How Netcore Accelerated BurJuman Mall’s Digital Transformation - Driving 2.5X Higher Engagement and Unlocking AED 18K in Gift Card Revenue

BurJuman is a shopping, dining and entertainment destination in Bur Dubai, part of the Saif Al Ghurair Real Estate Group. BurJuman is a shopping, dining and entertainment destination in Bur Dubai, part of the Saif Al Ghurair Real Estate Group. BurJuman reaches an audience of 1.40 million people through email, organised into named lifestyle segments – Community, Convenience, PTA Data and Fun – alongside an invitation-led VVIP tier called BurJuman Society.

Industry Context

Dubai’s wholesale and retail trade sector generated an estimated AED 50.9 billion in real GDP in the first quarter of 2026 alone, close to a quarter of the emirate’s economy. In a market that dense, shoppers move fluidly between browsing in person, researching online and buying through an app, often within the same afternoon, and the brands they visit are expected to keep pace. For a destination like BurJuman, with a customer base spanning tourists, long-term residents and a smaller VVIP tier, that expectation makes one message for everyone a mismatch almost by design.

Whether it was a tourist connecting to the mall Wi-Fi for the first time or a Society member on their fifth visit that month, the two looked identical from a communication standpoint – both simply joined the database and received the same scheduled email as everyone else. BurJuman knew who its highest-value shoppers were, but most of them still got exactly what everyone else got.

A visitor connecting to mall Wi-Fi wasn’t treated any differently, from a communication standpoint, than someone who’d never set foot in BurJuman at all. Every Gift Card purchase happened somewhere out of view – the team could see a card had been bought, but not which email or journey, if any, had actually driven it. And BurJuman Society, the mall’s own VVIP tier, existed on paper more than it did in the inbox: same offers, same cadence, same everything as the general list.

Only about 40% of BurJuman’s 1.4M-person database had been sorted into any lifestyle segment at all. The rest – roughly 60% – were reachable, but not really known.

The Goals

1. Move beyond generic campaign execution toward an insight-led CRM approach – replace one-size-fits-all sends with communication built around who a customer actually was and what they were doing.
2. Understand visitor intent and build audience segments that could actually be used for targeting – turn signals like Wi-Fi activity and campaign engagement into segments large and specific enough to act on, not just report on.
3. Strengthen engagement with high-value Society/VVIP customers – give BurJuman’s invitation-led VVIP tier communication that matched its status, instead of the same offers and cadence as the general list.
4. Turn CRM into a measurable growth lever for the Gift Card programme – close the gap between a campaign sent and a card purchased, so Gift Card performance could be tracked, not just assumed.

The brief was simple: BurJuman wanted Netcore to operate as a strategic partner, not just a campaign execution platform – working through audience strategy, journey design and performance together, rather than only executing whatever came next on the calendar. That collaboration took shape across H1 2026, in six connected stages, each one picking up a thread from the pain points above.

1. Starting With What Was Already There Before changing anything a customer would see, the two teams sat down to consolidate BurJuman’s campaign, journey, audience and engagement data into one clear view – a baseline to measure every later decision against, and a first honest look at how much of the database was still unsegmented.

2. Turning “Reachable” Into “Known” With the baseline in place, the work turned to roughly 60% of the database still sitting outside any lifestyle segment. Community, Convenience, PTA Data and Fun were built out further, and BurJuman Society – the mall’s invitation-led VVIP tier – reached 2,158 members with its own dedicated line of communication, separated from the general list for the first time.

3. Solving the Wi-Fi Problem This was the piece that addressed the tourist-and-Society-member scenario directly: AMP-powered feedback campaigns captured customer preferences, Wi-Fi activity provided real-time visit signals, and Send-Time Optimization helped BurJuman engage customers at the time they were most likely to respond.

4. Putting Those Signals to Work Once BurJuman could read intent in real time, the next step was acting on it. The Spend & Win promotion, previously a broad send to the whole database, was rebuilt as a live journey triggered by Wi-Fi connection. The Gift Card programme, until then running with no dedicated activity, was onboarded with its own campaigns and journeys.

5. Activating the BurJuman Society VVIP Lifecycle BurJuman already knew who its Society members were – the gap was that many of them didn’t know it themselves, or what came with it. Netcore designed a dedicated welcome journey to introduce members to their VVIP status, walk them through their benefits, and surface further rewards and participation opportunities, turning a list into a live line of communication for the first time. The clearest evidence came from the same Spend & Win campaign in step 4: five Society members responded by presenting the welcome email they’d received in person, in-mall – the first visible sign that the programme was shaping behaviour outside the inbox, not just inside it.

6. Closing the Loop on Gift Card The last piece answered the question that had been unanswerable before: campaign-level conversion and revenue tracking was added to Gift Card, so a purchase could finally be traced back to the message that drove it.

Reach and engagement grew sharply once the programme moved from broad sends to a segmented, signal-led model:

• 146 CRM activities in H1 2026 (101 campaigns, 45 journeys), delivering 18.54M of 19.27M emails sent – a 96.2% delivery rate
• 3.7X more campaign activity and 187% higher delivered reach versus H2 2025
• 2.5X more opens and 2.5X more clicks versus H2 2025

The shift to real-time triggers showed up clearly against BurJuman’s own broad-send baseline:

• The Wi-Fi-triggered Spend & Win journey generated 55% more clicks than the comparable broad campaign, on similar open volumes
• Targeted campaigns and Send-Time Optimisation both outperformed regular broad sends on open and click rates

The Gift Card and Society programmes moved from engagement metrics to measurable commercial and loyalty outcomes:

• Before the transformation, BurJuman could see that Gift Cards were purchased but could not identify which communication influenced the sale. Netcore introduced campaign-level conversion tracking, connecting CRM activity to AED 18K in confirmed revenue from 22 orders and AED 33.8K in initiated order value – commercial visibility BurJuman hadn’t had before.
• The same shift showed up in Society. What had been a VVIP tier in name only became a defined community of 2,158 members, reached through six dedicated campaigns built specifically for them rather than repurposed from the general list – achieving a 5.94% open rate and low attrition.

Beyond the Numbers

• Internal confidence, at BurJuman, that CRM can work as a growth lever and not only a communication channel
• A clearer read on which approach – broad, targeted or triggered – suits which purpose, rather than treating every send the same
• A foundation to build on in H2 2026, with a large share of the 1.40 million-person database still to be mapped into named segments

H1 2026 was treated internally as a proof point rather than a finished rollout. A large share of BurJuman’s reachable database is still unsegmented, and growing that is the priority for H2. The plan carries the same infrastructure forward: expanding lifecycle and occasion-led journeys, scaling Gift Card campaigns alongside stronger mall and brand offers, and building further on Society/VVIP engagement now that the first redemptions and participation have started coming through.