EXL Acumen 2017

September 2017

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Marketing Campaign Strategy for
InstaMoney
InstaMoney is an emerging money transfer firm with presence across 50+ countries. It is a very
popular brand for money transfer among Indian expatriates (especially those based out of Middle
East and Europe), who send money to their families based in India. Usually, the number of such
money transfers from other countries to India goes up significantly during major festivals/events
such as Diwali or Ramadan. In order to maximize the marketing ROI, InstaMoney always targets
such festive periods for launching marketing campaigns in India. For a large country like India, it is
difficult to launch a nationwide campaign purely because of budget and logistics constraints.
Hence, it is imperative for the company to identify a set of locations, which would maximize ROI
from the campaign.
InstaMoneys India business model operates in the following manner:
Initially InstaMoney only used to have its own stores. However, as it started growing it became
increasingly difficult to reach different parts of India just with the own store model. To maximize its
presence across the country, InstaMoney started doing tie-ups with small and mid-sized banks,
financial institutions, post offices, travel agencies and smaller independent businesses which would
pay a one-time franchise fee to InstaMoney and would get the franchise license to operate as
InstaMoney stores. Apart from the initial one-time franchise fee, these franchise stores would pay a
certain % of the monthly revenue to InstaMoney.
In April 2017, the overall mood in general body meeting for Q1 (January March) review for India
business of InstaMoney was gloomy. The company suffered drastically in the post-demonetization
period after Nov 2016 and even in Q1 17 the numbers were not satisfactory.
Mr. ABC, who is leading the Marketing division of InstaMoney, India was under tremendous
pressure to turn it around in the upcoming quarters. He plans to launch a major marketing
campaign during the month of Ramadan (May 25, 2017 Jun 24, 2017) when money transfer
transactions usually go up drastically considering the trends of last few years. He plans to organize
a campaign for selected stores which would offer very high ROI (return on investments) from the
marketing spend during the month of Ramadan and offset the overall poor performance of
InstaMoney, India in Q1 17. The Ramadan dates in previous two years for your reference are:

Ramadan 2015 June 17th to July 16th

Ramadan 2016 June 6th to July 5th

However, Mr. ABC doesnt have much time at hand. He needs to decide the stores where the
campaign would run as soon as possible, because then he will have to communicate about the
marketing campaign to the store owners/franchises. The selection of stores is very tricky, because it
needs to be approved by Mr. S, who heads the Analytics division at InstaMoney. So, along with the
list of selected campaign stores, you also need to estimate the potential incremental impact from
the Ramadan campaign in these stores because Mr. S approves only those campaigns which
have very reasonable estimates of potential impact. Hence, Mr. ABC has sought your help for
these two upheaval tasks:

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Problem I
By looking at month-wise store level data for the past 2 years till end of April 2017, you need to
identify a set of 500 stores at which the Ramadan campaign would be run. The selection of these
500 stores has to be strongly backed by KPI trends and business logic relating to the past 24 months
of data provided.
The objective of this campaign is to maximize the returns (ROI) from the marketing spend, with a
focus on potential incremental impact from the campaign. Please note that your selection of
stores for the campaign should take into account overall past performance of the store, whether
the store has been growing/declining over last two years and performance of the store in previous
two years Ramadan months. Since the objective is to generate incremental impact, please
consider the trade-offs between selecting already high performing stores vis--vis choosing
potential high performing stores. Feel free to choose any additional criteria that would do justice
to the objectives of the campaign.

Problem II
What is your estimated incremental impact from the Ramadan campaign on overall transactions
in the selected set of 500 stores? Please provide the estimated incremental impact % along with
detailed calculations to support your estimations.
Please note that Mr. ABC is very detail oriented. Hence, you need to share your working files along
with the outputs in a desired format (Please check EXL_Acumen_2017_Output_Template.xlsx)

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