How we helped Notino save over $30k in a year

Here in Europe, Notino is a huge name when it comes to e-commerce, perfumes, and cosmetics. For those who are perhaps not as familiar with the brand, it can be easily compared to Sephora - but while Sephora has a European presence, Notino dominates the continent. Today, Notino is operating in 27 countries, and it receives an average of 560 million website visits per year.

Notino stays competitive by limiting their number of physical stores and buying in bulk from wholesalers, resulting in savings that ultimately makes its way down to the consumer. They are a much beloved brand, with original, high quality products and a fair return policy that ensures customer satisfaction.

Competing in a global marketplace can be very tricky, and in 2018, Notino decided to implement a bold strategic plan not often favored by other marketers – out of their 3 million email contacts, they deleted more than 1/3 of their inactive recipients. Why is this a bold move, and not a bad move? Most marketers will push for a larger audience size, no matter the cost. However, in the email deliverability world, we understand the cost very well.

When you send generic, bulk email to your entire list without segmenting for engagement, this translates to lower opens and clicks, which translates to lower deliverability, which translates to lower ROI. When mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook see that mail you send is not being engaged with, they assume the mail does not provide value, and they start to move your mail to the spam folder. In other words, send all the mail you want, but it will not end up in front of your intended recipients, and it will not result in money well spent.

It is a bold move, because they removed the inactive recipients who were not making them any money, and this action resulted in a savings of over $30k a year, and a much more engaged audience. Not only that, it allowed their audience to grow organically to 10 million recipients - a whopping 5x larger than their list size in 2018, thanks to their long time partnership with Mailkit, the leading email service platform (ESP) for international mailings. As of 2023, Notino has a net worth of $185.2M and has had an average profit of 43.2% per year since 2016. So how did they make it happen? Read our case study to find out more. 

When Notino Met Mailkit

Notino was founded in 2004 in Brno, originally under the name Parfums.cz, and it soon became one of the fastest growing e-commerce players in the field of beauty. In 2016, as part of a rebranding exercise, it began to unify its names in local markets under the Notino brand. By 2017, Notino operated in 13 countries and had built a database of 3 million users.

The relationship between Notino and Mailkit began in 2015, when the retailer started using Mailkit to send email, and later SMS, to all domestic and international recipients.

The initiator and leader of the project was Veronika Šklíbová, who at the beginning of 2017 was the new Head of CRM & emailing. Her professional experience, specialization in email marketing, and strong data orientation accelerated significant changes in the company.

"The company was in the midst of a challenging rebranding process under the Notino brand; we were planning to enter 8 new markets that year and preparing for the extensive changes associated with GDPR. 

Notino addressed 3 main risks

Spam traps

Removing spam traps in the form of long-term inactive addresses or typos can dramatically improve the deliverability of campaigns. These are a direct route to blocklisting when sent to repeatedly.

Domain Reputation

The cornerstone of good deliverability, domain reputation is most often determined by recipient engagement - do subscribers find value in the mail you are sending them? This can be accomplished through a number of factors - namely removing the “junk” emails from a list and adopting a more strategic approach to email marketing.

Emailing effectiveness

Effective mailings have higher open rates (OR), click through rates (CTR), conversions, and return on investment (ROI), while ineffective mailings unnecessarily increase the volume of the emails sent and resources spent, without getting much in return. Increase email effectiveness by sending targeted content to specific segments of a list, at an expected cadence, with content they value.

A change like this was not made arbitrarily, and it required key support to move forward. Thanks to the results of A/B testing, Veronika was able to gain the necessary support from the board and convince members of top management that removing this volume of contacts would not have a negative impact on financial results. The data clearly showed that the revenue from mailing to the entire database was identical to the revenue from emailing campaigns sent only to active users.

The database cleaning

To be removed from the database, contacts had to meet all of the following conditions:

• Mailkit engagement score = 0
• Date subscribed was more than 1 year ago
• Contact has not engaged with newsletters for more than 1 year
• Last purchase was more than 2 years ago
• Recent web activity was more than 1 year ago

A total of 1.25 million recipients fell into this net and Notino decided to exclude them from future email campaigns.

Results, evaluation, and next steps for Notino

After just one month of testing the effectiveness of the cleaned database, there was no drop in sales; on the contrary, the results showed an upward trend. After one year, 94% of the inactive segment remained inactive, only 1% of unsubscribed recipients resubscribed to the newsletter, and 5% of the deleted users repurchased on Notino. And here’s the big one: Notino was able to save over $30k in the first year after cleaning.

Five years later, in the period from 2018 to 2023, just 3.7% of the deleted segment re-subscribed to the newsletter and 16% of the same segment still made a purchase. As of 2023, Notino’s list size has bloomed to over 10 million active recipients from the original 2 million, and their global reach more than doubled from 13 countries to 27. As recently as Sept 2024, this cosmetics and perfume giant has seen a turnover of 33.6 billion crowns, with an average year-on-year growth of 28%.

Over the past several years, Mailkit has helped catapult Notino into becoming a household name, and the go-to beauty retailer for the European market. Their impressive collaboration even earned Notino and Mailkit an invitation to the prestigious Email Evolution Conference, where they presented the outcome of their work together. Such an undertaking was not without its doubts, but in the end, the results speak for themselves.

It’s easy to view a mass exodus of email addresses from an audience as a loss - but when done with care, it is anything but that. Notino’s success story serves to inspire others who need to change their email marketing strategy and follow best practices. It will always lead to an improvement in deliverability. So what is next for Notino? Dominika Vystavělová, who now runs the dedicated mailing department at Notino as Lead of Mailing, declares that automation is next on the agenda:

Want more effective email campaigns too? Get in touch with our team, get an active mailing list, and save on emailing.

We would like to thank Veronika Šklíbová, Head of CRM & emailing from 2017-2021 and current Lead of Mailing Dominika Langová from Notino for providing the data in this case study.