35% More Opens: Inside Payflex and Netcore's Inbox Visibility Optimisation Play

Payflex is South Africa’s first and largest Buy Now, Pay Later platform, giving consumers a flexible way to shop through three Pay Later products. Over time, Payflex has grown beyond the payment moment to build a wider ecosystem that connects shoppers with merchants across fashion, electronics, beauty, homeware, lifestyle and more.

Today, that ecosystem reaches a large and engaged consumer audience through several channels, including email, the Payflex app, the website and the website/app store directory, which drives significant traffic to merchant sites.

With reach this broad, staying consistently connected with its audience is essential. Every channel is an opportunity to bring consumers back into the Payflex ecosystem, and email, with its substantial base of active Pay Later subscribers, is one of the most important of those touchpoints.

Industry Context

Buy Now, Pay Later has become one of the fastest-growing payment categories in South Africa, driven by a young, digitally-savvy, under-banked population looking for alternatives to traditional credit. The category is projected to grow at roughly 10.6% annually through 2029, as more merchants add BNPL at checkout to lift conversion and average order values. Growth in this category comes with a distribution dynamic unique to it: BNPL brands live and die by how often they can put a new deal in front of a customer. Unlike a credit card, there’s no standing relationship pulling users back – every offer has to earn its way into view. For a brand like Payflex, that makes the inbox itself part of the product experience, not just a marketing channel.

Payflex has over a million users on its mailing list, all opted in to hear about the brand’s offers and promotions. For a Buy Now, Pay Later brand, staying top of mind isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s core to how the model works; every offer needs to actually reach the customer to convert into a transaction. Payflex’s team had been running a steady cadence of campaigns and continuously refining content and creative to drive better engagement, and had already seen real gains from that work.

At the same time, open and click rates weren’t rising as fast as the campaign investment justified. Working closely with the Netcore team to dig into what more could be unlocked, both sides looked across the full funnel – content, creative, cadence, and deliverability. That analysis surfaced an important piece of the puzzle: a meaningful share of emails were landing in the Promotions tab rather than the main inbox where customers would actually notice them. It became the next opportunity in an already active optimisation roadmap.

Payflex has been a long-standing Netcore customer and advocate – their CMO has spoken at Netcore’s QBRs and events, and their team has a track record of testing early with Netcore’s newer capabilities. Netcore was already powering their transactional emails through the Netcore API; the natural next step was extending that same rigour to promotional campaigns.

NIVO, Netcore’s Inbox Visibility Optimization program, was still an early-stage initiative at the time. Payflex’s team was open to testing it, and together with Netcore’s CS and Deliverability teams, agreed that inbox placement was worth prioritising alongside the content and cadence work already underway. Both teams reviewed campaign performance together and confirmed that the traditional levers – content changes, send-time experiments – had limited room left to move the needle on their own; placement was the piece that hadn’t yet been optimised. With that shared read, the two teams moved ahead with NIVO.

The Experiment

NIVO went live on 19 May 2025, deliberately timed alongside one of Payflex’s largest annual campaigns, to see how the solution held up under real pressure, at real volume. Because nothing else about the sending programme changed, performance could be measured like-for-like: the month before (19 April to 18 May) against the month that followed. No hypothetical benchmark, no controlled lab conditions – just Payflex’s own campaigns, before and after, with improved visibility as the single variable that moved.

The Optimization

The NIVO programme

The focus stayed narrow and deliberate: improve deliverability and inbox placement. Netcore did not change who Payflex was targeting, and did not recommend a different set of users post-NIVO. The audience stayed the same; what changed was where the email landed once it was sent.

Continuous optimisation

The work didn’t stop at flipping the switch on inbox visibility. Netcore stayed in the loop through the rollout, tracking inbox placement and campaign performance as the numbers came in, and layering on deliverability consultation along the way. Through the engagement, the team also recommended and supported:

• Subject line A/B testing
• Emoji versus non-emoji subject line testing
• Ongoing deliverability monitoring

Each one a small lever pulled to see how far engagement could be stretched once the inbox problem was solved.

Before NIVO, Payflex was averaging a 30.08% open rate and a 1.25% click rate on campaigns going out to a database of over a million users – solid numbers that reflected the content and creative work already underway. A month after NIVO went live, benchmarked against the same period, open rates had climbed to 40.6% and click rates to 2.38%: a 35% lift in opens and a 90% lift in clicks, achieved during one of Payflex’s biggest campaigns of the year, when the stakes for getting it right were highest.

What stood out even more was where those gains showed up. Days that had historically underperformed for Payflex started performing in line with the rest of the week – proof that inbox placement, layered on top of the campaign optimisation already in motion, was the piece that unlocked the next level of performance.