How Hirsch’s Raised Email Open Rates by 52% and Click-Through Rates by 111% with NIVO (Netcore Inbox Visibility Optimization)

Hirsch’s began in 1979 as a small appliance repair and retail showroom on Umhlanga Rocks Drive in Durban, opened by Allan and Margaret Hirsch with R900 in savings. It is now Southern Africa’s largest independently owned appliance and electronics retailer, with 19 branches and concept stores across KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and the Western Cape, and it remains family-run, with Richard Hirsch as CEO and Luci Hirsch as Brand Manager. The business sells home appliances, electronics and furniture through a connected store and online offer, and its website draws over 372,800 monthly visits (SimilarWeb). Service and trust have been the brand’s position since the day it opened.

Industry Context

South Africa’s appliance and electronics specialist channel reached ZAR52.06 billion in current value in 2025, growing around 3% year on year (Euromonitor). The wider home appliances market is forecast to move from USD 3.48 billion in 2025 to USD 3.67 billion in 2026, at a 5.39% CAGR through 2031 (Mordor Intelligence). Growth is steady rather than rapid, and it is happening while households stay careful – Statistics South Africa recorded retail trade sales up 1.3% year on year in April 2026, slower than the revised 2.5% in March. Specialist retailers continue to hold the category, expanding steadily within a consolidating market where promotional offers look broadly similar across brands. Appliances are also a considered purchase: customers compare several product pages, shortlist, leave, and return days or weeks later. For Hirsch’s, that pattern makes email less a promotional channel than the route customers take back to a decision they have already started.

Hirsch’s sells experience goods – things people take time to buy. A fridge, a television, a lounge suite. Customers compare products over days or weeks, leave the site, and come back when they are ready, a pattern Hirsch’s own journey data confirms. Email is what brings them back. If a campaign is not seen, the customer who was close to buying simply does not return.

By this point Hirsch’s had a mature email programme behind it: engaged audiences, relevant campaigns and healthy delivery. The opportunity was no longer about sending better emails. It was about making sure more of those emails were seen.

The brief for the channel was direct:

• Increase email open rates
• Improve customer engagement with campaigns
• Drive higher click-through rates
• Generate more revenue from campaigns already being sent

Delivered is not the same as seen

By every measure the team had, the email programme looked healthy. Delivery rates were high. Bounces were low. Nothing on the dashboard pointed to a problem.

But a significant share of Hirsch’s marketing emails were landing in the Promotions tab rather than the Primary inbox. An email that reaches the inbox but receives limited visibility has significantly less opportunity to drive engagement.

The scale of that is easy to underestimate: 68% of users rarely or never open their Promotions tab (Netcore Email Benchmark Report 2026). For most brands, that is the majority of a campaign’s audience, gone before the subject line has a chance to work.

The problem stayed hidden because the reporting looked fine. Delivery only confirms that an email arrived. It does not tell you whether anyone saw it. That difference is where the channel was losing its return, and no standard email report is built to show it.

The team had already worked the obvious levers – creative, timing, list practice and standard deliverability best practice. Performance barely moved, because none of those levers change where an email lands. And the gap widened at the worst possible time. During major sale periods, every retailer’s volume rises at once and the Promotions tab becomes the most crowded place in the inbox. The one time Hirsch’s most needed to be seen was the one time it was hardest to be seen.

Hirsch’s was already running customer engagement on Netcore. The decision was not to replace anything or rebuild the campaign calendar. It was to fix the one thing sitting upstream of all of it.

That work is NIVO (Netcore Inbox Visibility Optimization) – the programme that changes where an email lands rather than what it says. Placement is not a setting that can be switched on. Mailbox providers decide it continuously, and they weigh more than sender reputation. They look at whether the message went to people who wanted it, whether those people opened, clicked or replied, and whether the content proved useful enough to be worth the attention. Relevance is being judged on every send, quietly and constantly. Earning a place in the Primary inbox means passing that judgement consistently, then holding it – which takes engineering rather than best practice. The work ran in three stages over roughly six weeks.

1. Diagnose – establish why the emails were being filtered

Nothing was changed until the sending was understood. Hirsch’s domain was baselined against placement history, complaint and bounce patterns, and a full check of authentication and routing. The point was to identify what specifically was pulling campaigns into Promotions rather than work from assumption.

2. Optimise – strengthen the signals supporting inbox placement

Reputation cannot be rushed, and forcing placement tends to cost more than it returns. Volume and traffic were reallocated so Hirsch’s strongest sending signals carried the most weight, and content was shaped to read as a message from a known brand rather than as bulk mail. This is where placement is earned rather than gamed.

3. Protect – hold the placement once it was won

Engagement signals were re-scored continuously, so weakening segments were handled before they could affect the wider programme. Placement became something monitored and defended, not achieved once and assumed.

Importantly, the programme did not require Hirsch’s to increase campaign volume, expand its audience or add incremental spend. The gains came from improving the visibility of the campaigns already being delivered.The emails that went out in April were the same kind of emails that had gone out in January. What changed was whether anyone saw them.

Within six weeks, the same email programme performed like a different one. Open rates rose 52%. Click-through rates rose 111% – clicks on the same campaigns more than doubled. Measured across April 2026 against the January–March 2026 baseline.

The instructive detail is what did not change. Hirsch’s did not send more email, grow the list, rewrite creative or increase spend. None of the additional engagement came from additional investment. It came from unlocking an additional performance from an existing channel, without increasing campaign volume or spend.

That is the part worth carrying into any business, well beyond appliance retail. Most email reporting measures delivery, which is a logistics number: it confirms a message left the building and arrived somewhere. It is not a marketing number, and it cannot tell you whether anything reached a customer’s attention. Until placement is measured, nobody in the business knows what the email channel is actually capable of – which means every decision made about it, from budget to frequency to whether to invest in it at all, rests on an incomplete picture.

For Hirsch’s, closing that visibility gap unlocked incremental growth from an audience and programme they already had: an audience that was already theirs, on a list they already owned, reading campaigns they had already written.

Beyond the numbers

• More of Hirsch’s marketing email reached customers’ Primary inbox, improving visibility across the campaign calendar
• The team reported stronger engagement across email campaigns alongside the measured lift
• Deliverability shifted from a one-time setup task to a monitored, ongoing discipline

With placement now measured and managed, Hirsch’s has a clearer view of what its existing email programme can deliver before any additional spend is considered. The assessment, monitoring and optimisation routine set up during NIVO carries forward as standing practice, giving the team a way to hold the gains and to keep testing where else the same approach applies across the campaign calendar.