Adult - Media platform
RedGifs
Discover how MailSoar took an adult content platform from almost no email activity to a full 1.5M-email-a-month marketing program.
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Unique Open Rate
RedGIFs is a specialized short-form media platform built explicitly for hosting and sharing adult-oriented (NSFW) animated GIFs and short video clips.
- Industry
Adult- Content production - B2C.
- Challenge
How to help an adult content platform go from near-zero email activity to 1.5M sends a month with pristine deliverability.
- Solution
Subdomain segmentation, list cleaning, engagement-based warmup (creators first, then users), live automation on new subscribers, phased re-engagement of existing subscribers.
- Outcome
Securing transactional email first meant new creators and users could reliably receive password resets and welcome packages from day one — removing a source of support tickets and onboarding friction.
From there, RedGifs went from having no functioning marketing channel to a full email marketing program sending 1.5M emails a month, including retargeting and re-engagement — a channel it can now keep scaling as signups continue to grow.Five-plus years into the partnership, deliverability has stayed stable and optimal for both transactional and marketing email.
- Duration
Recovery took a few months; ongoing client for 5+ years.
1.5M emails / month (up from near-zero marketing activity)
Inbox Placement Rate
Unique Open Rate
IP / Domain reputation
RedGifs is a high-traffic adult-content hosting platform built around user-generated content, attracting an exceptionally high volume of daily sign-ups from both content creators and users.
At RedGifs' scale — tens of thousands of new signups a day — even a small deliverability gap compounds fast, and it had: transactional emails, including password requests and welcome packages for new content creators, were landing in spam, while poor sender reputation made it impossible to send any marketing email at all.
RedGifs came to MailSoar essentially starting from zero on the marketing side, needing to first secure critical account communications before it could even consider building an email marketing program.
At the time, it was sending through ExpertSender for marketing and Postmark for transactional email, targeting a volume of 1.5M emails/month.
RedGifs' case is a reputation freeze compounded by explosive signup growth:
• Transactional emails landing in spam: password requests and creator welcome packages — communications critical to onboarding and account security — weren't reliably reaching recipients.
• Marketing volume blocked entirely: sender reputation was poor enough that marketing email couldn't be scaled at all, leaving the company with essentially no active marketing channel.
• High spam and unsubscribe rates despite double opt-in: even with a double opt-in signup flow already in place, negative engagement stayed high — a pattern common to adult content, where recipients report even properly opted-in email as spam.
• Explosive, uneven signup growth: tens of thousands of daily signups — later surging a further 300% — meant any list-hygiene or reputation gap got amplified before it could be caught.
The concrete result: an inbox placement rate of only 25% and a unique open rate of 12%, with a marketing program that essentially didn't exist yet.
MailSoar segmented transactional and marketing traffic by subdomain to secure critical notifications first, then cleaned the list and built a warmup starting with live automations for new subscribers.
Once transactional deliverability stabilized, the marketing warm-up began with content creators — whose engagement was consistently higher — before extending to users, supported by a clear sign-up form and a detailed preference center built around users' need for privacy.
Once deliverability stabilized, MailSoar layered in a re-engagement plan for existing subscribers, scaling volume with a subsequent 300% surge in daily signups.
What we did
How MailSoar has helped RedGifs scale email marketing to 1.5M emails a month
A 4-step process
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Segmentation of notifications per type on a subdomain
Transactional notifications were separated onto their own subdomain, so password requests and creator welcome packages could reach the inbox independently of the marketing program's reputation.
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Marketing warmup on the creators
Warmup started with content creators, whose engagement was consistently stronger, building a solid reputation foundation before extending sending to the broader user base.
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Warm-up on the users
Sending was extended to users through a clear signup form that asked exactly what types of emails they wanted, backed by a detailed preference center that respected their need for privacy.
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Re-engagement and volume increase following the signup surge
With deliverability stable, MailSoar built a re-engagement plan for existing subscribers and scaled sending volume to absorb a further 300% increase in daily signups without losing ground on reputation.
We took over a business with an already established email stack but with little to no visibility on the numbers regarding sending metrics. Mailsoar helped us work through the situation to establish the foundations required for taking our email strategy to the next level. We are now able to understand the performance of all emails in our stack and pinpoint areas for improvement and development. Something Mailsoar are also helping with.
The results
Results that speak for themselves
Frequently asked
How can a platform go from almost no marketing email to 1.5M sends a month without repeating the same reputation problems?
By sequencing the rebuild: secure transactional email first by isolating it on its own subdomain, warm up marketing sending on the most engaged audience segment before expanding to the rest, and only scale volume once deliverability has proven stable — including through sudden growth. That sequence took RedGifs from 25% to 95% inbox placement while absorbing a 300% surge in daily signups, on the way to a full 1.5M-email-a-month program.
