Finance - B2C
Halsted Financial Services
Discover how MailSoar helped a financial services company triple its email reach and hit 98% inbox placement at 25M+ emails a month.
Talk to a deliverability expert See more case studiesInbox Placement
Unique Open Rate
Financial Services (HFS) is a US debt collection company that communicates with its contacts at scale by email as part of its collections process. For a collections business, email volume translates directly into business outcomes — every email that reaches the inbox is a lower-cost alternative to phone or mail outreach, and every one that doesn't is a missed opportunity to collect.
- Industry
B2C financial services.
- Challenge
Deliverability issues when expanding segmentation, inability to reach qualified contacts, no re-engagement path, overly complex infrastructure.
- Solution
Contact tiering by engagement, infrastructure rebuild with subdomains and smart IP pooling, complexity reduction, later a dedicated on-premises MTA for scale.
- Outcome
Reach capacity up 3x, more robust and redundant infrastructure, pristine deliverability, scalable via MTA.
With deliverability no longer the bottleneck, HFS can reach 3x more of its qualified contact base by email instead of falling back on costlier outreach channels.
The tiered, redundant infrastructure also means the business can keep scaling volume through its own MTA without reopening the same reputation risks — three years into the partnership, with no major deliverability issues since.
- Duration
Ongoing partnership for 3 years.
25M emails / month
Inbox Placement
Unique Open Rate
IP / Domain reputation
Halsted Financial Services is a B2C financial services company—debt collection.
For a collections business, email volume translates directly into business outcomes—every email that reaches the inbox is a lower-cost alternative to phone or mail outreach, and every one that doesn't is a missed opportunity to collect.
So when HFS hit a deliverability ceiling while trying to expand segmentation, it directly capped how many contacts it could reach.
At the time, HFS was sending over 25M emails/month through SendGrid and later added a dedicated Kumo MTA.
HFS's case is an infrastructure-driven scaling ceiling:
Deliverability issues when expanding segmentation: Every attempt to reach more of the qualified contact base ran into new deliverability problems, rather than scaling cleanly.
Inability to properly reach qualified contacts: the sending setup couldn't reliably get mail to contacts who were legitimately worth reaching.
No re-engagement pathway: there was no safe way to bring dormant or lower-engagement contacts back into active sending without risking reputation.
Overly complex, ill-suited infrastructure: the existing setup wasn't designed for HFS's specific volume and risk profile, and its complexity made problems harder to diagnose and fix.
The concrete result: an inbox placement rate of only 30% and a unique open rate of 20% — a hard cap on how much of the business's outreach could actually land.
MailSoar implemented a contact tiering system based on engagement to improve segmentation, and rebuilt the sending infrastructure around subdomains and smart IP pooling — dedicated IPs for high-volume, low-risk channels, and shared IPs for smaller, riskier ones. This reduced the overall complexity of the setup. Later, MailSoar implemented a full on-premises MTA (Kumo MTA) to support delivery at scale.
What we did
Discover what MailSoar achieved
In 4 steps
-
Infrastructure rebuild
Subdomains and smart IP pooling were put in place — dedicated IPs for high-volume, low-risk sending, and shared IPs for smaller, riskier channels — reducing the overall complexity of the setup.
-
Contact tiering and dynamic segmentation
The contact database was tiered by email engagement, creating dynamic segments that made it possible to expand reach without sacrificing deliverability.
-
Controlled reach expansion
Using the new tiers and infrastructure, HFS was able to broaden its audience gradually, reaching previously unreachable qualified contacts without triggering new deliverability problems.
-
On-premises MTA for scale
A full on-premises MTA (Kumo MTA) was implemented to give HFS the redundancy and control needed to keep scaling volume reliably over the long term.
Pierre understood the expectations of the job, was able to properly articulate the challenges we faced, and did a great job communicating with us through every phase of the project until it was completed. Most importantly he successfully completed the project in a timely manner. I would highly recommend Pierre.
The results
Email performance, by the numbers
Frequently asked
How can a high-volume sender expand reach without triggering new deliverability issues?
By tiering contacts based on engagement and matching infrastructure risk to each tier — dedicated IPs for high-volume, low-risk sending, shared IPs for smaller, riskier segments — rather than treating the whole list the same way. That approach let HFS triple its reach while taking inbox placement from 30% to 98% at 25M+ emails a month.
