How Adv+ Achieved 2x Customer Base Growth, 6M+ Emails Delivered, and WhatsApp averaging 65%+ open rates with Netcore

adv+ is the UAE’s leading lifestyle membership brand and the country’s self-styled no. 1 family lifestyle membership, recognized for making premium fitness and leisure accessible to a wider audience. Through a single membership, members unlock curated access to a network of 80+ premium clubs – elite gyms, beach clubs, pools, and leisure venues – alongside 130+ partner offers spanning wellness, F&B, family experiences, and more. The network spans Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, and Abu Dhabi, with marquee partners including Fairmont The Palm, Ritz-Carlton DIFC, Marriott Resort Palm Jumeirah, Le Royal Méridien Abu Dhabi, and the Dubai Polo & Equestrian Club. Built for families and fitness enthusiasts who value both health and lifestyle, the brand records 60,000–70,000+ monthly website visits and – through a notable enterprise tie-up powering GEMS Rewards Plus for the GEMS Education community – serves as a vital gateway to some of the UAE’s best wellness and leisure experiences.

As adv+ achieved enviable scale, it bumped into a familiar growth ceiling – communication that felt increasingly distant from the lifestyle the brand promised. With Mailchimp powering email-only broadcasts, the team was boxed into a one-to-many loop that lacked the immediacy and intimacy a premium audience expects.

Three gaps emerged:

• Performance plateaus. Email open rates needed to consistently outpace the UAE industry benchmark of 20–30%.
• Channel silos. Members in the UAE live on WhatsApp, but the brand had no native way to reach them there.
• Relevance at scale. As the venue network expanded across the Emirates, getting the right message – a new gym opening, an F&B-only offer, a class schedule – to the right member became increasingly hard.

adv+ moved from a single-channel, volume-heavy approach to a multi-channel, value-driven model on Netcore. The work centered on three pillars.

1. Omnichannel orchestration: email + WhatsApp on one platform

Consolidating the marketing stack on Netcore eliminated data silos and gave Adv+ a single source of truth for member communications. Email and WhatsApp could now work in concert rather than as isolated blasts. Recognizing the UAE’s mobile-first behavior, Netcore stood up a native WhatsApp Business API channel for adv+ from scratch – reserved for high-impact, time-sensitive moments like new venue alerts, exclusive event invitations, and urgent club notices. On the email side, Netcore’s deliverability infrastructure handled millions of sends, ensuring newsletters and renewal notices reliably reached the inbox.

2. Behavioral & lifecycle segmentation

Rather than treating the entire database as one audience, the team split campaigns by lifecycle: active members vs. non-member prospects.

• Members received utility-focused content – gym class schedules, app download guides, wellness offers, and referral rewards.
• Prospects were nurtured with lifestyle-first content – new partner announcements and F&B preview offers designed to drive conversion.

Campaigns were timed to specific moments in the member lifecycle – renewals, re-engagement, new-venue launches – so the brand stayed relevant without slipping into notification fatigue.

3. The “human-in-the-loop” success model

Where previous self-service tools left adv+ to figure things out alone, Netcore paired the brand with a dedicated Customer Success Manager. The CSM operated as a Success Consultant – setting up campaigns, resolving queries quickly, and offering hands-on guidance on how to outperform UAE benchmarks. That partnership let adv+ keep up the fast-moving cadence required of a brand that’s continually adding new partners and venues across the Emirates.

• Email platform onboarding – Onboarded adv+ onto Netcore’s email platform and stood up the end-to-end campaign infrastructure, giving the team a reliable foundation for high-volume member communication.
• WhatsApp channel launch from zero – Built the WhatsApp Business API channel from scratch – including message templates, opt-in flows, and broadcast workflows – to give adv+ a native, mobile-first line to its UAE member base.
• Campaign execution & best-practice guidance – Supported day-to-day campaign setup and scheduling while sharing ongoing best practices on creatives, segmentation, and send-time optimization to keep performance consistently above benchmark.
• Annual performance reviews – Conducted structured annual reviews with detailed performance analysis and forward-looking recommendations, ensuring the strategy evolved in step with adv+’s growing venue and partner network.
• Responsive query resolution – Delivered fast, hands-on query resolution and support – a service quality the adv+ team specifically called out as a key reason the partnership keeps moving at pace.

By treating digital communication as a digital handshake, the partnership turned marketing into a direct retention and growth driver.

Email channel

• 6M+ emails delivered, sustaining consistent member visibility at scale.
• 25–30% average open rates overall – a 20–30% uplift vs. the prior baseline.
• 35–45% open rates on member-specific campaigns – roughly 1.5x higher engagement than broader campaigns and well above the UAE industry benchmark.
• 1–2.5% click rates overall, with top campaigns reaching 3% – a 25–40% CTR uplift on targeted campaigns vs. BAU.

WhatsApp channel

• 50–60% average open rates, with peaks of 79% on targeted sends – roughly 2x the visibility of email.
• 0.5–1.5% click rates overall, with top campaigns at 2–2.5% – a 30% uplift on event and reminder campaigns.
• Built from scratch and scaled to a reliable engagement channel within weeks.

Business impact

• 2x growth in active member base since the partnership began.
• Both channels operating concurrently with consistent, high-quality engagement.

Beyond the numbers

The WhatsApp channel gave adv+ a direct line to members on the platform they use every day, unlocking a level of immediacy email alone could never deliver. Consistent, well-designed email reinforced the adv+ brand experience between venue visits – turning every newsletter into a small extension of the membership itself. And throughout, the Netcore team’s responsiveness emerged as a key differentiator: queries resolved quickly, and campaigns kept moving.

The journey doesn’t end with scale. adv+ plans to deepen this playbook by leaning further into automation, lifecycle journeys, and hyper-personalization. With Netcore as its success consultant, the brand is doubling down on a simple promise: as the adv+ community grows across the Emirates, every member should continue to feel like the most important guest at the club.