A New York–based, nationally licensed collections agency wanted to grow account volumes without adding headcount. The strategy was to move more consumers into self-service by scaling digital outreach, starting with email.

Collections emails are different from retail or marketing emails. They discuss financial matters, and many consumers mark them as spam, whether intentionally or not. This quickly damaged the agency’s sending reputation.

The problem: Deliverability of collections emails had become unmanageable

The agency tried all the usual fixes:

• Warming up domains
• Rotating multiple domains to avoid blacklisting
• Limiting send volumes per IP and domain

These efforts helped open rates improve from 3% to 7%, but then progress stalled. Worse, the process became a constant firefight:

• Spam complaints tanked domain health, forcing constant domain replacement
• Open rates flatlined, no matter how many new domains were added
• Sending became fragmented and messy, with no predictability
• Bounce rates and low engagement triggered negative signals with providers

The team found themselves managing infrastructure instead of collecting debt.

What we found: Strategy gaps hidden behind domain issues

When the agency turned to Prodigal’s proCollect team, we conducted a full deliverability audit across all of email campaigns.

We found three critical issues:

1. Irregular sending patterns made the agency look suspicious to ISPs
2. Templates contained spam-triggering language, reducing inbox placement
3. Engagement signals were too weak - too many bounces, too few opens and clicks, too many spam marks

In short: the problem wasn’t just infrastructure, it was strategy.

Building a rock-solid infrastructure for collections emails

We started by repairing the foundation:

• BIMI protocol: Verified the agency’s identity so inboxes displayed their logo and checkmark, improving trust
• IP optimization: Balanced IP addresses with send volumes to protect reputation
• Pre-send validation: Automatically checked email addresses before each campaign to cut bounce rates

This stabilized their domain health, but we knew the bigger battle was engagement. In collections, unopened emails or spam complaints sink deliverability fast.

Increasing email engagement with hyper-personalization

To make deliverability sustainable, we deployed proCollect’s AI-driven orchestration powered by Prodigal Intelligence Engine (PIE).

Here’s how it worked:

• Context from CRM, dialer, and payment data fed into PIE
• PIE generated personalized strategies for each consumer, including the best time of day, day of week, right frequency and tailored content
• A library of 200+ pre-built and customized templates was created, ensuring messages stayed fresh, personalized, compliant and relevant
• 20+ deliverability best-practice checks were run before every send
• Consumer interaction data flowed back into PIE, refining strategies continuously

This turned generic “balance due” blasts into context-aware, personalized outreach, making it harder for consumers to dismiss and easier for them to engage.

Results: From stuck at 7% open rate to breakthrough performance

Within 6 weeks of deployment:

Payments from email increased significantly, turning email into a reliable revenue channel. Instead of fighting domain fires, the agency now had a scalable, predictable email strategy.

Impressed by the results, they began working with Prodigal to expand to a full AI-powered omnichannel approach with proCollect.