GRI 3-3

In a year of marked growth in the financial industry amid the vagaries of global markets, Al Rajhi Bank applied a digital-first marketing strategy, utilising digital channels, emerging technologies, data analytics and insights to promote innovative financial products and services, and create an unparalleled customer experience, a strategy that yielded significant results during the reporting period.

Al Rajhi Bank’s digitalisation drive led to a more enriched, vibrant customer experience during the reporting period as evidenced by the Bank’s top-down Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 75% for conventional banking and 78% for digital banking, the latter against a competitor average of 61%, making Al Rajhi Bank the Bank of choice for the evolving, digitally-adept banking customer.

Al Rajhi Bank also took measures to provide its customers with a more rewarding loyalty experience by further enhancing and enriching the Bank’s Mokafaa loyalty program in 2022. Such focused efforts resulted in Mokafaa achieving the top NPS, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) in the Kingdom for the year under review.

Enhancing brand perception

Since the launch of the “unbank the bank” brand identity in 2021, Al Rajhi Bank has taken to its digital channels to creatively communicate new brand principles. These channels recorded increased engagement in 2022, with higher channel integrity that strengthened top-of-mind awareness and positioning of the brand. Supported by positive customer feedback on the facelifted logo, the modern brand identity allowed Al Rajhi Bank to penetrate the youth market with an approachable tone of voice, through the right mix of channels.

This more emotion-driven brand voice served to strengthen Al Rajhi Bank’s YoY brand positioning as a bank that is trusted, accessible, affordable and innovative, and contributed towards increasing the Bank’s brand power score by 40.3% at the end of the reporting year.

Al Rajhi Bank’s partnership with Visa to launch the global “She’s Next” initiative for the first time in the Kingdom also served in terms of greatly enhancing the Bank’s brand perception as a leader in the financial sector, and brand sentiment for nurturing financial inclusivity across the Kingdom. “She’s Next” is a global advocacy program that aims to economically empower women entrepreneurs and small business owners through grants, funding opportunities as well as practical insights that help them grow their businesses, and aligns with Al Rajhi Bank’s BOTF Strategy as well as it’s ESG agenda.

The Bank tracked its “Brand Health & Equity” in 2022 in conjunction with a few ad-hoc market research studies that were carried out on customer behaviours, banking preferences and other aspects in the course of the year, in a concerted effort to better understand customer expectations.

The digital impact

The Bank’s customer experience was largely enhanced by its industry-transforming digitalisation agenda, which saw a large collection of customer touchpoints directed towards high-performing, highly responsive automated systems, creating greater efficiencies for Al Rajhi Bank customers, and enabling more instances of self-service and the ability to better manage their finances.

The increased use of digital channels during the reporting period allowed the Bank to collect information, customer data and feedback instantly, and gain insights to improve messaging, channel selection and creative style, which were then applied across those same customer touchpoints, creating a continuous improvement cycle based on actual customer usability.

In 2022, the use of digital channels for the Bank’s marketing campaigns resulted in a higher success rate and reduced cost, despite increased competition across digital marketing channels by new entrants such as fintechs. Major campaigns launched in 2022 such as the highly anticipated “blue week” discount offers with Al Rajhi Bank cards comprised multi sub-tactical campaigns that were planned, managed and executed using only digital channels, which offered the advantage of segmentation and targeting.

During the reporting period, the Marketing team explored a number of emerging technologies and tools for marketing automation. Prominent among these was a Campaign Management System, which allowed the Bank to design cross-channel customer experiences and provided an environment for visual campaign orchestration, interaction management, and cross channel execution. A Content Management System used to create, publish, and manage content on websites and apps was also successfully deployed in 2022.

More “social”, more “media”

Al Rajhi Bank’s creative use of rich content led to an overall social media growth of 113.7% during the reporting period, with the follower count on Twitter doubling, and an increase of almost 60% in Instagram followers.

As part of Al Rajhi Bank’s new brand strategy and emotion-driven tone of voice, the Bank’s social media engagement sentiment increased from 34% in 2021 to 65% in 2022, an improvement demonstrated by the type of conversation generated by the Bank’s communications as well as the emergence of organic brand champions and advocates on social platforms.

Data-driven social media tools were used to create more targeted campaigns during the year under review, and the resulting engagement and behaviour of the target audiences helped the Bank develop more meaningful and impactful communication. The Bank also took into account emerging social media platforms such as Snapchat and Tiktok as well as high engagement channels such as Twitter to ensure an evolving and comprehensive marketing effort.

Outside of social media, the Bank continued to successfully utilise more traditional, automated channels such as SMS, push notifications and e-mail, enabling highly targeted and relevant communication with customers based on predefined use cases, improving the overall interaction between brand and customer.

Rewarding loyalty with exclusivity

In line with the overarching BOTF strategy, Al Rajhi Bank reinforced the Mokafaa loyalty program with multiple enhancements and product offerings in 2022 to provide an even more rewarding experience to its loyal customers, and closed the year recording exceptionally high growth across all aspects of the program. More focused improvements on the loyalty program were carried out following a market research study carried out by the Bank during the reporting period, gaining insight to customer expectations from loyalty programs, as well as customer redemption behaviour and their overall perception of Mokafaa.

Over 30 new Al Rajhi Bank products became eligible for point-earning during the year under review, with the program adding products and services from the Bank’s subsidiaries as well as other partners, as external sources of loyalty point accruals.

Mokafaa member engagement increased significantly YoY due to exclusive and enhanced product and engagement offerings, with active earners during the period growing by 320% and active redeemers by 220%. The partner network doubled in 2022, directly contributing to a 62% increase in customer registrations, with the Mokafaa loyalty base approaching 6 million members at the end of the reporting period. The 250% increase in points redemption YoY evidenced the high level of customer interaction with the program, and its elevated level of appeal.

Mokafaa’s availability in native app format in 2022 greatly enhanced the program’s user experience, allowing members to easily access points balance, transaction history, the partner panel, vouchers, etc., from the app instead of the previous web-based portal. The app also offers a new, exclusive eMall feature, where members can shop online and earn points from over 300 merchants based in KSA as well as the UAE, UK and the US. Other upgrades included event notifications and in-app features enabling the exchange of points with airline miles, and the donation of points to top charities in the Kingdom.

On average, Mokafaa ran five to six campaigns per month across various channels during the year under review, with the loyalty program recorded a high loyalty newsletter open rate well ahead of the global financial industry open rate, with a click-through rate (CTR) around four-times higher than the global financial industry CTR average. Such impressive rates complemented by the program’s leading NPS among other customer satisfaction ratings, demonstrates Mokafaa’s position as the top loyalty program in the Kingdom in 2022.