms, and banking experiences they use daily.
Even today, too many companies think of UX as a cosmetic layer. But it influences how efficiently campaigns convert, how quickly high-intent customers move through the funnel, and whether peak-season budgets show returns at all. When one electronics brand consolidated its customer profile and sharpened product discovery journeys, cart abandonment dropped by 27%, and repeat purchases among first-time buyers rose by 5%. So you are leaving money on the table if you don’t treat UX as a revenue driver.
On AI-driven retention vs acquisition – what’s shaping 2026
Across e-commerce, QSR, real estate, and travel, teams are quietly shifting their 2026 budgets toward retention infrastructure. Rising acquisition costs, signal loss, and season-driven volatility are pushing brands to build around lifetime value instead of one-time peaks.
AI is reshaping how that happens. Predictive models are getting better at identifying which users are about to lapse, which ones are likely to upgrade, and which segments need education rather than offers. Automated journeys now handle much of the day-to-day work that used to consume marketing hours – onboarding, nudging, win-backs, replenishment flows, and so on.
Retention is becoming a system rather than a set of campaigns. 2026 Maretch will lean strongly towards infrastructure that makes retention repeatable, measurable, and less dependent on constant manual intervention.
The Middle East as a global testbed for mobile-first, real-time personalisation
Few markets adopt consumer technology as quickly as the Middle East. People simply use their devices differently here: quickly, frequently, and across more touchpoints than in many Western markets.
Because of this, brands in the Gulf often test real-time personalisation ideas earlier than their global counterparts, whether that’s using messaging apps for commerce, tailoring journeys based on micro-interactions, or designing funnels specifically for high-mobile contexts. The audience here provides the kind of scale and behavioural velocity that pushes engagement systems to evolve.
Playbooks that take years to mature elsewhere can gain clarity in months here. The brands that succeed are the ones that match the pace of their customers.
