How changing the sender affects open rate
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: 04/09/2015 - 07/14/2015
CaringBridge had an automated email as part of their new name conversion strategy that had been sent in a designed template using their founder as the sender for years. Since most of their development emails came from their founder, Sona Mehring, they wanted to test this with a more personal email from a member of the development team.
Research Question
Will a new sender increase open rate?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Open Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 49.6% | ||
| T1: | Treatment 1 | 52.7% | 6.3% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 1,994 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 28,048, 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:
6.3% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
This experiment showed that it can increase open rates to use a new sender. Credibility has an important impact on email performance, but that doesn’t mean that every email needs to come straight from the CEO.