Background

Western Union is a leader in global payment services. The company provides consumers and businesses with fast, reliable and convenient ways to send and receive money around the world, to send payments, and to purchase money orders. As of March 31, 2015, the Western Union branded services were offered through a combined network of over 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories and over 100,000 ATMs and kiosks.

As one of the largest money-transfer companies in the world, raising awareness of its service offerings was no tall order for Western Union. However, growing its list of email subscribers for customer relationship marketing programs proved to be a more difficult challenge. Prior to working with Fluent, there had been no active email opt-in programs running for over a year, as engagement among new customers acquired through third-party vendors was lower than the marketing team had hoped for.

Campaign

Western Union teamed up with Fluent to pilot an alternate method of reaching out to new consumers.  As opposed to a list purchase, this new campaign delivered targeted content via display ads to consumers who explicitly stated that they had utilized money transfer services in the past. Initially running campaigns at a smaller scale, Fluent’s lookalike modeling and optimization technology was applied in order to ramp up volume by identifying and targeting consumers who closely resembled Western Union’s most valuable customers and who were most likely to utilize its US domestic money transfer or bill payment services.

“Fluent’s precise targeting and unique ability to pre-­qualify consumers before serving ads to them enabled us to better engage with our most valuable customers at scale.” – Bjorn Leigvold, Director CRM, Loyalty & Payments Marketing at Western Union

Results

With Fluent’s platform, Western Union saw an 8x improvement in open rates and engagement compared to previous efforts. Fluent’s lookalike modeling and perpetual optimization resulted in ongoing growth of 15x in these key metrics within the four month campaign trial. Based on the success of the initial campaign, Western Union is expanding its current program and including an additional advertising effort for their US outbound to Central and South America business.