Founded in 1961 as a national nonprofit, GreenPath Financial Wellness has a legacy that rivals some of the most stalwart financial institutions – and its success was built largely through relationships with partner institutions, not marketing.
Since its inception in 2018, the dedicated marketing department has generated a commanding share of GreenPath’s growth, but it still felt there was a lot left to prove to the wider organization.
As Director of Marketing, Brad Lowrey knew GreenPath had untapped potential, but his team needed a way to prove marketing was actually driving results. He knew right away that bringing in an outside agency was the best way to support his team.
Ensuring GreenPath’s growth meant rethinking their whole approach and finding a stronger agency partner. Their current agency was lacking on service quality, and performance marketing campaigns were suffering from a lack of hands-on attention.
Brad needed a partner who understood financial services and the unique constraints of GreenPath’s business, with the skills to deliver efficient, high-volume lead generation campaigns.
Brad engaged in a rigorous selection process with crystal-clear criteria: fluency with financial services and regulatory obligations, alignment with GreenPath’s empathetic brand voice, and the ability to coordinate and execute quickly with GreenPath’s internal team.
CSTMR rose to the top of the list by demonstrating the qualities Brad was looking for and by backing them up with a portfolio of clients with similarly high demands. CSTMR’s channel experts understood the challenges and could hit the ground running.
With more than 60 years of history, GreenPath’s brand, voice, and operations were fully mature, if still grappling with unprecedented growth and digital transformation. The established brand identity gave CSTMR’s digital marketing experts a huge leg up in developing creative assets and deploying campaigns.
The most critical work was dialing in performance marketing campaigns that could consistently deliver qualified leads and scale predictably.
We took over digital advertising in May of 2025, and by July we’d already reduced costs per conversion by 40%.
Now more than a year in, the latest numbers paint a clear picture: CSTMR has transformed the efficiency and efficacy of D2C lead generation for GreenPath.
When Brad first presented CSTMR’s results to GreenPath’s board of directors, they were skeptical. Today, leadership is fully bought in on the power and legitimacy of Brad’s strategy and the role CSTMR plays in driving new growth.
These results also stand in stark contrast to GreenPath’s competitors, who, according to Brad, admitted at industry conferences that they were pulling back from paid ads due to poor performance.
Because of CSTMR’s success with D2C lead generation, GreenPath is evaluating how the partnership can expand to include B2B (partners) and B2B2C (leads for partners) lead generation. Like any high-performing relationship in a highly regulated industry, the name of the game is to establish proof-of-concept in controlled experiments before refining and scaling.
As CSTMR and GreenPath work closely together, our success is built on candid feedback, operational precision, and the commitment to advancing GreenPath’s mission to empower everyone to live financially healthy lives.
"It went from 'Marketing is something we think we need to do,' to 'Wow! This is something we need to continue. We need to invest in and scale. with budget, staffing, and other support,' because it is driving a lot of the volume we see."
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