What you need to know:

• Chemist Warehouse has driven a 50 per cent spike in email-attributed revenue so far this financial year by shifting from “batch and blast” email to precision CRM, underpinned by first-party data and behavioural segmentation via Klaviyo.
• Its email subscriber base surged 70 per cent year-on-year – despite a compliance-driven database cull, thanks to streamlined opt-in tactics and upcoming incentives like vouchers and early access.
• Retail media value unlocked for suppliers like L’Oréal and Swisse, with targeted cohort campaigns now possible alongside mass reach events like Black Friday.
• Top performers include replenishment trigger emails, especially in vitamins, while abandoned cart emails underperform – possibly due to customers completing purchases in-store.
• A new ecommerce site and tech stack are launching soon, with the big challenge being seamless data integration to enable scalable, personalised CX.
• SMS marketing and AI are on the roadmap, but both are being rolled out cautiously – SMS for urgent promotions only, and AI projects squarely focused on internal efficiency before customer-facing use.

Chemist Warehouse has seen a dramatic increase in conversions and revenue by overhauling how it uses an owned media channel that experts suggest is just as valuable as in-store media: email.

The retailer, which saw media revenues eroded by almost $150m between 2022 and 2024 amid increased competition, has subsequently driven a 50 per cent spike in email-attributed revenue this financial year to date, plus 70 per cent year-on-year net subscriber growth, while unlocking millions of dollars in supplier value. Behind the surge: a ruthless shift from old-school batch-and-blast to buying behaviour targeting, powered by first-party data and built squarely for commercial impact over vanity metrics.

The hard financial returns tell their own story. But behind the uplift is a focused push into behavioural segmentation, data hygiene, and high-velocity iteration, spearheaded by Head of Digital and E-commerce, Leteesha Serzycki. While they're just getting started, the early numbers suggest a blueprint worth watching.

Data rebased

Historically, Chemist Warehouse operated what Leteesha Serzycki describes as a “batch and blast” model – mass email campaigns pushed to the database with limited segmentation. No longer.

Over the past few years, the business has reoriented its email marketing strategy around first-party data, leveraging Klaviyo to deliver increasingly personalised outbound communications.

“We've been using our first-party data and segmentation in Klaviyo to be more targeted and more personalised with our outbound communications. And as a result, we've seen some really, really positive outcomes," Serzycki told the Klaviyo K:Syd event yesterday.

"We've seen a significant increase in our click-through rate and our open rate. When I pulled the numbers yesterday to look at revenue and conversion financial year to date, period on period, we've seen a 50 per cent increase in the last quarter, which is amazing.

Per Serzycki: "On top of that, the net new subscribers, when we looked at our FY 25 H1 results, period on period, we're seeing a 55 per cent increase – and a 70 per cent increase year on year."

She acknowledged that Chemist Warehouse "is still very rudimentary in our segmentation ... but those changes for us have really driven so much value and benefit, and because that program is doing so well, it also means that we can bring in so much more supplier and marketing revenue too – which is another key key target our team has to look after".

The strategy is evolving fast. 

“What we're going to focus on over the next year is, how do we feed in customer attitudes, customer needs – and look at the lifetime value of a customer, the life cycle of that customer –  so we can keep evolving that segmentation, and we can continue to be more targeted and more personalised for our consumers.”

In other words, the team is shifting from a focus on what customers bought, to why, when and what will likely bring them back.

Strategic Simplification

The tighter segmentation model is proving valuable for supplier-funded retail media. Brands like L’Oréal and Swisse, said Serzycki, can now target specific customer cohorts with higher precision, whether launching new products or executing seasonal campaigns, while the broader database mass blasts can still be harnessed for broad campaigns like Black Friday.

Serzycki says that while it sounds rudimentary, the ability to make targeted email work harder for suppliers, while still preserving the effectiveness of mass campaigns, is no small feat. Especially when that same segmentation engine is driving performance uplift at the bottom line.

As a pharmacy business, Chemist Warehouse is also subject to Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) regulations, meaning marketing oversight is both necessary and strict with a particular focus on privacy and compliance... "making sure that the subscribers that are opted in to our database actually opted in! That means, as part of that cleanup, we did wash out a lot of our database, and we thought we would take a very conservative approach, which  means that, yes, we lost a bit of our base".

The upside? A clean slate and a compliant database, followed by a highly effective opt-in campaign. “It's just a simple pop up,  nothing out of the ordinary or extremely imaginative, but it is something that's been working really well for us," said Serzycki.

Plus, a cleaner database always tends to deliver higher engagement rates.

Now the team is planning to layer incentives on top of the existing program to accelerate opt-in growth further such as sign up bonuses.

Testing, triggers and triage

A/B testing and test-and-learn approaches are central to the way Chemist Warehouse now operates its CRM program. Some initiatives have exceeded expectations. Others haven’t panned out.

Replenishment emails, especially in the vitamins category, have emerged as a standout.

"One thing that we've tried recently that has worked really well is replenishment emails with some of our suppliers. You buy a tub of vitamins, there's 60 tablets in there, so you should be taking one per day. It gives us a really good indication of when we should be contacting those customers to remind them to come back into store to top up their vitamins or do some refills. So that test and learn has been going really well," said Serzycki.

Not every trigger is pulling its weight. Abandoned cart emails, for instance, are underperforming.

"We do abandoned cart emails [but they] don't provide us probably the most value from our email program – and we're really trying to unpack why that is. We do have a hypothesis: because there are Chemist Warehouse stores everywhere, people add things to cart as a wish list, because we currently don't have one on site today – so we could find that the customers are going back into store to purchase."

Serzycki said the team needs more data to validate that assumption, but it underlines that digital doesn’t operate in a vacuum and that the omnichannel nature of Chemist Warehouse’s customer base complicates attribution.

SMS and sensibility

While email is doing the heavy lifting today, SMS is the next frontier – but Chemist Warehouse  is approaching it with caution.

“SMS marketing is quite a sensitive channel,” said Serzycki. “It's very personal to be contacting someone to their mobile phones.”

Initial plans are modest: SMS will be used for flash sales, deep promotions, and last-minute campaign pushes – not for supplier-funded marketing, at least not yet.

AI: Internally first

Meanwhile, the team is laying the groundwork for AI adoption – but for now is focused squarely on internal efficiency.

"We don't currently use a lot of AI today, what we're going to work on over the next 12 months is defining use cases more internally, as opposed to with customers," said Serzycki.

The focus will be on using AI to drive efficiencies in house: "How we do our jobs better and quicker, and how do we utilise that to get data and insights."

By way of example, she underlined the demands upon the analytics team that sits within her business unit. "We go to them for a lot of our insights, and that takes a lot of time for everyone. If we can use AI within our platforms to do those things quicker, we can actually move at a quicker speed as a team and as a business and without having to do all that grunt work ourselves."

That’s phase one. Phase two, customer-facing use cases, will come later, with guardrails firmly in place. As a TGA-regulated business, Serzycki is clear: compliance will always trump everything else.

For the meantime, the revenue gains from better sweating email underline there's plenty of opportunity still to be unlocked from existing owned channels – a lesson other retailers could heed as customer acquisition costs soar and unit economics tighten.