Western Union
Growing a global landing page program.
Previously, we had a tool, but no solution. Now, we have a tool and a solution.
Josh Carroll
Digital Marketing, North America Western Union, Inc.
background
The Western Union Company is known as an innovator in financial services and has become an industry leader in global money transfer with approximately 450,000 Agent locations in 200 countries and territories. Western Union offers fast, reliable and convenient services for transfer of money — consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, and business-to-business. For more than 160 years, the familiar signs of Western Union have stood as a trusted symbol for connecting friends, family and businesses around the world.
the challenge
Western Union needed a better, easier way to create and optimize targeted landing pages. Although the Western Union® marketing team did have a tool to help with landing page creation, it required code and was overwhelming for the content managers. Without a way to easily create targeted, specific landing pages, the Western Union team knew that they were missing out on results and ROI. The Western Union team needed a solution that would make it easy to create, test and manage targeted landing pages for various online marketing channels such as PPC and display ads.
the solution
In December of 2010, Western Union adopted ion interactive’s LiveBall landing page platform. Not only did they now have an easy-to-use, code-free platform to help their marketing team create and test landing pages, but they also had the support of the ion interactive’s professional landing page services team.
the results
LiveBall has empowered Western Union with enterprise-scale marketing agility that has helped them grow their landing page program and their conversion rates. As Josh Carroll, explained, “LiveBall gives us flexible management and optimization of robust web experiences. It has given us the ability to optimize pages with real-time responsiveness which has resulted in dramatic improvements in digital campaigns.”
With LiveBall, the Western Union team now has close to 300 landing pages and co-branded microsites managed in one centralized platform including mobile landing pages, localized pages for 15 different countries. What was once a complicated process, is now managed by marketers. Western Union has content managers from numerous teams scattered across the globe who, thanks to LiveBall, now have the ability to test and optimize landing pages without development resources.
With better landing pages, Western Union is getting better results. For instance, a recent 30-day promotion advertised through Google PPC ads converted at 19% — a 1,800% increase over typical Western Union lead generation rates (under 1%).
While the Western Union team creates most of their LiveBall landing pages themselves, ion interactive’s services team is a helpful resource for large, complicated, or pressing projects. Recently, Western Union engaged ion to quickly create customized templates for their Small & Medium Enterprises microsite.
The microsite launched in November 2011 and Josh was immediately impressed by the results. As he put it best, “Our 22%+ conversion rates are a dramatic improvement over previous benchmarks. LiveBall is the best landing page solution that I have used; we really love that it is robust enough to support microsites as well as single pages.”
what’s next?
The Western Union marketing team plans to focus on nurturing the B2B community by providing topic-specific microsites for industry verticals like mortgages, insurance and government. Their goal is to provide recommendations, education and thought leadership to build awareness, credibility and trust.
