How a signature in an email affects donor conversion
CaringBridge
CaringBridge offers free personal, protected websites for people to easily share updates and receive support and encouragement from their community during a health journey. Every 7 minutes, a CaringBridge website is created for someone experiencing a health event.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 12/20/2016 - 01/17/2017
CaringBridge was sending a personal email from a development team member as a follow-up to a matching gift announcement. They wondered about the inclusion of an actual signature in an email. People don’t normally sign emails, but many organizations brought this tactic over from direct mail appeals.
Typically, their emails did not include signatures, but they created a treatment to see if this small change added validity to the sender or decreased the personal feel of the email.
They split their email file to determine a winner.
Research Question
How will adding a signature image to an email affect donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | No signature | 4.0% | ||
| T1: | Signature Image | 5.2% | 28.9% | 72.7% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 2,496 in order to be valid. Unfortunately, the required sample size was not met and a level of confidence above 95% was not met so the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
Adding the signature produced a directional 32.9% lift in donor conversion—which meant that despite it being a non-native email element, it appears to have positively affected conversion. However, at only 72.9% statistical confidence, it needs to be tested with a larger audience to reach validity.