Introduction

RAKBANK, also known as The National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah, is one of the oldest and most dynamic banks in the UAE. Founded in 1976, the bank has grown to become a leading retail and business banking provider, with over 19 branches across the country. RAKBANK offers a wide range of personal and business banking services, including treasury and insurance solutions.

As a customer-centric and innovative bank, RAKBANK is always looking for ways to enhance its digital capabilities and customer experience. However, the bank faced some challenges with its website and digital marketing operations, which were hampering its efficiency, performance, and growth.

Teams were siloed and disconnected within marketing. The bank's marketing team had to rely on multiple tools, documents and drives to collaborate on, store and share assets, resulting in a lack of visibility and efficiency.

Furthermore, they were working on an outdated and slow CMS. The bank's website was built on HCL, a legacy CMS that the bank had been using for 12 years. The website had poor load times, limited functionality, and needed a tedious syndication process for content updates.

To overcome these challenges, RAKBANK decided to look for a new CMS solution that could meet its current and future needs. The bank wanted a headless CMS that could integrate with its other platforms (such as its mobile app) and needed a solution that could also support digital asset management, content creation and campaign management. After evaluating different options, RAKBANK chose Optimizely as its digital partner.

Solution
RAKBANK partnered with Optimizely to implement CMP and DAM for its digital and content marketing operations, and to migrate their website from HCL to Optimizely CMS. The bank also leveraged Optimizely's local support and ability to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

Streamlining Collaboration and Content Operations

Optimizely CMP is purpose-built for marketers, which enabled RAKBANK to see immediate value by adding structure to their marketing processes without requiring heavy maintenance or training.

Using CMP, RAKBANK can easily plan, create, and execute campaigns and content within a single platform, instead of disparate tools, documents, and spreadsheets. Their marketing team relies on flexible workflows to assign campaigns and their supporting tasks and to check progress. They’re able to collaborate on content and campaigns by having all the relevant campaign information (and content creation) happening in one place. This streamlined approach to content creation and execution in CMP has transformed RAKBANK’s digital and content marketing operations.

Uplevelling RAKBANK’s Digital Presence with Headless Content Delivery

Optimizely's headless CMS allows RAKBANK to create, manage, and deliver exceptional content experiences across multiple channels, such as its website, mobile app, and social media.

Migrating to Optimizely CMS also supplied faster load times (18% decrease in load time), easier content updates and more flexibility to choose the best implementation for each of their sites.

To further improve the visitor experience on their website, RAKBANK also implemented the Search and Navigation add-on to Optimizely CMS. Using natural language processing, the feature understands the topics that visitors are interested in and provides them with relevant content recommendations. After implementation, RAKBANK experienced a 6% increase in page views, a 37% increase in engagement time and an 8-12% increase in leads.

Using Optimizely CMP and CMS together means that RAKBANK can use the publishing integration that connects the two platforms. This enables their marketers to plan, create and publish content to the CMS (via an embedded CMS editor), without ever having to leave the CMP. This streamlined process empowers RAKBANK’s marketing team to make content updates and get content to market faster by removing the dependency on technical teams and lengthy syndication wait times, ultimately reducing 9 hours per week of manual work.

Using Integrated Asset Management to Get More Out of Their Content

An essential part of the content process, Optimizely’s integrated digital asset management (DAM) allows RAKBANK’s marketing team to store, organize, and manage their brand-approved assets in a central location. DAM also enables RAKBANK to seamlessly reuse and repurpose their assets for different campaigns and channels, saving them time and resources.

With native capabilities like asset renditions featuring smart focal points and image editing, RAKBANK can take a main file from their creative agency and make minor tweaks right within DAM, significantly reducing the time it takes to finish assets.

With the goal of building a more connected tech stack, RAKBANK uses the integration between Optimizely DAM and Optimizely CMS to create and deliver engaging content for their website and other platforms. Optimizely DAM is fully integrated into the upstream workflows (content planning and creation) and downstream workflows (delivering to any channel) in CMP, as well as Optimizely CMS, where assets can be pulled directly into webpages from the CMS interface. This seamless integration enables RAKBANK to easily access and insert their assets into their webpages and get the most out of their content.

Next Steps

RAKBANK are not stopping their marketing transformation here. The bank has ambitious plans to expand its use of Optimizely products and features to continue improving upon their digital experience, such as:

• Web Experimentation: RAKBANK plans to use Optimizely Web Experimentation to test and optimize its website content and campaigns and deliver personalized experiences to its diverse and growing customer base. They already have a list of hypotheses and experiments planned, such as changing images, fonts, colors, languages, CTAs, lead forms, and QR codes.
• Integrations: RAKBANK plans to explore the integrations that Optimizely CMS and CMP offer with other solutions, such as heat mapping tools, Google Analytics, Google Drive, their CRM and other data platforms. These integrations will help the bank to gain more insights and enhance personalization.
• AI: They plan to take advantage of CMP’s innovative AI capabilities, including text and image generation, to help scale their content production efforts across various channels.