How increasing personalization affected 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: 10/21/2015 - 11/05/2015
CaringBridge wanted to improve the clarity of the value proposition on their tribute donation pages, which are landing pages that are personalized to the person whose journal they have been reading. They wanted to see if improved clarity and prioritized personalization would improve conversion rate. They created a treatment that connected the donor’s gift back to the person, though it took more words to explain.
Research Question
Does increased personalization (even at the cost of length) increase clarity and donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Short / General Language | 13.4% | ||
| T1: | Longer / Personalized Copy | 9.3% | -30.6% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 455 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,388, 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:
0% increase in traffic
× 30.6% decrease in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
This tells us that a more direct ask, even if it contains less personalization, presents a clearer value proposition that results in increased conversions over the treatment.
The goal of the donation page is to increase the perceived value to the donor. While the treatment sought to do this, the decrease in clarity caused by the added text negated any improvement in value proposition.