How an exit-intent popup affects overall donation rates on a donation page during a recurring-giving campaign
Focus on the Family
Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 03/07/2023 - 03/17/2023
During a high-urgency campaign focused on acquiring new monthly donors, we wanted to know how an exit-intent popup would affect overall donation rates.
As the name applies, the exit-intent popup would populate only as a prospect attempted to leave the donation page without completing a donation. The specifics of the popup were designed to leverage the persuasion principle of reject and retreat. This principle is based on the idea of reciprocity and states that when someone is presented with a perceived large commitment and rejects the offer, they may be more likely to accept a subsequent offer if it has a perceived lower level of associated commitment—due to the fact that the prospect will be motivated to reciprocate the retreat by accepting the smaller offer.
In this case, the exit-intent popup would provide prospects who are attempting to leave the page without becoming a recurring donor the opportunity to still make an impact by instead giving a one-time gift of the same amount.
For this experiment, 50% of donation page traffic was shown the exit-intent popup while the other 50% did not see anything when they closed the page.
Research Question
We believe that showing an exit-intent popup with a one-time ask for traffic attempting to exit a recurring-giving donation page will achieve higher overall donation rates by presenting a lower-commitment offer to leverage the reject and retreat principle of persuasion.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 15.0% | $0.00 | ||
| T1: | Exit intent | 15.8% | 5.4% | 39.1% | $0.00 |
This experiment has a required sample size of 15,544 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
While the treatment showing the exit-intent popup did produce a slight lift in overall donations, we are unable to draw any definitive conclusions about this experiment based on how the results were tracked.
Because the experiment session “fired” based on page load (rather than popup load) we are unable to determine whether it was the popup that persuaded more people to give or if these results occurred merely by chance. We were also only able to achieve a 39% level of confidence in these results. This does not mean that the tactic itself is invalid, just that in order to retest we will want to make sure the experiment “fires” only once someone see the popup and attempt to obtain a larger sample size to validate the results.