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Minnesota Public Radio

Does addressing the reader as”Friend” instead of using a generic greeting increase email engagement and downstream gifts?

Experiment ID: #204682

Minnesota Public Radio

Experiment Summary

Ended On: 07/16/2026

MPR wanted to test whether using a generic email salutation or addressing the reader as “Friend” would lead to higher email engagement and more downstream gifts when the recipient’s first name was unavailable.

This experiment was run on a FYE appeal email with traffic split 50/50 between the two segments.

Research Question

We believe that addressing recipients as “Friend” when a first name is unavailable will increase email engagement and downstream giving by creating a warmer, more personal experience than a generic salutation.

Design

C: Control
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T1: Treatment #1
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Results

  Treatment Name Click Rate Relative Difference Confidence
C: Control 0.86%
T1: Treatment #1 1.0% 19.0% 96.7%

This experiment has a required sample size of 26,960 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 63,881, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

    19.0% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The key learning from this experiment is that addressing recipients as "Friend" when a first name was unavailable led to a meaningful increase in email engagement. The treatment generated a 19.0% increase in clicks for all traffic with 96.7% statistical confidence, indicating that a warmer, more personal salutation encouraged more recipients to engage with the email. While downstream giving remained essentially unchanged (+0.9% in transactions, 1.1% in LOC), the increase in clicks suggests that even a small degree of personalization can positively influence recipient behavior without negatively affecting fundraising performance. In future experimentation, it would be valuable to continue testing alternative fallback salutations and personalization strategies when a recipient's first name is unavailable. Additional testing could also explore whether certain audiences, message types, or fundraising appeals benefit more from a friendly salutation, and whether pairing personalized greetings with other email optimizations produces downstream gains in conversion. Overall, this experiment demonstrates that the way an email greets a recipient matters. A simple shift from a generic salutation to "Friend" led to significantly higher engagement, making it a low-effort optimization that improves the subscriber experience and creates more opportunities for downstream giving.

Experiment Documented by Michelle Harvey

Question about experiment #204682

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.